Sunday, August 14, 2005

OSx86 Project: Mac OS X on a sub $300 USD Intel "White" Box

Your next Mac could cost you only $300 USD or less, and run faster than any G4 or G5 you've ever used. The future is already unfolding! Based on the Apple OS X x86 Developer Kit, the OSx86 Project offers a hack designed to over-ride TPM Chip (Trusted Platform Module), Apple's anti-competitve chip intended to prevent the system from running on Ordinary PCs and stifle innovation. By removing the TPM Kernel extension (AppleTPMACPI.kext) and writing the drivers (Known as Kernel Extensions) so that they can run your own Non-Apple-Gadgets such as Wi-Fi cards, VGA Cards, etc. Mac OS X can now be run on any x86 Box (Intel or AMD) that offers SSE 2, although you will need SSE3 if you plan on running Power PC Applications on Rosetta. Many believe (although I'm highly doubtful) that Apple wanted to demonstrate the weakness of TPM security, and may have plans to eventually license the operating system to PC Makers eventually. The setup can be done in 30 steps or less (if you happen to download a ready made VMWare image for instance) a guide on how to setup Max OS X on an intel box can be obtained from http://www.xplodenet.com/?p=guide the OS through BitTorrent, my test setup ran perfectly and much faster than a G4 with 1024 MB of RAM on a humble box I purchased primarily for testing Mac OS X, an Acer Power F2 (Intel Celeron 2.66 Ghz with 512 MB RAM) I wouldn't have believed it if i didn't run both systems back to back! Of course there are several reasons why you should wait for Apple to realease it's own Intel Boxes, the current legal-status of OS X intel is one, and the uncompleted developer nature of OS X for intel is another. For more information you can check: http://osx86project.org/ http://www.osx86.classicbeta.com/wiki

5 comments:

Anonymous said...

Hi what's SSE2/3? how would i know if my cpu has it?

Roba said...

Hehe, escaping imaginary cops? :P Dodging bullets? :P wonderful :P

Yazan Malakha said...

Sorry Mohammed, I didn't notice your question up until this moment. This is hard to put into lay terms, so I'll try to make it as short as possible, SSE stands for Streaming SIMD Extensions, SSE2 adds support for 64-bit double-precision floating point and for 64, 32, 16 and 8-bit integer operations on the eight 128-bit XMM registers first introduced with SSE.

SSE3 is known by its Intel code name Prescott New Instructions adds 13 more instructions to SSE2.

For more information go to:
http://wiki.osx86project.org/wiki/index.php/Installation_Guides

To find out if your CPU has any of the above

Anonymous said...

mohommed,
you can download a tiny app called cpu-z. about halfway down on the first tab, next to the label "Instructions" there is a box that will says SSE, SSE2, SSE3, and/or whatever else is applicable. If it DOESN'T say SSE2 or SSE3 then give up (for now).

http://www.cpuid.org/download/cpu-z-130.zip

Online Casinos said...

Curiously, but it is not clear