I mentioned doing this in my LJ to some degree, but maybe I'll put it here too since this is in fact a technology website, even if just a little bit..!
Last night I got OSX running on my normal PC. This is v10.5.4, where as 10.5.6 is currently the newest apparently, so just minor differences. My setup is as follows:
- Gigabyte GA-8I865GME-775-RH motherboard (just AGP/DDR1)
- Intel i865 chipset (ICH5 southbridge)
- Realtek AC'97 audio
- Intel PRO/100 VE ethernet (not sure the exact model)
- Radeon 2400 Pro video card
- 60GB parallel IDE hard drive + parallel DVD-RW
- Pentium D 925 cpu (dual core 3ghz)
- PS2 to USB adapter for mouse/keyboard
I mention the parallel drives since I heard that normally they need to be SATA (dunno if that's true for sure), but I guess drivers and/or alterations on the install disc took care of that if so. You also have to have a USB keyboard and mouse, which I didn't have to start with, so sticking the adapter on was the only hardware modification I made, aside from using a separate drive from my normal setup to install it onto of course. I didn't want to take the chance of messing up my WinXP/Win7/Ubuntu installations initially, though I believe at this point I could reinstall OSX differently and quad boot between them all.
Anyway, OSX ran fine. Sound and ethernet worked from the start, which were the things I was worried about having trouble with. Only real issue was some Nvidia ethernet driver on the disc not being readable, which halted the install, so the next time I just skipped that since I didn't need it anyway, and everything was fine. I guess part of my luck was due to having an Intel chipset on this board, which is what the modern Macs are based around apparently. But going by the driver list on the install CD, I could have gotten away with a lot of different possibilities. There's so many things there which Apple just won't support by default, so that you'll have to buy their hardware.
The install disc was the modified JaS 10.5.4 one, not a stock OSX install disc, just so you know. There's different custom releases, but that's the first one I found which I recognized from tutorials, so that's the one I got. I didn't even bother trying to use the stock install disc we have laying around somewhere.
I'm gonna install WoW sometime to see how it runs out of curiosity. Other than that, I can't think of a lot that I want to do with it, aside from mess with the unix underbelly a little bit. You can install X11, which is the Unix/Linux graphical interface, and run various graphical Linux applications natively inside OSX, which could be interesting to play with.
Anyway, that's about all there is to it. As long as you have relatively compatible hardware and an install disc, it should work just fine. Based on what I read, stats seem to show that possibly more people are running OSX on generic hardware than there are people running Linux these days. Considering that, and the fact that Psystar's lawsuit with Apple could result in Apple having to let other companies sell OSX installed on non-Apple hardware, who knows what the future of Apple hardware could be..!
Oh, and have a useless picture:
