OSX86 is a HOBBY, and it is done for the sake of interest in learning about it. If you are interested in OSX86 because you want to get a "cheap" or "mid-range" Mac or if you're only in it for the iPhone, you are likely to be disappointed. If that is why you are here, you're better off sticking with your current OS until you can get a Mac. Most of the current users of OSx86 are into it because of an interest in how it actually works.

2. Basic computer knowledge is NECESSARY. Do some googling on your computer. Look up the specifications of the manufacturer by typing in the model number (somewhere on the box and/or tower of the machine itself. If it's a laptop, check above the screen or around the keyboard) into the manufacturer's website. If you've put it together yourself, awesome! You already know the components (the motherboard, the processor, the video card, the three most important parts), and maybe even their chipsets (the north and southbridge, important!).

A) Motherboard: the most important parts of your motherboard to know about are the following: northbridge and southbridge chipsets, ethernet chipset, audio codec and/or chipset, and method of connection to the hard drive controller (IDE/PATA or SATA). Also, ideally when you're finding the chipset information, vendor and device id's (4 characters each, along with subsystem ids sometimes) will reveal drastically more precise information about specific components working under OS X.

There are ways to gather these ids from inside Windows or Linux *BEFORE* you go about installing OS X. For instance, on Windows XP, right click "my computer", properties, go to the hardware tab, device manager, right click the device you're interested in, properties, go to the details tab, and navigate the scroll bar bit to "device instance id", there'll be a number like this: , the VEN_XXXX is your vendor id, DEV_XXXX is your device id, the SUBSYS_XXXXXXXX is your subsystem id, and REVXX is your revision number. In Vista, you right click "computer", properties, click device manager in the upper-lefthand side, right click the component, properties, go to the details tab and change the scrolly bit to "hardware ids". In Linux, open a terminal and type "lspci -nn" it will give you vendor/device ids for every pci-based component on your system, the first set of four will be your vendor id, the second four will be your device id ie:

Processor: Do you have an AMD or an Intel processor? AMD cpus are not as well supported as Intel, mostly because the chipsets that AMD motherboards rely on are less compatible. Also you will need a patched kernel (see below).

What kind of instruction sets does your processor support? SSE only is not supported, a processor under OSX86 requires at least SSE2, and SSE3 is best. Socket types (how they fit onto the motherboard) do not matter.

Windows: To find out which processor instruction sets you have, you download a program for Windows called CPU-Z. It'll tell you a lot more information too.

Linux: open a terminal, then and you'll get a report for every core on the cpu, the section for instruction sets is called 'flags'.

N.B. Kernel choices DEPEND ON THE PROCESSOR MOST. The optimal processors for OSX86 are Core architecture Intel cpus, dual or quad, or the new intel Atoms (solo or multi). These, and only these processors are capable of running practically ANY kernel, especially the coveted "vanilla" kernel (less different from a real Mac) If you ever hear the term vanilla, it means unaltered, unmodified. This is http://www.projectosx.com/forum/index.php?showtopic=6 the same kernel real Macs run. Other kernels have been patched to run on different cpu instruction sets like SSE2, and with different cpuids (for AMD), and even with extra features such as sleep (which can be problematic on hackintoshes, also known as hibernation mode), speedstep (cpu stepping to dynamically lower the cpu clock speed to reduce power, mainly used to extend battery life on laptops, but also used on desktops), and to allow different kernel flags to work for debugging/testing purposes. The newest and most fully featured of these 'patched' kernels is the voodoo kernel.

C) Video card There's a lot of information out there about video cards, but to be brief, some ATI regular cards work, some ATI HD cards work in the desktop series but no ATI Radeon HD Mobility cards work properly, most recent (6/7/8/9) series nVidia cards work. At time of posting the new GeForce 260/280 cards from nVidia (anything with G98 cores), and the HD 4800 series from ATI are reported to work. VIA/Unichrome Graphics.. you can maybe get full resolution, but no hardware accelerated video.

