Sunday, February 08, 2009

Hackintosh

I'm certainly not the first person to do so, but I just set up my first Hackintosh. In the last few years I've become a fan of Apple's OS X, but really can't afford any more of their hardware on a grad-student's budget.
Fortunately, the folks at the OSx86 project have put a lot of effort into getting OS X working on non-Apple hardware. Notably, the MSi Wind netbook.
I had been poking around the Circuit City liquidation last week and spotted some Averatec rebranded Winds. I liked them quite a bit more than the Eee PC 701 that I use around the house and decided to pick up a Wind through Amazon (the liquidation wasn't all that great).
Using the MSIWindOSx86.iso distribution, handy instructions, and pointers from the MSi Wind forums, I've got everything working except for the built-in camera and the audio jacks. Also, probably due to the slipstreaming process, the Character Palette didn't work. However, I was able to resolve the issue by copying the Localization.prefPane and CharacterPalette.component from my iMac and clearing the system caches. Now I've got a little "Mac" for less than half the price of a refurbished Mac Air. Maybe, if I get a real job later this year, I can get the real deal... if I get a real job.