Building a Hackingtosh, good/bad idea?

I'm talking late 06 / mid 07. Don't even start me on that X3100 chipset on the late 07s... the spinning beach ball can't even spin properly! Laggy as can be. Nothing makes a machine feel slower than when the beach ball shows up and doesn't even display nicely! :biggrin-new:

Hear, hear! 10.6 was great with RAM, 10.7 ate more than you could throw at it and now 10.8 seems to have reeled it in a little more, but I agree 2GB is on 10.8 is asking for trouble! Always double the minimum RAM requirements and you'll be peachy most of the time.

 

Never had issues with the X3100 chipset personally. If anything, it kept up really well with my work laptop at the time (Dell Latitude D830 with Nvidia Mobile graphics, running XP.) It's no good at games though, but then I don't really play games on computers any more.

I have 10.6 (external usb), 10.7 (onboard hard drive) and 10.8 (external usb) on my Mac Mini. Going to be honest, 10.6 still runs really well, 10.8 runs pretty good, 10.7 is getting sluggish. I'm probably moving it to 10.8 on the internal fairly soon.I bought it ages ago, but I wanted to keep 10.7 because I do a lot of audio work and wanted the drivers to catch up.

10.6 is actually unsupported on the hardware, but I followed an online guide to install it and hack around the unsupported parts, and it runs really nicely.

 

Haha, I meant the drivers for the X3100 chipset are poor on genuine Macs :wink-new:

10.6 will always have a place in my heart alongside good old fashioned 10.4. Sure is a pain the way third party drivers are slow to update! :topsy_turvy:

 

Yeah - I'm pretty sure they are what prevented Mountain Lion support, because Apple never made 64bit versions supposedly. Allegedly, the EFI is 64bit according to Everymac, though I installed 10.7 on mine and it runs just fine so I'm not worried. It tripple boots 10.6/10.7 and Windows 7. So I can pretty much run anything I need to on it still.

10.4 is about the only version of OS X I never used. I used 10.0 and 10.1 on a friends computer, and I had 10.2 and 10.3 on various PowerPC based Macs. 10.3 was pretty good in its day. My first Intel Mac had 10.5.

It was well worth the convoluted route needed to install 10.6 for the Mini for sure.

 

64-bit, bah! Every version of Mac OS X was compiled for use on x86 hardware since 10.0.
As if they couldn't whip up some 64-bit drivers. Although given they can't get eject buttons working...

Try ejecting a disk image or external drive from Computer (Cmd-Shift-C) by pressing the eject button while in list view.
Instead of ejecting, it attempts to rename the thing you are trying to eject.
Weird bug right? What makes me concerned is how do they miss things like this?
They changed a load of the GUI in 10.7 and 10.8 but break strange things like that.
Don't get me wrong, normally I eject using Cmd-E... whores will have their trinkets!
Then there was the whole "Reopen windows when logging back in" check box that never remembered what you picked until 10.7.4...
Four point releases. They can make my text edit file remember what I had open but they can't let me keep that damn boxed dechecked! :dejection:

But I digress! 10.3 was fast, especially compared with 10.2 and earlier. I loved the Public Beta of 10.0. I remember firing it up on a G3 Ruby to give it a spin.
Damn that thing was a mess compared to what was current in the day (10.3).
At least we can reflect on how good things were back in the day, right? :smile-new:

 

I know OpenStep was on Intel, as I ran that for a while. I also had Rhapsody DR1 on Intel. The only version of DR2 I ever saw was PowerPC though. Mac OS X Server 1.0 was pretty cool.

I always use command+E, as I use a windows Keyboard on my Mini and there was no eject button on Classic Mac's anyway.

I never really had an issue with the open windows thing, I set it to "off" and it seemed to persist. What did used to annoy me was when you then open something like TextEdit, and it pulled up a document you viewed months ago. That was annoying. So I always make sure I command+Q every app these days.

Yep, OS X is a pretty poor Openstep, but I do prefer it to Windows 7 still. Having said that, I use iOS/Android more these days anyway for casual browsing and youtube.

 

There are plenty of articles out and about on the net about this so I'll let you do your own googling, but 10.8 can be hacked to work natively on any Intel Mac in the exclusion list, including full hardware acceleration for the X3100.

 

I guess i'm a bit biased when it comes to ram. All of my mac / hacks have SSD drives in them and when you pull it down to 2GB of ram it's like you don't have a SSD anymore.

Anyways as far a rumors go, OS XI will be running on ARM processors and they will combine IOS and Mac OS into one OS. Hence the major GUI changes in 10.8

 

Major GUI changes?

They added full-screen apps and Mission Control, but they didn't change anything? Not that I noticed going from 10.7 to 10.8 anyway.

 

Full screen apps and Launchpad and Mission Control were in 10.7. The main thing I remember for 10.8 was iCloud integration. I'm sure there was more, but that's the main thing I remember.

