incgnito Posted February 22, 2008 Share Posted February 22, 2008 In the process of attempting to add content to my own forums (and before you comment yes I know there's not much on it right now but I'm trying) I decided to write a little article about my limited experiences with OSX. I tried to write it for the average joe as much as possible while still being informative to others that may be considering jumping onto the OSX86 bandwagon. If anyone could offer anything that could improve on it I'd appreciate it. Original post: http://www.justfixit.org/viewtopic.php?f=5...;t=8&p=9#p9 ---------------------------------------------------- DISCLAIMER: Some of the things I talk about in this article involve software and procedures that aren't technically legal due to licensing and copyright issues; they were involved as part of an academic exercise and they are not recommended to people just because they want to have a Mac! If you truly want a Mac experience do what I'm doing now: save your pennies and get one! SECONDARY WARNING: Most of the time I try to talk like the average joe, but since I'm also creating this article to give other techies an idea of what I went through just in case they're considering this I do tend to go into "geek speak" to help them out. If there's anything you need clarified feel free to reply to this post or message me an I'll be more than happy to elaborate. Bear with me, people! THE PROBLEM I'll be the first to admit that I'm a noob when it comes to Mac stuff: unlike most others I knew I never used one in school (they preferred TRS-80's and later on PC's), most everyone I knew had PC's or old Atari computers, etc. The only two experiences I had with computers from Apple were with the Apple IIc and IIe, and that was only playing Archon or some cheesy lemonade stand simulator at the town library. Recently though I've had more than a few calls from people asking for help with their macs, and I had to turn them away because of my lack of knowledge which I really hated. So a few months back I decided it's time to get some mac knowledge under my belt, dammit! Yeah well, then I had a chance to look at our bills which unfortunately made it difficult to justify the purchase of a computer anytime in the near future. So I started to look at other options since simply learning about it in a book wasn't an option for me: I prefer hands-on learning, and I definitely prefer experience vs. book-smarts! So it was either use an emulator -- which realistically wasn't an option considering the state of current Mac OS emulators -- or getting OSX to run on the hardware I already had. This led me to the OSX86 project. The OSX86 project aims to get Mac's OSX operating system working on standard x86 hardware (i.e. standard PC's). They do this by modifying parts of the OSX code, introducing code to emulate components that standard PC's don't have, and in some cases including code from Apple's open source Darwin project. They've been at it for a few years now and have been able to produce stable results on a variety of different hardware combinations. Being a tech myself I've worked with many different types of operating systems and software, so I figured if I can install Gentoo Linux (the old no-installer way, thank you) I can work with this! Besides, OSX was built on the framework of BSD which I knew how to use, so I figured if worse came to worse I could open a terminal window and figure things out from there to start. PART ONE: TIGER At the time I was starting to do this OSX was at version 10.4.10, and after reading up in various forums I found there were several different varieties of OSX out there modified to work with standard PC's. Of them, it seemed that a lot of people preferred the version made by a couple of people who referred to themselves as "uphuck". Their latest version at the time was 10.4.9, which should be fine for the purposes of learning OSX! So I looked around and found a copy of the ISO (and no I'm not going to tell you where, though if you look around a bit you might be able to figure it out), pulled out a laptop I wasn't using much (a Dell Dimension 600m) and went to installing. The first time I overlooked a detail and ended up with an unusable installation (it seems there are multiple ways to partition the hard drive during the install: GUID (the default) and MBR. To use this version of OSX I had to use MBR and it never occurred to me to check), so I erased the drive using a Knoppix CD and tried again. This time around I got a somewhat working installation (although it stuttered a lot), but after a bit I decided to go ahead and do the updates from Apple to 10.4.10 -- which basically hosed my installation. Oh, well -- live and learn, right? So after a little more research I found another person who refers to himself as "Kalyway" who released an OSX install disc version 10.4.10. So I decided "what the hell", got a copy of the ISO and proceeded to install it. The Kalyway install disc was basically a uphuck disc with extras and improvements, which ethically is a bit off but hey: it works for Microsoft! The installation went without a hitch on the first try (hey, I'm getting better! *grin*), and the result was -- another choppy/stuttering desktop, when I could