OSX on a Dell

truth or spoof?

truth - I had a play with it, it was quite a shock actually.

how tho if macs dont use a bios to boot up?

it was running on some kind of shell. I was told what, but I'd had a few shandy basses by this point. I will phone the guy later and get him up on here to explain himself if I can.

could it just be a shell replacement for windows?

Don't think so, people have been fiddling around getting OS X running on generic Intel hardware for some time. One of the artists in our office managed it - but he then he kept hassling me (cos I have a Mac) as to why he couldn't get Final Cut Pro to work.

It's like the reverse of Boot Camp...

http://www.apple.com/macosx/bootcamp/

...which allows you to run Windows on your Mac. Personally I'd rather run OS X on much cheaper PC hardware - who gives a feck what the box looks like after all (sorry Mr Ive!).

I kinda agree with mrming with this one, The best quote to sum this whole get XP running on Mac x86 hardware is, "Great, Now I can have the reliability of Windows on hardware with the value of Apple".

there's been a Vmware image of OSX on the net for a while, also there are loads of forums who manage to do it, however any which provide any kind of kit/automation install get shut down by apple pretty quickly.

Vmware image. thats it. I have been promised a DVD install of 10.4 very soon.

does that boot from disk or is it just an emulator that rides ontop of windows a lá virtual PC etc

I don't think its an emulation, in the true sense of the word - however, I am starting to discuss things that I am not 100% sure of. I am trying hard to get the fella who did it to come up here. In fact, I'll phone him again now.

I think vmware is the better of the emulation apps and it can be set up to seem seamless. Virtual PC is too resource heavy and you need a very fast system to get a average VPC system. If I get hold of a OSX install CD I might give it a go.

also the reason why final cut pro may not have worked is if the software was coded for g4/5 and OSx was expecting to emulate it but could not on an PC platform, as the new macs are geared up to do this mac users probably wont see those problems.

onlymatt. you may find the following useful. as I said there are lots of forums etc.. talking about it.

http://www.osx86project.org/index.php

http://osx86project.org/?option=com_content&task=view&id=19&Itemid=2

Good luck.

Here are more shots of PCs running OSX using PearPC... supposed to run well, "with some caveats."

http://pearpc.sourceforge.net/screenshots.html

Take a look half way down this protein post...

http://forum.proteinos.com/viewtopic.php?t=1425&start=40

Haven't been able to upgrade past 10.4.2, but still very functional.

The Dell in question is running XP SP2 and VMWare

http://www.vmware.com

-

Vmware provides a virtualised environment in which things like the display / hard drive controller are presented as fairly generic devices that MacOS knows about. As it's virtualisation as opposed to emulation I ran it on the laptop due to its Pentium M having SSE2 support. (A must for running MacOS, unless you go down the hacking Qemu route . . .)

Anyway, I must confess to not being the best informed soul concerning MacOS on Intel, but my mini overview goes something like this . . . .

A developer release of MacOS is leaked into the wild.

People discover that the major stumbling block to MacOS on Intel is something called the TPM (Trusted platform module)

People remove the TPM and compile the sources, providing an Intel friendly MacOS.

People enjoy playing with MacOS in virtualised environments
whilst
some people lose sleep and hair trying to get MacOS working on their PCs only to discover that to run NATIVELY, hardware support is very limited in terms of chipset / graphics.

So, to conclude it's fairly easy to run MacOS on an SSE2 PC using VMware. It's also possible to run MacOS on an SSE2 PC NATIVELY - though you will probably have to make some specific purchases to facilitate . . . .

Apologies to the original poster for my delay . . . I am my screen name ;-)

yeah, damn right you are! glad you could make it though, Devon Time or otherwise.

i got a copy of all the software to run osx ona pc but didnt bother loading it up. it may take a bit of patience to actually get things running - but the reason i didnt try to get it to work, is because even if the operating system works, all the programs are still tuned to working on a mac structure and getting the programs to work (efficiently) is just another problem!

Rich

I think vmware is the better of the emulation apps and it can be set up to seem seamless. Virtual PC is too resource heavy and you need a very fast system to get a average VPC system. If I get hold of a OSX install CD I might give it a go.

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