 

That's what analysts are saying, but then they have claimed Apple are producing a TV for the last 5+ years also. I highly doubt they will transition to ARM with in the next 5 years, mainly because they will lose all backwards compatibility with Intel, which Apple has historically never done before. Until ARM is able to *reliably* handle 64bit Intel emulation, ARM will stay as a portable option only, specifically targeting iOS.

 

10.8 brought more blandness to the masses. More light grey text on dark grey backgrounds. Mmmmm yup. :sorrow:

 

Since when? They switched from 68k to PPC, PPC to Intel.

PPC to Intel they got devs to compile "fat binaries" with both x86 and PPC code within them. Switching to ARM is actually just like something Apple would do - they have done it before! Twice!

 

They completely hid the filesystem, you only have access to your home folder now (excluding library). You can still get to the root of your hard drive by typing "open /" in the terminal but thats about it unless you use a third party app / preference pane or changing settings via terminal. There is also an option to view hard disks on the desktop in the finder preferences, but it goes to show that apple is trying to hide the filesystem from the user, which is probably fine for most people.

Root terminal access is also disabled by default as well as third party apps, these can be easily changed though. Maybe not much has changed since 10.7, but from 10.6 it has. Its becoming more IOS like, which probably is a good thing for normal users.

Yea i agree, it would not surprise me at all. They always say it's for power consumption or effieciency, but i would rather see them go with the newer MIPS technology. I've always felt MIPS was much more efficient, thats why they put it in just about every embedded device.

Either way we will have a get ready for a new rosetta and universal binaries.

 

Command + Shift + G. Type in / and then hit enter. There's your other option aside from the Terminal and aside from permanently enabling it via the Finder's preferences. Didn't realize checking a box in the Finder's preferences was that big of a deal, though.

 

Me neither. Pisses me off when people start rejecting ML because it's been subject to "iosification" what a load of shit, a lot of Apple users are just like hipsters, like to feel that using the older software is somehow cooler.

They added a fancy menu and a few notifications, big whoop. Gatekeeper and Library restrictions is probably a good thing when the vast majority of the OS X user is the general public who don't want to fuck around with stuff they shouldn't.

You can permanently get /Library back and enable root by default with a few terminal commands.

As for the switch to ARM. Can't see it happening to be honest.

 

No need to do any fancy commands to get /Library. Just go to the Go drop down menu in Finder and hold Option. It'll appear automatically. This method is probably even quicker than opening up a new window in Finder and navigating to the /Library folder that's been enabled via Terminal anyway.

 

Ah, of course!

Microsoft have been hiding "My Computer" by default since Windows Vista, too.

Sure it's not completely the same, but I think you're reading more in to it than is really there. It's completely trivial to get around for power users like us.

Huh?

Open terminal, sudo su, password, done. I don't ever remember having to "enable" usage of sudo.

Gatekeeper is there, but again, trivial to disable, and stops their other 99% of users from installing something stupid. Less tech support calls and Genius appointments.

 

10.6.8 was a tuned beast, the pinnacle of Mac OS X. I don't know where the software engineers went, but they aren't home anymore under 10.7 / 10.8.
At least not the good ones anyway...
That said, 10.8 is definitely coming along and improving but with these rapid release updates... Is there enough time to fine tune an OS? This isn't Chrome after all! :wink-new:

Hahaha on that note, so many people get random documents and photos stuck in menu bars these days since a particular update in 10.6.8 days.
One of my friends fell victim, last time I visited them, there were all these random icons in the sidebars and toolbars of Finder... :grief:
Although I guess that technically is better than her "deleting" the hard drive or home folder from the side bar... :victorious:

 

68k to PPC they also got developers to create FAT binaries, this was actually where the name came from. The old Mac executable format (PEF) was resource based, so could have code for multiple architectures in it.

What you're ignoring is this:

68k -> PowerPC, all PowerPC Mac's for YEARS afterwards contained a software 68040 emulator in ROM. Mac OS 7.1.x was some PowerPC code, but the majority of the OS was still 68000 and ran under the emulation. MacOS 8.x was the first version of MacOS to ditch most of the 68000 code in favour of PowerPC when using that processor.

PowerPC -> Intel, all versions of Mac OS X up to 10.7 had Rosetta, which allowed PowerPC apps to run without any major issues on Intel hardware. Apple therefore supported PowerPC for a whole OS cycle after 10.5.9 when they officially ended support for the processor.

So, to move to another architecture, history tells us they will find a way to run Mac OS X apps on the new target hardware. As this requires a 64bit emulation of the Intel architecture, I don't see any low powered chips being suitable with in the next 5 years.

What I could see happening is a MacBook Air that runs iOS modified to be more suitable for keyboard/mouse use. But, I can't see who the target audience would be for that really.