log in to the desktop that is! After a little research (after the fact; wow my tech skills are really showing through now *sigh*) I learned that the laptop I had suffered from a BIOS problem that meant I had to turn off one of my processor cores for OSX to act right. Once I did that everything ran smoothly (albeit at just over half speed, which was still useable). Thus my first experiences with OSX began, and I have to admit I was impressed! Considering it was running on a laptop with one core disabled it still ran at a decent speed. Things such as creating & burning CD/DVD images could be done in the OS itself -- Windows users have to download another program to do this! Speaking of programs, in most cases installing programs in OSX couldn't be easier: Just drag and drop the icon representing the program into the applications folder. Uninstalling is just as easy: just drag the icon in the application folder that represents the program into the trash. Luckily for me most of the components used in the Dimension 600m are also used with some Intel based Macs, so drivers didn't pose too many problems for me in most cases. It took me awhile to get sound working, but once I researched a bit and learned how to install and work with drivers in OSX (called kexts) things started to fall into place. Some things--like the 600m's memory card reader--just won't work with OSX -- after all, they were never designed to in the first place! Thankfully that was the only component I couldn't get to work, and it wasn't that big a deal to me right then anyway. Software wise it took me a bit of time to find OSX equivalents of the software I was used to using in windows. I found a copy of both MS Office '04 and iWork '08 and decided I liked iWork better (not a surprise for me: I prefer OpenOffice on Windows), for torrent downloads I decided to go with Transmission, for usenet newsgroups (i.e giganews) I tried Unison -- afterwards I wished they had a windows version since I liked it better than my windows program (newsleecher, for those wondering)! For converting video I went with Handbrake, Cyberduck for SFTP, Adium for instant messaging, and the list goes on. In case I can't find OSX equivalents of my favorite software there's always solutions such as Crossover and VMWare Fusion, which allow me to run Windows software in OSX. If there is a downside to this it's that a lot of the latest games aren't available for OSX, but since I'm running on a laptop with low end graphics it's not a big deal right now. PART TWO: LEOPARD Okay, so fast foward a few weeks: a friend needs a laptop so I reluctantly wipe the hard drive of the 600m, load windows xp onto it, and hand it off. This meant I was without OSX again. Figures. My other systems were in use at the time so if I wanted to do this again I would have to do some kind of dual-boot setup with one of them. As fate would have it my personal system decided to spit out random BSOD crashes at that point--which I troubleshooted and determined to be a compatibility issue between Vista 64-bit and Stardock's Windowblinds--so I took that as a cue, backed up what I needed, disconnected my data/backup drive from the motherboard (that way I'm not tempted to screw up and lose my stuff), and proceeded to work towards my new dual-boot setup. To avoid any potential problems with either system's partitioner I decided to start with a Knoppix CD and partitioned the system via fdisk (Gparted and QTparted don't know how to properly identify an HFS+ partition (type af)). I decided to load Vista first since I have a lot more experience with windows and if the boot sector gets screwed up I know how to troubleshoot it in windows vs. OSX where I have no experience repairing boot sectors yet. For the OSX part by now a new version of OSX called Leopard had just come out so I got on the net and downloaded the uphuck version of OSX 10.5.1 -- which I couldn't get to work despite multiple load attempts. So, remembering the last time, I went to see if there was a version released by Kalyway which there was -- and that version installed without a hitch! Once both OS's were installed I anticipated a boot problem with Vista which there was, but fixing it was as easy as putting in the Vista install CD and selecting "repair" when the option came up: it immediately found a problem with the boot sector, asked me if I wanted to fix it, and rebooted without a problem (NOTE: some people have reported that Vista won't fix startup issues if it's partition isn't the active one -- something to keep in mind). Once I was back into windows I decided to take the easy way out and downloaded a freeware tool called EasyBCD to add OSX to my Vista boot menu. I rebooted, chose OSX, and lo and behold I was looking at an OSX desktop again! Now it was time to work with drivers! Most of the laptop's components were also used by some macs so they loaded without any issues; this setup--a quad core Q6600 with a G33/ICH9 chipset, Jmicron IDE controller, and 8800 GTS OC 640MB video card--was another matter. Since one of my hard drives was PATA and in windows it caused issues to hook up the DVD writer and hard drive on the same cable I had inadvertently saved myself hassle by previously hooking up my DVD writer to the system