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How to tell if i have a pirated copy of leopard?

J

jjjavah0lic

macrumors newbie
Original poster
Apr 7, 2009
5
0
Oh okay so today i friend of my mothers came in and asked me to sort there computer and interrupted my viewing of the critical manchester United match which inwardly really pissed me off something chronic but i digress

It is a Acer Aspire 3680 and seems to have a version of leopard installed. I'm not really up with the apple macs at all. Infact i think this is like the second apple mac i have had the displeasure of working with/on.

Soooo anyway with that over i'm told it was dropped from a great distance and has been used bought from a friend (mothers friends son's friend) at the beginning of this year maybe the end of last year. hearing that it had been dropped i assumed it wouldn't be able to do anything before discovering it wouldn't load into his user space/account so to get a warkspace running i decided to after a bit of searching being a mac newbie to run in single user made and activate the root user account so i could select other at the login GUI and type in creditials for for root user account which let me log in okay. The reason i choose to do this was to get in and change the account password as i heard there was a bug with handling 8 characters or more and noticed that he had a password of that length. having done that i actioned to reeboot and since then i haven't been able to get the Login GUI to appear period. I don't know what else to try at the moment. At or about this time the friend that loves Mac and leopard came online so i started chatting to her and she seems to think it may be a pirated copy SOooooo my question is how do i figure out if it is a pirated copy or not. It wouldn't surprise me if it is they are a poor family from a poor part of town. If it is a pirate copy what can i do about it to sort their problems

I'm in the right mind to rip hard drive out and copy his personal files and install ubuntu over it's illegal copy.

I tried to keep the message short.
 
i decided to check some of the other posts and read as much

If it not apple it is a hack.
 
DoFoT9 said:
no necessarily....

just because its installed on a PC doesnt mean that it hasnt been purchased from Apple. im pretty certain that doesnt break the EULA (lets no get into this but haha) - but once you purchase a copy you can do what you want.
Click to expand...

I guess so. There must be some tell tale signs if its been torrented but we really aren't the experts here. The OP should ask over at the forums of Insanelymac.com
 
flopticalcube said:
I guess so. There must be some tell tale signs if its been torrented but we really aren't the experts here. The OP should ask over at the forums of Insanelymac.com
Click to expand...

generally you can tell by going to :apple: symbol -> About Me. that sometimes has information about the business/company/group that has modified the OS. the Leopard installation disk Read Me also is modified to show who has edited it...

maybe you could check there OP>?<
 
should i be able to plug the hard drive into my quad core and test it it'll load login screen there?
 
Quads are the hardest machines to get Leopard running on, so basically as your even having to ask us these questions i'd say you have no chance.
 
They came in looking for help, not to see if you can determine if their Leopard is pirated or not; you have no permission to modify their computer other than attempt to fix it; if you have moral issues, just tell them you can't help.

kastenbrust said:
Quads are the hardest machines to get Leopard running on, so basically as your even having to ask us these questions i'd say you have no chance.
Click to expand...

Do you have anything to back that claim?
 
alphaod said:
Do you have anything to back that claim?
Click to expand...

The fact ive hackintoshed all the PC's in my house for all my family, and a few at work for 'research purposes' :p which covers everything from random nvidia chipsets, dual cores, even AMD's, but i never ever ever ever ever ever had so much trouble as trying to get it to install on my own Q6600 PC Core 2 Quad machine. I eventually had to make my own distro which was a modified Kalyway.

Even an Efix card doesn't work, the latest Kalyway and iAtkos releases dont work, none of the new Kalyway kexts work, its a problem with the Darwin Bootloader not recognizing the processor as having 4 cores, and has to be fixed in the BIOS.
 
kastenbrust said:
The fact ive hackintoshed all the PC's in my house for all my family, and a few at work for 'research purposes' :p which covers everything from random nvidia chipsets, dual cores, even AMD's, but i never ever ever ever ever ever had so much trouble as trying to get it to install on my own Q6600 PC Core 2 Quad machine. I eventually had to make my own distro which was a modified Kalyway.

Even an Efix card doesn't work, the latest Kalyway and iAtkos releases dont work, none of the new Kalyway kexts work, its a problem with the Darwin Bootloader not recognizing the processor as having 4 cores, and has to be fixed in the BIOS.
Click to expand...

dont worry, stating that you have hackintoshed will get you looked down upon here. some will even gasp at the fact you commented in this forum!

congrats on all your success, maybe you could link the OP to an article that would help, or PM them for more contact info to help them
 
michael.lauden said:
dont worry, stating that you have hackintoshed will get you looked down upon here. some will even gasp at the fact you commented in this forum!

congrats on all your success, maybe you could link the OP to an article that would help, or PM them for more contact info to help them
Click to expand...

