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I witnessed OS X on Sony labtop

B

BigPrince

macrumors 68020
Original poster
Dec 27, 2006
2,053
111
Now from reading those forums I have heard you get OS X to run on PC's. The general impression I got was that it was not fully functional and huge pain in the ass.

I am sitting next to this girl at a meeting I attended and shes in OS X on a Sony and I was like damn how did you do that. She explained her boyfriends friend is a computer engineering major and did it for her. She knew it was illegal.

What got me was though, according to her, its flawless, which was not the general impression I got from people who talked about it being done.


Just wanted to share my story that I witnessed this cause I was so shocked.


I see her every once in a while, if you have any questions for her let me know.
 
I did not ask her. I will ask that when I see her.

A. She does

B. She does not know how

C. Her friend maintains the computer


are my guesses
 
Are you sure it was actually OS X and not just a windows skin that makes it look like OS X? It is possible she would not know the difference.

Also, not to be critical - just curious - did you mean laptop instead of labtop? The helpdesk where I work had a couple students who kept using the term labtop instead of laptop until we explained the origin of the word...sits on the top of your lap.
 
I could see this working. I've done a lot of reading through the OSX86project and there are a large number of compatible PC's. Though some work is still required to get everything working. It is likely that Sony did not work completely right away. The guy who did the install probably still had to hunt down drivers for the audio, Ethernet and wireless depending on the component manufacturers Sony used for her laptop.

You should ask her if all hardware ports work. The two biggest problem areas are:
1. Audio - though audio out often works, audio input and multichannel audio do not.
2. Ethernet - often the Ethernet chipset has no viable driver, though there are ones for most wireless chips

Other problems could be bluetooth, built in mic, built in webcam assuming the laptop has any of these.
 
Roric said:
Also, not to be critical - just curious - did you mean laptop instead of labtop? The helpdesk where I work had a couple students who kept using the term labtop instead of laptop until we explained the origin of the word...sits on the top of your lap.
Click to expand...

My computer sits on top of my labrador....
that would make it a labtop, right? :)

An old crazy roomie of mine has always said that it is possible to get OSX onto a PC. Then again, we always refered to him as "crazy".
 
this is old news. my friend is running dual boot vista - tiger on his ibm t61. and of course automatic update is not possible. although he rarely uses it. when i asked why he just said it's because it's do-able (similar to when people tried to run linux or windows 98 on a xbox).

i could ask him to take a picture of it if you want.
 
I think Apple should just allow OS X to be installed on PCs, but not make it easy. Maybe something like you'd have to provide your own drivers or something. Or maybe a stripped down trial version for potential switchers.
 
ghall said:
I think Apple should just allow OS X to be installed on PCs, but not make it easy. Maybe something like you'd have to provide your own drivers or something. Or maybe a stripped down trial version for potential switchers.
Click to expand...

Then companies would just start selling pre packaged computers with OSX and all the drivers. Most of them would probably be made with cheap/shoddy hardware and not be as stable as a real mac (just like how windows is unstable on crap hardware) and people would believe OSX is just as buggy as windows.

One thing they could do is allow the installation but part of the license agreement would be that OSX would always have to display a warning. Such as

"This version of OSX is not running on a verified Apple system. Stability is not guaranteed and no support will be offered by Apple."

Make it illegal (by the EULA) to remove this warning and even if a vendor does remove it apple could just use it's update system to put this warning back up.
 
dejo said:
I think this story is untrue since everyone knows computer engineering majors don't have girlfriends! :D
Click to expand...

He never said she was goodlooking!

We all know computer engineering majors don't have goodlooking girlfriends. Having dog ugly girl friends is normal and believable though :)
 
Its not terribly difficult. Since Apple switched to Intel x86 based processors OSX has been able to run on standard PC hardware. I have previously installed it on my PC to test it out and see if I was ready to make the switch (my MacBook gets here tomorrow). There are quite a few guides available on getting it to run. You will need a specific copy of OSX that was originally intended for devolpers only.
 
TBi said:
.............One thing they could do is allow the installation but part of the license agreement would be that OSX would always have to display a warning. Such as

"This version of OSX is not running on a verified Apple system. Stability is not guaranteed and no support will be offered by Apple."

Make it illegal (by the EULA) to remove this warning and even if a vendor does remove it apple could just use it's update system to put this warning back up.
Click to expand...

I like this idea very much. :)
 
Last edited:
dejo said:
I think this story is untrue since everyone knows computer engineering majors don't have girlfriends! :D
Click to expand...
It's kind of funny... Of all the engineering majors I know, they're all either single or have really freakin hot girlfriends (myself included). I don't know how that works out, but I'm sure not complaining right now!
 
It's definitely possible

A IT friend of mine checked out the project and bought all the right hardware and had the system up and running in no time, according to him.

Now he's a geek mind you, but everything ran on it. He had the beta of PSCS3 and it ran just as good as it does on my mac (in some ways better). Rosetta ran faster than it does on my Core2Duo Imac (tried out Indesign).

He had a AMD DUAL 64 something. But before seeing the box below his desk, I thought he had a mac.

I have to admit - it was sweet - and with an awesome case, he still spent less than $500 on it.
 
It's been possible for over a year now - Since 10.4.1. Friend of mine's done it - generic Dell parts as well. Pretty sure it was fully working as well - i browsed the internet + listened to a few song son it.

Though iirc, updates for iTunes / Quicktime / 10.4.x updates dont work properly until patched - Unless your on an Intel SSE3 machine - because of the protection Apple builds into them, and updating can bork the machine fairly badly
 
The first time I messed around in OS/X it was on a Hackintosh. That machine is still running just fine, as is another I played on before deciding I like OS/X enough to shell out the bucks for a Macbook.

If not for those Hackintoshes I would not be a Macbook owner right now.
 
Before I got my MBP i had a hackintosh gateway laptop. That thing was sick. I finally abused it so much it fell apart. Everything worked great on it, updates (except for system), apps, everyhting, course I got lucky having an sse3 processor, gma950, and the same chipset as airport cards.
 
It's actually not that hard to do once you get the hacked version of OS X to install. I did it with an asus and it worked almost perfectly off of that one cd. The video card even showed up with qe and ci. The only things that didn't work was the sound card and the wireless card. And of course the power management when you would close the lid. Since the change from ppc to intel the only major difference between macs and other laptops is that macs use an efi instead of a bios.
 
I had one too. Almost everythign worked after installing the hacked OSX except QE, sound, and ethernet but I was able to get those working by browsing through the boards at OSX86Project. It ran decently but not being able to do software updates was slightly annoying.

Now that I have a Macbook though, I don't have to worry about any of that :)
 
I'd just run Ubuntu with Beryl, if I was to purchase a PC laptop. It's not worth the hassle of trying to get all the quirks out of OS X on a regular laptop.
 
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