[SGVLUG] Any "hackintosh" experts on here?

[Michael Proctor-Smith]

On Fri, Oct 16, 2009 at 5:05 PM, Stan Slonkosky <stan.ke6zc at gmail.com> wrote:
> On Fri, Oct 16, 2009 at 4:20 PM, Emerson, Tom (*IC)
> <Tom.Emerson at wbconsultant.com> wrote:
>> One of my co-workers asked me today about what it takes to install the Mac OS on an Intel-based laptop (seems he just bought one a week or two before the company assigned one to him, so he's free to "experiment" with his purchase)
>>
>> Who has done this?  What can one expect in the process?
>>
>> [oh, and this might make for a great topic to share at a future meeting...]
>>
>> [as well as a discussion on the differences between Apples version of "unix" they call Mac-OS and what we call "Linux"...]
>
> I'm no expert on this, but if you Google around you will be able to
> find instructions on how to do it. There are even Youtube videos of
> people doing it. Sometimes you might have problems finding drivers and
> may need to replace some hardware (e.g., wireless cards in laptops). A
> year ago when I bought an MSI Wind netbook, I chose it partly because
> people had been able to install OS X on it without replacing any of
> the hardware (only I never bothered installing OS X). This was also
> true of the Dell Mini 9.
>
> I believe that OS X is based on BSD Unix.
>

I am in no way an hackintosh or OSX expert but OSX runs on top of the
mach microkernel, and has some traditionally kernel level services
provided by freeBSD code, and uses some freeBSD userland. But it uses
code based on NextStep(tm) to do windowing, but they have been in a
very paradoxically way actually been supports of opensource software
ex: apple's dev tools are based on gcc. They also open sourced grand
central(multi-tasking/multi-core dispatching), which I just saw was
ported to freeBSD as libdispatch.

>
> --
> Stan Slonkosky
>