OSX Leopard 10.5.1 On A PC

In a previous post I showed you how an ordinary and boring windows PC could be converted into a OS X Tiger powerhouse. That project might have taken someone with advanced knowledge of computing an entire weekend to perfect. The most difficult part of the operation was ensuring that all of the computer components worked correctly. Improvements have been made since Leopards release, and more modern devices are supported automatically. Needless to say, this is a handy feature for people with cutting edge computers.

OS X Leopard was cracked for PC consumption the day of its release. This was mostly accomplished because Leopard was meant from the beginning to be used on computers with the x86 Intel architecture. The roadblock keeping OS X from naturally running on any pc is something called EFI, or Extensible Firmware Interface. The EFI that Leopard uses is only tooled to work with Apple hardware, which means that it needs to be patched. The original method of patching was to use a thumbdrive attached to the computer and utilize the terminal to transfer files from the thumbdrive to the operating system files of Leopard. Compared to installing Tiger onto a PC, this method was ridiculously easy and was all that was required to have a successful boot of Leopard. But a better solution is now available, one where no thumbdrive is required and installation is streamlined and so easy that nearly anyone can do it.

OK, first thing's first.

This is a set of guidelines for installing OS X Leopard onto a PC. What you choose to do with this information is up to you, and I am in no way responsible for whatever happens to your machine.

The things you need for this project are as follows:

• High Speed Internet Connection (Useful if you want the disk image before the end of time)
• Blank DVD-R
• Nero, or some other program that allows the burning of disk images to blank media
• A BitTorrent program such as BitComet or Transmission
  
• A computer with the following attributes:
• Processor with either SSE2, SSE3, or SSE2/3 capabilities.
• at least 512 MB RAM
• at least 9 GB of free disk space
• A DVD drive for installation

Now that all of the essentials are taken care of, we can get to the nitty gritty. In my personal opinion, this is one of the easiest installations of any operating system that I have ever had experience with. If all of your devices are supported, and your system has reasonable specs, you may expect to be cruising on your new Leopard in under and hour and a half. If you have just the bare minimum system requirements, it may take considerably longer.

Preparations:

In order to install Leopard, you first need to get the Leopard OSX86 installation disk. Now, the legality of this is somewhat questionable. The general consensus is that there are three ways to go about this, and I will order them in the most painful to least painful:

• Become an Apple developer. After several years or decades of convincing Apple Corp. that it would be a great idea to open up their kick ass operating system to the public for use on PC's, you can probably install the now defunct and outdated leopard onto your PC free of legal worries.
• Buy a Leopard License, and then go and download Leopard from one of a plethora of Torrent websites. So that way at least your giving your money for a Leopard license and choosing to use it on a computer. Even though the license agreement specifically states that you cannot use OS X on anything but apple software. Oh well, it happens.
• Who cares, just download it. This is the most common method, and also the least legal.
  

Now, for the two practical options you need to download the Leopard distribution. My personal favorite, and in my opinion the easiest to install, is the Kalyway 10.5.1 disk. To do this go to a torrent site (I cannot link or suggest ones for legal reasons) and you might want to consider typing in "Kalyway 10.5.1" and use the torrent program of your choice to download it. Unless you have a crazy good connection, expect to wait upwards of 2-3 days for the whole thing to download. It is a large file and will take a considerable time to acquire.

Then you need to burn the .iso file to the blank DVD. I prefer using Nero to do the burning, but you may have another program that does a similar job.

If you’ve never booted from a CD or DVD on your system, then follow the outlined steps. If you already know how then just skip the next paragraph.

Insert the dvd into your dvd drive and shutdown the computer. Then whenever the computer boots up, pay attention to if it says anything about boot sequence or BIOS setup in the first few seconds of booting. For most Dell systems that I’ve come across the Boot Sequence option can be reached by hitting F12 at startup. For HP it is usually F2. Other BIOS’s might be Del or any of the F keys. Then select your CD/DVD drive, and the computer will boot from it after hitting enter.


Unfortunately I was not able to get a good screenshot of the first few stages of the installation process, but I will tell about every screen that you should come across until I can show actual screenshots.



Something along the lines of “Press any key to start the disk. . .” will appear on the screen.

You will need to press a key in order to start the installation process, otherwise the disk may boot into a bootable partition that it finds on your hardrive.

“Loading Darwin x86 . . .”

The length of loading depends on your system configuration, but mostly depends on how much RAM you have. Having 2 GB of RAM is very nice compared to 512 MB.

Now I have pictures. They will go through each screen that is encountered throughout installation.

Apple Loading Screen

Choose Your Language (English for this tutorial)

Apple Loves Loading Screens

This is the Welcome Screen. Notice the silhouette break dancer. This is an image added by Kalyway. If you click on More Information, it will show you all the features Kalyway packed into the disk.