Whats wrong? its not illegal where i live, and its not illegal in the US either in my case as i have licenses to cover every install i do due to working with Apple machines a lot and having multi licenses.
Anyone who chooses to hackintosh should buy an OS X license even if they downloaded OS X from torrent just because its the right thing to do. Theres nothing morally wrong with hackintoshing, but not paying for software is morally wrong, especially as its so good your choosing to hackintosh.
 
kastenbrust said:
Whats wrong? its not illegal where i live, and its not illegal in the US either in my case as i have licenses to cover every install i do due to working with Apple machines a lot and having multi licenses.
Anyone who chooses to hackintosh should buy an OS X license even if they downloaded OS X from torrent just because its the right thing to do. Theres nothing morally wrong with hackintoshing, but not paying for software is morally wrong, especially as its so good your choosing to hackintosh.
Click to expand...

i agree totally - people shouldnt look down on fellow mac users who want to turn their crappy PC's into awsome leopard machines!! :p
 
michael.lauden said:
dont worry, stating that you have hackintoshed will get you looked down upon here. some will even gasp at the fact you commented in this forum!

congrats on all your success, maybe you could link the OP to an article that would help, or PM them for more contact info to help them
Click to expand...

I think you need to apologize for assuming that and writing it about a member here.

I don't think ripping on Kastenbrust is very wise. He always preaches legal licenses for all software.

He is not doing anything illegal at all. As long as he buys a license, it is 100% legal! There is an actual huge hackintosh thread here on Mac Rumors, so I don't think people are going to frown upon it.

What is wrong is when people do NOT buy a copy of OS X, but instead download it from a torrent site. That is what people shouldn't ever do or brag about. That is what members frown upon.
 
DoFoT9 said:
no necessarily....

just because its installed on a PC doesnt mean that it hasnt been purchased from Apple. im pretty certain that doesnt break the EULA (lets no get into this but haha) - but once you purchase a copy you can do what you want.
Click to expand...

You can think what you want, but once you purchase the software the EULA is binding (you have of course the right to return the unopened package). After installing Leopard on a non-Apple computer, you have actually _lost_ the license. At that point, even after deleting it from the non-Apple computer you wouldn't have the legal right to install the software _anywhere_.
 
gnasher729 said:
You can think what you want, but once you purchase the software the EULA is binding (you have of course the right to return the unopened package). After installing Leopard on a non-Apple computer, you have actually _lost_ the license. At that point, even after deleting it from the non-Apple computer you wouldn't have the legal right to install the software _anywhere_.
Click to expand...

pretty sure i said lets not get into the EULA lol....

i wonder how they can tell.. interesting.

who cares though, its not as if they are going to do anything about it..
 
gnasher729 said:
You can think what you want, but once you purchase the software the EULA is binding ................................................._.
Click to expand...

this has been discussed ad nauseum here already. EULA's are not binding. the courts have ruled that numerous times. it's save to ignore them. downloading a torrented OS X however is still sketchy even if you have a legal copy of OS X to go with it.
stealing software is lame in any case.

as for the OP:

you have two choices: try to fix the PC as is or tell them you don't want to or can't fix it. messing with their machine is not fair since you don't know the exact circumstances.
 
andiwm2003 said:
*opinionated stuff which has many sides of none i am taking*

as for the OP:

you have two choices: try to fix the PC as is or tell them you don't want to or can't fix it. messing with their machine is not fair since you don't know the exact circumstances.
Click to expand...

good advice, he said he has only used OSX a couple of times, and in-fact hates the OS... so he should leave it..
 
andiwm2003 said:
this has been discussed ad nauseum here already. EULA's are not binding. the courts have ruled that numerous times. it's save to ignore them.
Click to expand...
This has been discussed again and again, but that doesn't make your opinion less wrong. EULAs are binding unless they contain terms that are deemed unacceptable by a court. For example, putting terms into a license that you can't sue for any reason would be invalid. Unless you can find something in Apple's license that a court would reject as unacceptable, that license is binding. There have been plenty of cases where EULAs have been thrown out because of the terms they contain; there are also plenty of cases where EULAs without any such illegal terms have been confirmed by courts.

andiwm2003 said:
as for the OP:

you have two choices: try to fix the PC as is or tell them you don't want to or can't fix it. messing with their machine is not fair since you don't know the exact circumstances.
Click to expand...

Messing with their machine could be legally very, very dangerous.
 
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