3. Installation Method: Hardware plays a large role in choosing an installation method:

Preboot:
Preferred for all "production" installs, both intel and AMD,
A "preboot" media such as "boot-132" Chameleon 2 or XPC is loaded at boot, then the Retail os x media is booted.
Most usually you will download a basic disk image that you will burn to cd, although usb methods are gaining in popularity.

advantages: "clean", uniform install, easy to troubleshoot & update.
disadvantages: more "hands on" installation procedure, GPT partition table preferred.

Prepatched:
Previously, Prepatched "osx86" DVDs were the main means of installation, it may be a quick way to get your machine up & running, provided you find one that fits your hardware: If you wish to go this way, do some research into the disks available and choose the one which seems to support your hardware the most. Please do not ask for links to torrents, there are many torrent sites out there, you can search on your own.

advantages: (almost) all-in-one installation gpt or mbr, specialst applications
disadvantages: harder to troubleshoot & update

4. Burning: Make sure when you have the .iso that you burn it as an image. Most dvd burning programs have this option, and if yours doesn't, no matter what platform you're on, there is a free one which is easily installable that offers it, for instance on Windows: Infrarecorder and IMGBurn. Linux: Brasero/Gnomebaker/K3B OS X: Simplyburns/disk utility/hdiutil (command-line) and yes people with real Macs have been known to get involved with hackintoshes!!

5. Booting:
Booting a prepatched DVD is fairly straightforward: insert, boot from DVD generally it either boots or it doesnt and there's not much you can do about it. in some cases ppf patches exists to support difficult hardware.

Booting a Preboot cd is a bit more complicated, involving a few keystrokes and swapping the cd for a retail DVD to bring up the installer. if your preboot cd can't boot, you can try another (they are typically <50mb) or you can add kexts or patches or otherwise alter other boot parameters to get it to work.

6. Drive formatting:
A normal PC that has Windows and nothing else comes with an MBR partition table. Chances are if you've installed Linux, it's stayed that same way. OSX86 can be installed to MBR partition tables as well, either on it's own, or alongside Windows, and/or Linux, or even all three. Note well that one of the many native ( wink to Dense ) partition tables which are in use on real Macs is the GUID partition table (a.k.a. GPT) which is considered by some to be "more vanilla". Retail installs are also easier on GPT

Reminder, if you don't know what a hard drive partition is, look it up on google/wikipedia!

First thing to do is decide how you'll install.

Will you be solo-booting, diving right in with only OS X ? This will be the easiest and least risky in the long run, especially if you're at all hesitant about formatting a drive or partitioning. A second hard drive can be useful this way if you know how to switch it out, or even a USB hard drive can be installed to.

How about dual or even triple-booting, if you *have* to have some of those latest Windows games on your system, or need some specific Linux programs.

The second thing to do is decide how you'll partition. OS X has an awesome built-in disk utility on the install dvd that will allow you to look at your hard drive, and re-partition or format it however you please.

REPARTITIONING WILL ****WIPE**** YOUR HARD DRIVE AND/OR PARTITIONS.
This will mean Windows and/or Linux will be GONE. Clean slate! Be careful that you pay attention to exactly which partition or drive you're working with! Formatting will WIPE a partition in the same way. There is a popular open-source partition utility called Gparted, available in a livecd so you can resize partitions, making extra space if you plan on dual-booting.

An MBR partition table has a limit of how many primary partitions can be made on it. OS X can be installed to both primary and extended partitions, but is only bootable from a primary partition. You can have either 4 primary partitions OR 3 primary partitions and 1 extended partition. A GUID partition table does not have such a low limit for primary partitions (128 partitions).

HFS+ is the filesystem most easily installed upon, which is a selectable option in the OS X disc utility under the erase tab, when choosing your partition. Most people tend to choose Mac OS Extended Journaled (the first option), however you can also choose Mac OS Extended, Mac OS Extended Case Sensitive Journaled, and Mac OS Extended Case Sensitive

7. Driver Selection:
Prepatched:
So you've chosen the disk/partition to install upon. On the next screen you'll have the option to choose "customize" in the lower left-hand corner, this is the driver selection area. Depending on your release, you could have multiple things to choose from: motherboard chipsets, kernels, video card drivers, audio card drivers, and possibly some other things such as intel memory controllers, thermal info and ACPI fixes. Remember, if don't understand something (such as ACPI), look it up.
A couple notes: Choosing multiple kernels or video drivers is not a good idea. Generally those are the only two things you have to worry about, as they cause conflicts.
On a first install choosing drivers/kexts to use should be done very minimalistically just to make sure your system will boot properly. If you install ten different drivers for various things, if something screws up then you'll have to pinpoint exactly which one it is, which, hey if you're a newbie, you might not be able to do, so it's better to choose the bare minimum (avoiding sound/video drivers) so you have less to worry about breaking on your first install.