Now it gets more complicated. You need to format the hard drive at this point in the installation. To do this, go to the Utilities button on the upper OS X bar as pictured below. Then go to Disk Utilities.

The disk utility will come up. Click on your hard drive (Not any partitions you may have, see below - its in the right hand column) and then click the erase tab:

Click on the Volume Format drop down menu. I always use Mac OS Extended Journaled. You may be able to use another type, but I know for a fact that that does indeed work. Then name the partition whatever you would like, I'm partial to something plain like Leopard.

Once that is accomplished (It may take some time depending on your hard drive size and system configuration) click the red x button to exit the Disk Utility and return to the installation Welcome screen.

Click on Continue and the Agreement page will come up. Click Agree.




Then the following screen will appear telling you where you can install Leopard. It should show the partition and hard drive you just formated. If it does not then something went wrong in the formating process, but don't worry, you can still go to the Disk Utility and try it again.

Click continue and the Install Summary page comes up

VERY IMPORTANT!!!!!

You MUST Click Customize!! If you do not, your install probably will not work. The Customize screen will show you several options that you will need to select or de-select based on your own hardware configuration. If your first install does not work correctly, chances are you need to choose different options in the Customize screen:

This is the setup used for a Dell Dimension 3000 with a nVidia card in a PCI slot. The bootloader patcher used is MBR and not GUID because there is only one partition on the drive. If there is more than one bootable parition on the hard drive, and the paritions are set in GUID, then use the coresponding patcher.

Click Done, and then Install

The installer will now check the disk. If you are feeling particularly daring you can skip this process. However, I recommend going through the process at least once. There may have been an error in burning the disk, or the .iso file itself may have been slightly corrupted. As long as the disk hasn't been scratched, you really only need to check the disk once if you need to install Leopard again.

WHOO HOO! Leopard is installing!

If you did not check your disk and it has an error on it, this is the most likely step to encounter problems.

Once this is complete a green circle with a checkmark comes up saying that the Installation was successful. You will need to restart the computer (I think it may do it automatically if you are not around) and after it goes through the Darwin Bootloader, another Apple loading screen appears:

Then a very fancy video will play that welcomes you in many different languages.

Now all you need to do is set up the Leopard Basics.

Because you most likely don't have an Apple Keyboard, all you have to do is press the buttons to the right and left of the two shift keys.

Then you have to pick the type of keyboard.

Then choose your country:

THEN, select the country your keyboard is from.

The transfer screen. I did not need to transfer anything, but if you have another mac you may wish to transfer things.




Then you can input your Apple ID so that Apple can fill in your information for you. I do not know if they can detect that you are not using actual Apple hardware or not. The risk is yours to take.



Registration Information. If you input your Apple ID, it will show up here. But I blurred the stuff out because I'm not an idiot.




A Few More Questions. ENOUGH WITH THE QUESTIONS, I WANT LEOPARD! But Apple must have their way with you. Answer the questions and advance one step.



Then you need to create your user account:



Now its time for Apple to try to get you to purchase a .mac account. Personally I don't like .mac accounts because I don't think they are worth it. But you are of course entitled to your own opinion.

If you don't have .Mac, they will let you try it for free. (I said no)



ALL DONE! The Thank You Screen!



You are all done. Congratulations.



This is the default desktop and settings that Kalyway decided to use.

The file explorer has an orange background. To change this go through the following steps:

Open up an explorer:



Right click and select Show View Options:



View Options - Where it says Background: change it back to White, and then click Use as Defaults




Guess what. Your done - that is if all of your hardware is supported. If it is not, I suggest checking out these sources:

http://www.insanelymac.com/

http://wiki.osx86project.org/wiki/index.php/Main_Page

If you have any questions or comments, please post a comment at the bottom of this post. I have documented what experience I have had with OSX86 Leopard, I leave this open to you now. Please help one another.

UPDATE:

There are a few things that you should be aware of if you are doing this for the first time. The first one is that you should NEVER use the Apple updater to update your installation of Leopard. For instance, if the Apple updater pops up and says that you can update from 10.5.1 to 10.5.2 or .3, DO NOT UPGRADE UNDER ANY CIRCUMSTANCES!!! It will brick your machine and you will need to re-install Leopard again. I have created a tutorial for updating Leopard OSX86 to 10.5.2 and it is located here:

http://tgrounds.blogspot.com/2008/04/upgrading-osx86-leopard-1051-to-1052.html

The second thing that may be of use is a program called SIW, or System Information for Windows. This is useful if you do not know if your Intel processor is SSE2 or SSE3. Of course you need to have an installation of Windows to run the software, but many people do so I am providing the link:

http://www.gtopala.com/

Enjoy!

