Once upon a time, osx86 was born, of a few simple modifications to a single file which needed to be manually injected with some windows tools.. it wasn't hard, the hard work had been done by clever people who found out just what to patch in the relevant file. It was easy to understand, what was known was known (including the limited hardware support), the rest was virgin territory.

Fast forward 3 years, a whole point-release & more, through times when the osx86 was a mess of versions & patches to the situation today, where the clever stuff is done by people who make bootloaders, EFI value injectors and kexts, and we the users have an easier time than ever before.

But wait.. there is much confusion.. rumours & hearsay become "accepted fact", issues real & imagined and their fixes abound all over the place.. if so much progress has happened, why would this be?

Easy isn't easy enough for some, it seems. The expanded list of compatible hardware still attracts people whose equipment is marginal & so have trouble, but most of all it seems that people are trying to achieve success with no expenditure in effort to learn how to do even the simplest little things to their systems.

There are pre-patched releases, these are pretty simple, particularly if your hardware matches up to the DVD.. but some feel even this is too complicated, and want guides as to what they should click & select during install. For those with compatible hardware, the retail/boot-132 method reigns supreme, yet some people find this is also too complicated, and flock to gui tools & widgets and helpers that apparently "make it easier"

Did any of you get that lecture at school where they said that "if you cheat in an exam, you're only cheating yourself"? Well that is precisely what these people are doing..

I've seen people spend days on end trying to find a shortcut around a few simple terminal commands.. rather downloading & installing 6 different iso's looking for one where everything "just works" than following the established procedure of install, fix bootloader, fix drivers.

Then There are the pre-emptives.. take a look in "Buying Guides, Reviews & Recommendations" & you will find heaps of people asking "will this hardware work" or "what hardware should I get that works 100%" These are people who not only don't want to do the simple job of installation themselves, they won't even do their own forum & wiki searches to find out what hardware works. The information is out there.. asking for it again only clutters the forum.

The bottom line is that: THERE IS NO SUCH THING AS A FREE LUNCH

The knowledge and skill needed to install osx86 is not great, and all of it accessible with a little patience reading the forum & wiki. trying to make it easier only makes it harder in the long run, because when something goes wrong, you have no idea how to fix it, nor what caused it, because your system is full of other people's patches installed from point-&-click installers and you have no idea what they are. So we get "my system is b0rked I installed kalyatkoth v1.4p and L33tNik's nvidia installer what do I do?" posts.

if you take the shortcut, you're stuck asking for directions. If you learn the way, or better still, how to read a map, you can make it there unaided.

I tried making a n00bs guide once, I gave up. There is no way to proof a guide against every kind of idiot that may read it, but here's a potted version.
I began with:
"Know your hardware" which I still think is the first commandment. Unless you know down to the device & vendor ID exactly what every component in your machine is, you have no business posting in the technical threads. Once you have this, researching whether it will work is a pleasant afternoon's surfing.. then installing, making sure you've chosen a technique that suits your hardware, and once it's installed on the drive, and can boot, it's back to the results of your research to get as much of your hardware working as possible through the installation of kexts, the editing of plists & the generation & addition of EFI strings.

And finally: If you want a Mac, buy a Mac. a hackintosh is a PC no matter how you twist & turn it, and the installation of an unsupported OS is a hobby-task for those with an interest in such things. Those trying to get a "Mac for free" by this route are always disappointed.

Always has been one of the things I find ring especially true as we soldier on.

Hagar, I couldn't have said it better myself! To me it's all part of the fun of figuring out how this stuff works rather than going the "easy" route and learning nothing and ending up with a marginally working system. People need to learn to help themselves. In saying that, it sure helps to have more "updated" information available instead of a mishmash of non-sense.

-Stell

This is exactly what we fight for.

This is possibly the most epic summary of the subject ever.

Good job

i hate those installers, they usually screw up my system. whenever i install kext's myself, I immediately know exactly which one borked my system so I can take it back out

The only way to learn something is to try random things until the right thing happens (ie. push random buttons and hope for the best )

Thats how you went through school? I guess you pushed alot of schoolgirls and teachers "button"? =)

Superhai, you obviously havent known Crossfire for long enough. no schoolgirls in his boat

Concur'd.

Schoolgirls ? Where ?

Oh let me get back to the topic

Hagar , I couldn't agree more. It seems that these days a lot of people are finding shortcuts or being ignorant/lazier by not even googling .At times when in iRC, people do ask dumb questions such as "Will it work ?" . "how do I install a kext and so on ?". I hope that they did their home work at least first before asking. At least it shows that you have some some research prior to asking a question. Guess these days , people take things for granted and they want it their way

Kiko, I don't go for little girls like some people *looks at you*


fail. TiGGY, you of all people agreeing with kiko. shame on you.

TiGGY and Kiko ftw. Just sayin' bro.