via an IDE to USB2 cable (it turns out the Jmicron controller, though it will work for an optical drive once OSX is finished installing, will *not* work during installation). My onboard ALC audio wasn't working, but I'm using a pair of Bose USB speakers so that's not really an issue for me; I'll tackle that later if I feel so inclined. The video right now was basic because my video card wasn't built to be what's referred to as EFI aware (i.e it wasn't made to work with a mac), however someone else before me thought ahead and created something called NVInject which allows for some non-EFI aware NVidia cards to work. As it turns out my card was supported, so now I have my 1680x1050 desktop again! This machine has a total of 4 hard drives on it so I decided it would be nice to be able to have read/write access on all them (OSX by default can only access NTFS partitions as read only), and after a bit of research the answer was a fork of the linux project FUSE called MacFUSE which installed and worked flawlessly (NOTE: the NTFS-3G module installer to work with MacFUSE can be found here). Right now I have 4 issues, all of which are minor: The first issue involves random crashes under heavy load, which I found out most other macs are having as well that have more than 2GB of memory. The workaround for now is to add "maxmem=2048" as a kernel boot paramater (or hit F8 and enter it on each startup). This, while it's annoying since I can't use all of my installed memory, isn't critical. OSX doesn't seem to have any easy way to move it's swap partition to another drive to decrease any potential bottlenecks (in windows two of my hard drives--both 34GB WD Raptors--serve to host my swapfile and temp. files, respectfully). I've seen one or two that have done it, but with side effects. OSX has a feature called Time Machine which allows for one step restores in case of a system crash which would be great to use--except that I don't have any other HFS+ formatted drives. It would be nice if there was a way to fool Time Machine into using one of the drives mounted via MacFUSE, or if it could do DVD-based backups like Vista's one step backup/restore can. This doesn't mean I can't use a good 'ol Ghost Boot CD for all of it, so it's not a big issue. Though OSX has quite a few games available, for many of the latest games that I and my wife use (LOTRO, Supreme Commander, and Fuel of War for examples) it's still a windows world. My experiences with Crossover have met with limited success, and VMWare Fusion's 3d capability doesn't allow for an advanced feature in gaming graphics called shaders which pretty much kills that option for most advanced games. I can just reboot into windows and play my games without problems, but it would be nice to not have to go through that step. If anyone knows any ways to fix the above issues I'm more than willing to listen, and if/when I come up with answers of course I'll update this post to include them. Anyway, it seems like a lot just to get some mac experience but I think I prefer it this way, since it made me familiarize myself with the internals of OSX which was the purpose of this exercise to begin with! I'm currently saving for a macbook so I can continue my mac experiences legally, but for now at least this is one way to get what I need. I would definitely recommend a mac to others who aren't PC savvy since everything is made to be as absolutely simple as possible, or to those who are continually prone to virus problems since macs don't have hardly any of the virus issues that PC's have (I don't even have an antivirus loaded onto this one and I'm fine). Apple's Boot Camp option allows for dual-booting on a mac so you can still have windows for those things that OSX lacks or if your work requires it, so there's no reason not to use a mac anymore. Anyway that's my two cent's worth. Now bring on the flames! Link to comment https://www.insanelymac.com/forum/topic/89450-an-unorthodox-introduction-to-osx/ Share on other sites More sharing options...
~pcwiz Posted February 22, 2008 Share Posted February 22, 2008 Whoa talk about a long post, but I read all of it and its interesting You did surprisingly well for a "n00b" to macs. Link to comment https://www.insanelymac.com/forum/topic/89450-an-unorthodox-introduction-to-osx/#findComment-638113 Share on other sites More sharing options...
incgnito Posted February 22, 2008 Author Share Posted February 22, 2008 Whoa talk about a long post, but I read all of it and its interesting You did surprisingly well for a "n00b" to macs. Yeah I've been told I throw too much information at people sometimes, but I felt it was necessary in this case. Thank you for reading it through at least Link to comment https://www.insanelymac.com/forum/topic/89450-an-unorthodox-introduction-to-osx/#findComment-638311 Share on other sites More sharing options...
(MoC) Posted February 23, 2008 Share Posted February 23, 2008 Nice post dude! And welcome to InsanelyMac. From the looks of things and your knowledge you'll fit right in to the fun! Link to comment https://www.insanelymac.com/forum/topic/89450-an-unorthodox-introduction-to-osx/#findComment-638607 Share on other sites More sharing options...
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