Control a Windows Machine Using Remote Desktop - Through OS X

Ever find yourself sitting at your mac, needing to connect to a windows machine and run the Remote Desktop? Do you think that Windows and Mac hate each other so much, that it is hopeless to assume that you can use Remote Desktop Connection through a Macintosh? Well think again, because Microsoft has created Remote Desktop Connection for mac.

First things first, this has been out for a while. For those of you who don't know much about RDC (Remote Desktop Connection), it has traditionally been a program that allows windows users to remotely login to another windows machine. Features include cutting/copying from one machine and pasting into the other, to printing a document on another machine that is connected to a printer. It comes in handy, much more efficient than emailing a file to yourself, using a thumbdrive to transfer a file, or having a network attached storage device (NAS). This comes in handy when it comes to the file systems of the two operating systems, while windows refuses to even acknowledge the OSX file system, OSX will for the most part recognize the NTFS file system and read from it, but will not write to it.

Without further ado, here is where you may download RDC for Macintosh:

Remote Desktop

The URL is huge, but if you need to paste it into your browser it is:
http://www.microsoft.com/mac/downloads.aspx?pid=download&location=
/mac/download/misc/rdc_update_103.xml&secid=80&ssid=10&
flgnosysreq=True

Now here is a photo odyssey of what it takes to use this software. Keep in mind that this setup is a mac using RDC to connect to a Windows 2003 Server.

These icons appear on your desktop now:



Oh look, I can access the user files on the server:



Odd looking, isn't it?

Open DNS, The Faster Domain Name System!

When you type in an address at the top of your browser, lets say you want to visit www.weather.com for instance, your computer sends a request to a DNS server that it is connected to. In most cases this is provided by your ISP (Internet Service Provider), and is usually retrieved automatically using DHCP. The DNS server is like a phone book for the internet. It takes the address you typed in (www.weather.com) and looks it up, finding the IP address of the server containing the web page. This accounts for part of the time it takes to load a web page, because your request is put in line with a thousand others and it takes a few milliseconds to process. Once the server has found the appropriate IP address for the page you are looking for, it directs it your way.

Now, why change which DNS server you use? Well maybe your ISP provides you with a crappy one, maybe you think your internet is a bit slower than it should be, or maybe you just want to be a propper geek, and change everything about your computing experience that you can. It doesn't matter, because in almost every case, changing from ISP DNS to Open DNS will improve performance, it may not be noticible and only visible in added milliseconds, but the improvement will be there.

How can you change your DNS server's address? I'll show you how to do so in Windows and in OS X. If someone would like to share how to do so in Linux, let me know.

In OS X:

Go to System Preferences, Network, click on your Ethernet or Wireless network settings and click Configure, And where it has DNS Servers, add these two IP addresses:

208.67.222.222
208.67.220.220

There, all done for OS X!

In Windows (basically all versions):

Go to Control Panel, Network Connections, click on your connection(s) - whether they are wireless or not, then double click on the correct icon, hit properties, then scroll down to TCP/IP and hit properties. De select Obtain DNS automatically, and input the same IP addresses as in OS X:

208.67.222.222
208.67.220.220

If you want to learn more about what Open DNS is, and how they operate, visit their website at:
http://www.opendns.com/

Hope you enjoy!

How to Soft-Mod an Xbox - No Modchips Required!

Have an old Xbox lying around collecting dust? Does your 360 scoff at its 1st generation counterpart and its inability to play Gears of War? Well put that thing to good use. Put Linux, or better yet, Xbox Media Center on it and create a low-powered media PC capable of receiving streamed content over your home network! An amazing mod that only requires a day or two, but is well worth it.

First thing's first, I didn't come up with this technique, and there is a good chance that if you don't know what you're doing, or you mess up in some way (hey, accidents happen) that you may end up losing your Xbox completely. You have been warned, do this at your own risk, if you mess up, its not my fault, or the fault of the person who thought of this.

Another thing to consider is the cost of this venture. If you already have an Xbox, it will cost around $45 in materials to put the mod onto the Xbox. Thats if you buy everything brand new, if you buy it used, you can probably get everything for $10ish.

I am not going to explain step by step detail on the process, because I found out about it from this website:

http://www.productwiki.com/microsoft-xbox/article/how-to-go-from-
xbox-to-xbox-media-center-in-30-minutes.html

Here is a list of the materials you will need:

1. Microsoft Xbox ($150)
2. Networked PC Computer ($???)
3. Original MechAssault game ($20)
4. Datel Xbox Action Replay ($25)
5. Krayzie's NDURE installer ($0)
6. Xbox Media Center (XBMC) ($0)
7. uTorrent ($0)
8. FlashFXP ($0)
9. Winrar ($0)

MechAssault is used to exploit the Xbox and load a different operating system onto the Xbox. You can also use 007: Agent Under Fire, and the original Splinter Cell.

