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Basic knowledge
It’s always good to know how the things are working. It’s even better to know why the things are working the way they are.
You may know or not that the idea of running Apple OS on non Apple hardware it’s quite old (old in the computer time terms).It’s an OSx86 Project and it started in 2005.
If you are completely new to hackintosh I would strongly recommend visiting OSx86 Project site.
The subject is huge and the possibilities are endless. I’m not going to write a book about that here. If you feel like browsing some hackintosh dedicated forums you can check useful links. More you know, it’s always better.
Anyway I’m going to give here some small, very limited and selected explanation.
Basically they are two ways of getting the things done, so in the simple words you can have the Apple OS on your PC following these two methods:
- using the pre-hacked already patched distro
- using the original installation disc from Apple
In both cases the effect will be similar=you will have Apple OS on non Apple computer. I can not say which way is easier because it all depends on your knowledge and experience.
Let’s have a closer look at the first method.
First of all, what is distro you may ask ? Distro = software distribution. It’s already configured software. In our case it would be already configured operating system. There is quite a few distros floating around like: iAtkos, iDeneb, Kalyway or iPC. Probably you’ve heard these names somewhere. The whole idea behind the distros is that they are all based on original OS but modified and bundled with different patches to make them more compatible with most people PCs. I started my adventure with hackintosh with iPC distro (based on Leopard 10.5.6). The installation was successful and I was running Leopard OS X 10.5.6 on my Toshiba before. So why decided to use original retail disc? Let’s move to second method.
There is one limitation while using distros. You can not use Apple official OS and security updates. Majority of them will completely break your installation as they are overwriting patched distro files. In the result your computer will be not bootable. The only solution is reinstalling. Using original Apple installation disc to get OS X working on your PC allows you to update your system in the future with the official Apple updates. They are some hackintosh users reporting system crash after official updates, but it’s difficult to define if the update process was done correctly or not. This is not going to happen with our Toshiba laptop. After successful installtion of Snow Leopard 10.6 we are going to update to 10.6.6 using Apple combo update.
Few more terms you need to know:
Kernel – the basic part of your operation system, the heart of your computer, responsible for communication between different components of your hardware and your applications.
the central component of most computer operating systems; it is a bridge between applications and the actual data processing done at the hardware level *
Kext – kernel extension, as the name itself says kext adds extra features and support to kernel, extending kernel’s functionality. Great article here.
Bootloader – small program that loads the OS after turning on your computer.
EFI – Extensible Firmware Interface
a specification that defines a software interface between an operating system and platform firmware *
Empire EFI we are using to install Snow Leopard on our Toshiba emulates the EFI environment. In simple words it allows to use original retail Apple installation disc because OS see our computer as original Apple computer. That gives us an ability to use unmodified Apple kernel. That’s the reason why we can update it later on with the official updates.
* after Wikipedia
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