In the past couple years there have been several groups producing distributions of hacked OSX that allows you to install onto various Intel and AMD platforms. After many rebuilds in the past several months of my SpyWare-attracted XP-based Thinkpad T60, I decided to try out a few distributions to test my luck. My goal was to really to make it easy to rebuild my XP environments using Parallels hosted on OSX. This isn’t the best solution, but this is the setup I have on my iMac which allows me to wander aimlessly into the shark tank of the virus-infected Internet underground to check out the latest scams, warez, and torrents w/o worrying so much about a system compromise.
The logic behind all of this effort is that Apple hardware is cool, yet expensive. Apple has created a robust line of hardware/software solutions that are proprietary, yet stable. Mac’s are WAY less prone to spyware, because if you’re writing spyware and viruses, you’ll attack the bountiful array of Windows-based PC’s first, commonly owned by newbies, grandmas, soccermom’s, and the like. Most importantly from a hacker’s perspective, Windows makes up the largest market size over Mac, so you’ll get the most bang for you buck by attacking this population of computers.
But getting back to my point: You can take advantage of high end off the shelf hardware that can run even faster than the highest end Mac Pro – for a fraction of the price. If you’re a video guy and you need as much power as you can get, you’ll probably look at the latest 8-core Nahalem proc’s running 32GB of memory. An almost fully loaded non-raided machine will run about $10,000. You should be able to build your own machine for a almost half that – if you get non-Apple hardware. This is the real incentive – not to rebuild some old laptop as I have. You’ll get a solid Unix-based system to run all the high end NLE software like Avid, and have your boxes crunching like a pro.
Above is a screenshot of my Thinkpad T60 running iDeneb v1.3 10.5.5 Leopard. I’ll share my notes and experiences, but just as a disclaimer, you really shouldn’t do this due to violating many contracts and agreements that you probably don’t want to hear about. Also, I’m in a no way geeky enough to truly explain the best way to do this, but here’s what I went through.
I borrowed a spare laptop HD from our IT guy to run this experiment b/c it’s probably not wise to do this on my production drive for my daily needs.
I’ve got a T60 with the basic Intel GMA video (1024×768), 3G’s ram, 100GB 7200 RPM drive, and integrated Intel wireless.
I downloaded 4 different distro’s and the rundown:
- Kalyway 10.5.3 – installed, but booted up to blue screen. I tried all the flavors of bundled video libraries, but no go.
- iDeneb v.1.3 10.5.5 – took the longest to install, but worked. No wireless, no battery indicator support.
- iATKOS 4.1 – couldn’t load at all
- iPC xxx (did not try)
The first 2 distro’s had fairly similar install routines. You download the ISO’s, burn to DVD, pop it in the PC, and boot up. You format the drive to OSX Journal’d, then pick options, then install.
The one that did work, iDeneb, installed easily – I selected the Intel GMA libraries, SpeedStep, something for sleepmode, and selected a few things I thought might pertain to the Intel wifi and ethernet card, but not much else. It booted up and after about 15 seconds on the home screen kept overlaying a box that would say I need to reboot. The computer froze and all I could do is hold down the power key to reboot. I did this about 4 times with the same result. The 5th time I decided to try Kalyway again, so I booted up w/ the disc in the drive and connected to my ethernet hub (wireless didn’t work), but it still booted from iDeneb from the HD and it stopped giving me the error I saw before. I ejected the disc and this time it just worked. I’m not sure if it just needed a few kickstarts or rather something needed to initialize when I plugged into my ethernet.
After getting on the Net, I replaced my PowerManagement library with something that someone else used for installing iDeneb on an eBook, which after rebooting, gave me the little battery level icon. Check out section 3.4.4 about this PowerManagement file.
I plugged in a spare NetGear WT111 USB WiFi card and installed the Mac driver. After rebooting, I ran the RealTek USB utility and found my access point and it just worked. I disconnected ethernet and went back to my desk to plug back into AC power to continue installing stuff. You can run the utility to connect to the wifi network, then close the app. I added it to my Profile to hopefully have it reconnect on my next bootup.
I installed Parallels over Wifi after mounting the drive and voila!
I did have one more instance of having a frozen screen just after installing Parallels, but I think it was due to opening Safari to a page that had a ton of weird rich media ads… who knows what spyware was attempting to install.
What’s Left?
- built-in Wifi
- fingerprint scanner (I’ve seen this work on other hackintoshes)
- sleepmode
- Red Thinkpad glidepoint works, but tapping on trackpad doesn’t do a mouseclick (no biggie)
- audio works, but pressing buttons doesn’t show graphical level.
Day 2:
I thought I’d try some new extensions to fix some of the things mentioned above, but it ended up corrupting something to the point where I couldn’t even boot up anymore.
I reinstalled trying to recall all the options I chose before, but somehow didn’t get the right recipe… so the 2nd attempt resulted in a mid-OSX install crash.
A third try resulted in success, but with different results than my first try:
- Glidepoint (red knob) didn’t work
- Sound didn’t work
- Battery meter automatically worked
- Realtek Wifi driver didn’t work (downloaded WG111v2 driver directly from Netgear and worked)
- This time no intermittent crashes yet after 4 days of usage.
My guess is that it has something to do w/ the optioned I checked for Speedstep, power management, SSE2/3 stuff…. not sure.
My office environment is Windows-based, so I ended up installing the Cisco VPN for MacOS, our corporate x509 cert, Office for Mac 2008, Messenger to hook up with LCS server, and Entourage… which all works like a charm!