I'm not much of a cut and paster, and besides, I don't want to generalize on a very complicated process, so visit the Product wiki website and follow their instructions to the letter.

Xbox SoftModding: ProductWiki

Safari for Windows, Should You Get It?

For those of you who haven't found out yet, Apple has thrown their own web browser, Safari, into the fray of Windows browsers. Some people scoffed at the announcement, after all, who uses Safari on the Mac? Doesn't everyone use Opera or Mozilla by now? While this is true, Safari for Windows does have a few benefits. For an interesting graph that shows how fast Safari executes HTML code, JavaScript, and application launch, visit the homepage here:

http://www.apple.com/safari/

Interesting, apparently Internet Explorer is worst in 2 out of 3 examples - who would have guessed that?

Back to Safari, while it's execution speeds are impressive, it's ability to pass the Acid 2 test is even more impressive. The Acid 2 test is a HTML page that shows a smiley face. Opera 9 passes the test, while Firefox 2 does not. Here is a comparison to the Safari browser and Firefox:

Safari:

Firefox:

As you can see, Firefox comes nowhere near passing what Safari can do easily and with considerable speed.

Those are the pro's to Safari, so you're probably wondering "My goodness, Safari sounds like it kicks ass, why don't I get it?" The answer is simple: security. Safari 3.0 is a Beta release. Which means that it is currently in development and that there are many, many bugs. One of those bugs is that it had a zero day exploit found only hours after its public release. This means it will execute malicious code without the user ever knowing - a big no - no in the web browsing and security world. This one flaw is enough for most people to shy away, after all, who wants their precious computer turned into a zombie PC?

Because of the security issues, I recommend holding off on Safari until the final release, and even then, ONLY if Apple fixes the security issues.

Speed up XP by Removing Unwanted Processes!

Want to keep your computer running at tip-top performance? Have you defragged, reformatted, scanned for viruses, spyware, and adware, and yet you still want better performance out of that less-than-stellar computer of yours? I’ll show you a few tricks to squeeze a few extra horse power out of that XP machine of yours.

Before I begin telling you the nitty-gritty details of what you need to do, why you’re doing it, and what it will mean performance wise, I need to warn you about a few things that could possibly go wrong. You have to know what you are doing when you mess around with some of these settings, otherwise you may need to re-install Windows XP. That is the absolute worst case scenario; less destructive possibilities include various programs not working, XP crashing, or instead of improving performance, you may degrade performance. So when I warn you to be careful and make educated decisions, I mean it.

Ok, let’s start off with some relatively easy methods. Go to the Start button and click Run. Type in Services.msc. A window like the one below should show up:



In this list are all of the programs that either start up automatically at startup, or have the potential to initialize at start up. There are different columns with the name, description, status, and startup type. These are the important columns. Now is the part where you need to use some intelligent personal discretion. Look through this list and decide what you can do without. If you find some suspicious processes that do not look in any way familiar, check the path on the last column on the right in the picture and see where its coming from. If it still looks suspicious, look it up on Google and see if it is a viral process. If it is, run a virus scan and/or remove it from this list. Anyway, back to deciding what you can do without. Once you find something you don’t like (Example: you find a QuickTime or Real Player process, who needs those at startup?) right click it and delete. If you have never done this before, there might be quite a few things in there that you can get rid of safely. But like I warned you earlier, there are some things in there that you shouldn’t remove, things like Win32. Anyway, if you sort out the gold from the garbage you should have a faster startup and better XP performance!

Alternate way of removing processes:

Go to My Computer, your hard drive that Windows XP is installed on, click the folder called WINDOWS, and look for this icon:



Double click it. This is Windows XP’s built in Registry editor. It shows all of the processes your computer is capable of. Now here is where it gets tricky, follow these navigation instructions:

HKEY_CURRENT_USER
Software
Microsoft
Windows
CurrentVersion
Run

Now something like this should be shown:



Use the same discretion you did with the msconfig tip, these are some processes that start at startup/run while your computer is in use. They slow your precious CPU down, so the bad processes need to be dealt with. I have found a few viruses by looking into these processes, so keep that in mind when looking through the list and finding names you don’t recognize.
Another place to check for useless processes is:

HKEY_CURRENT_USER
Software
Microsoft
Windows
CurrentVersion
Runonce

And one more place is:

HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE
SOFTWARE
Microsoft
Windows
CurrentVersion
Run.

If you have further issues with XP (Honestly, who doesn’t have issues with any form of Windows.) I suggest visiting tweakxp.com

And if you are an unfortunate soul running Windows Vista, visit tweakvista.com.