Preboot:
You already have the drivers necessary to boot on your preboot media, you can proceed to first boot by selecting the harddrive from your preboot media.
You will need to install a bootloader at this point, chameleon is recommended. By adding the kexts from your preboot media to your harddrive install (usually an /Extra folder) you have a basic booting system.

"Drivers" (a windows term) on OS X come in the form of Kernel EXTensions, also known as a .kext. .kexts are placed in the /System/Library/Extensions/ folder under OS X. OS X follows the Linux/Unix folder hierarchy, with the equivalent to the Windows C: drive being located at " / ", otherwise known as "root". This is your root directory. The C:/ in Windows is / in OS X.


8. Driver Installation methods: Once you have booted your install, you can add drivers. However pay attention to the way you install the drivers. .KEXT files do not generally come in a .pkg (package) file, which is an equivalent to a Windows .msi or .exe. as kexts are system files that are normally not played with. Instead, as it is based on a freebsd/unix structure, these kernel extensions have to be placed in the proper directory (/System/Library/Extensions) and then have their permissions repaired. For anyone without any Linux/Unix knowledge, this will sound weird, but compared to Linux/Unix (which OS X counts as) Windows has a.. severely underdeveloped sense of security.

So a normal sequence of installing a driver for anyone with advanced knowledge of OSX86 would do the following. Say we downloaded an audio kext to our "Downloads" folder under our user account directory. We would open a terminal, (under /Applications/Utilities/Terminal.app) and type:



The first of these, in case you couldn't tell, is first "sudo" (superuser-do, so telling it to do this action with full administrator privileges), "cp" (copy), the first file (/Users/realityiswhere/Downloads/AppleHDA.kext) to it's next location (/System/Library/Extensions/AppleHDA.kext)

The second line was sudo chown (superuser-do change owner) to the "root" user (basically not a user, but the system itself, so the system would own and control this file, not us), in the permissions group of "wheel" (which has specific system priviliges), -R for recursion (I could make this into such a long and drawn out joke about recursion. Basically indicates it's a folder, and to do this action for the folder I've specified, and every folder inside it) and then the file to do the above actions to.

The third line was sudo chmod (superuser-do change mode), -R (recursively, again, folders and files within folders) to 755. Basically permissions 755 means, the owner of the file (root) to read, write and execute (value 7), the group (wheel) of the file to read and execute (value 5), and other users to read and execute (value 5).

For a more in-depth look at terminal commands Korrupted (formerly known as Dax) has an excellent walk-through located HERE which is a *highly* recommended read if you do not already understand some basic terminal commands.

Now obviously everyone is not going to want to do that every time, so some people have come up with different methods of facilitating the .kext installation process, the most commonly used one is probably Kext Helper (first link when you google kext helper) which is a graphical utility for kext installation, but some purists consider this to be cheating.

Also, don't hesitate to reinstall if you're new. It's not unusual (to be loved by anyone.. sorry.. Tom Jones joke) to reinstall multiple times. I know personally, I've reinstalled over 30 times easily before I found a set of steps that worked well for me.

9. Troubleshooting: This section could go on forever, but basically, check the forum sections appropriate to the issues you're having, and search. If you find the forum search isn't as spectacular as you hoped it was, here's a google hint. " site:pcosx.net <search criteria> " in google will return results only from this forum.

Some common issues:

"Still waiting for root device" on boot to the dvd: Check your IDE cable on your dvd drive and try switching it's position to a different jumper location. If this doesn't work, you may need to look into a SATA or USB dvd drive.

