Mac OSX 10.6.3

Tech

Did I just join the Apple cult ?

January 30, 2011

Not quite yet since I haven’t fully converted yet to Mac ^o^. An idea of learning iOS and getting the SDK ($100 per year) had been on my mind since a co-worker of mine showed me his first app ever that he created. After little bit of searching, I found out that the SDK only works on OSX and it really annoyed me. Spending ~$1000 on a Mac (maybe in the future but certainly not now) is not an option so here goes a nice little project of mine this weekend: hackintosh. The idea of hackintosh is to install OSX on your PC and since I have quite a few spare parts due to continuous upgrade every year, hackintosh would be a perfect starting point.

Saber Alter

A screenshot from my fully working OSX. Bought OSX 10.6.3 Snow Leopard DVD from Apple store for CAD$35 and installed it on my intel based system.

System specs:

  • Intel Xeon x3350 at 2.66 GHz
  • 4 x 2GB DDR2 800 RAM (using 2x2GB during installation)
  • DFI Blood Iron P35 motherboard (an ancient P35 motherboard)
  • eVGA Geforce GTX 280

Tools required:

  • Mac OS X Snow Leopard 10.6.3 DVD (CAD$35 at Apple site)
  • iBoot (Burned into a CD/DVD)
  • Multibeast
  • 10.6.6 dmg file
  • patience

Software installed so far:

  • Firefox 3.6
  • VLC
  • Adobe reader

I followed tonymacx86 guide for installing OSX Snow Leopard on an Intel based PC thoroughly and the only thing that I did different was that I used ‘-x PCIRootUID=1‘ instead of just ‘-x‘ when installing OSX. After successfully installed OSX, the next step would be to upgrade it to 10.6.6 which was a breeze. Still hard to believe how easy it was to install apps and update in OSX compare to Windows. Installing audio and video driver were also a breeze except I had to do a lot of reading on their forum before hand to make sure I installed the correct one using Multibeast.

It’s only fitting this hackintosh named as Saber Alter because my windows 7 PC was named Saber so now I can dual-boot windows 7 and OS X Snow Leopard ^^.

If anyone has any questions regarding hackintosh, feel free to ask and I will try to answer them.

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