IT'S ALIVE!

I'm posting this from my shiny new Hackintosh laptop (or Hackbook as I like to call it).  I have this running on an old Toshiba M50 that I rescued from a bad fire.  More shocking that it even works is how well OSX runs on the meager hardware this thing has.

Those of you that have come to know and loathe me understand that I love to tinker, especially with computers.  I had a previous go-round with OSX (10.4) Tiger and I have to say things have come a long way since then.  Installing the whole thing only took me a few hours and I have the majority of components working.  Back when I was mucking about with Tiger I had to get under the hood and get my hands dirty messing around with the command line and installing kexts, some completely by trial and error and downloading new ones at a feverish pace to try and make the entire contraption bear a semblance of a computer.  I had great fun (and a great deal of frustration) with that little experiment and unfortunately I never really got it to a point that I considered it usable.  It would do a few things but there were still major issues when I set it aside to get back to music making.

This time there are a great deal more options, the installers and bootloaders are really rather slick and some of the utilities are excellent.  While I remembered a great deal from my Tiger expedition, it's almost simple enough that anyone with a bit of time, patience and reading ability (and knowing how to use Google) can make this work on their own hardware.  I must admit that the knowledge I gained from 10.4 did make troubleshooting this unit a great deal easier as I had some inkling of exactly what the problems were and what files to track down to fix them.

I'll post pictures of it in action when I get around to downloading them from my Blackberry (a hateful little piece of tech that one is).  In the meantime I'm off to tinker some more and track down the remaining bits that need to be repaired.  Leave me a message if you want details of what I did to make this frankenstein come to life).

I doff my hat to the iPC distro and all of the assorted people that made it possible (too many to list, Google it if you're interested)

The graphic is borrowed from Deviant Art which is a fabulous site.  The artist's name is Jonzy and you can get to it here.