"Still waiting for root device" on boot to the hard drive: Either you didn't install the proper ATA/SATA (hard drive controller) drivers/kexts, or your ATA/SATA chipset isn't supported by the disc you've used to install. If this happens with an intel chipset, try switching your BIOS options around from SATA or RAID to AHCI. This mostly happens with nVidia nForce, Silicon Image (SiS), VIA, and ATI/AMD motherboard chipsets.

The best ones practically guaranteed to avoid this problem faced by a lot of people is to (if you have the option) use an intel motherboard.

Instant reboot after boot to the hard drive: Intel processor, check for NX-bit (also called No Execute, or Execute disable-bit) in your BIOS, enable it if it's there, also Virtualization Technology.

Some AMD processors get this as well if it's a recent enough processor like a Phenom, it's conflicts with the fake-EFI solutions some of the install dvds use (pc_EFI or Chameleon)

10. OS X Basics: Windows to OS X converts will probably have some basic questions or be confused by some different things so here are some basics questions answered, and other little useful tidbits.

A) Viruses: They exist, yes, viruses not existing for Linux/Unix/OS X is a myth, they do for sure exist, *BUT* not nearly in the staggeringly stupid amounts that Windows viruses exist. I honestly do not know many people that consider OS X viruses or spyware a threat or use an OS X virus scanner. If you are still insecure about this issue, look into ClamXAV.

Will " such and such " run on OS X? The answer is more than likely "Yes, or something else that does the same thing".

i. Yes, messenger programs run on OS X like MSN, Yahoo, AIM, etc. Some have good individual clients, iChat (built in to OS X) will run some of them, but overall you'll probably find Adium does a really good job with controlling *all* of them, and is very customizable. It's free, open-source (Cocoa) based on the Pidgin libpurple libraries, the only bad thing about it is it does not support webcams or microphones.

ii. Yes, Microsoft Office has an OS X version, at the moment the current version is Office 2008 (Outlook has been renamed to Entourage)

iii. Some games have native OS X clients, however a lot are not native. Some have been wrapped in what's called "Cider" (which is "like" Wine or Cedega for Linux, for Windows games), an emulation layer.

iv. OS X uses HFS+ (mostly) as it's default filesystem. It will natively read and write to fat32 (most flash drives, some older Windows including old XP installs). NTFS is the default for new XP installs and Vista, and is only *READABLE* natively by OS X, not writable. You'll need either NTFS-3G or Paragon NTFS to be able to write to NTFS drives. For Linux users, ext2FS will work for ext3, however the code can be buggy sometimes. If anyone has a better solution for Linux, feel free to pm me to update this post.

C) OS X can mount .isos natively just by double clicking, no need for Daemon tools anymore Windows users.

D) The thing on the bottom of the screen is called the "Dock", to get it to magnify "like in the ads" that's in the dock preferences, under system preferences.

11. OSX86 IRC: There are generally quite a few people on our irc channel, the server is irc.moofspeak.net, the channel is #osx86 . Some good OS X irc clients are X-Chat Aqua (an oldie but free and solid), Colloquy (free as well, seems quite customizable), and a newcomer that has potential is Linkinus, which is not free, but has a 15 day free trial and quite good so far.

Some basic IRC rules (for all irc networks): Read the channel topic before doing anything. If you ask a question and no one has an answer and you're getting frustrated, just leave and come back, don't swear at people for not knowing the answer. Also, never send private messages (also known as querying) to users without permission, especially channel operators (the highest people on the list). Do not just join the IRC channel and say "HELP ME!!! I'M A NOOB" or "Hello? Is anyone there?" and expect an intelligent reply. If you're joining to hang out, cool! Join, chill for a while, ask questions, but be patient. Remember no one on IRC is getting paid to help, and like I said before, this is a hobby, we do it out of our own love for learning.

All in all everyone, OSX86 is an awesome learning experience. Our AMAZING OSX86 developers that are far too numerous to mention (I'll compile what I hope to be an accurate list) have done such great work, the community has developed into something to really be proud of. Have fun!

Great guide, but:


A bit outdated. Voodoo kernel nowadays solves most of the AMD issues.

A few collaborative updates added, thanks go to realityiswhere, errors, omissions typos & stupidities to me