OSX on a PC

My kind boss bought me an iPod Touch as an end of year gift, and naturally I wanted to write software for it, but (there is always a but), you need a Mac to write software for the iPod/iPhone, which sucks. There is two solutions to this problem, one is to buy a Mac, which I don't have the cash for, or get OSX running on my PC.

Due to financial reasons the latter was the only option, so I obtained an iAtkos install CD for Leopard. Following a few YouTube videos I did a base install, only to discover that my PC is not very mac friendly.

My PC has the following hardware:

• AMD Phenom II X2 550 @ 3.1Ghz


• ASUS M2N32-SLI Deluxe Motherboard


• PCIe nVidia GeForce 8600GT


• 2GB DDR2 Ram

After a day of messing around with install options it became aparrent that things just would not work on this motherboard until I discovered an obscure post of a forum somewhere where someone just moved the video card into the 2nd PCIe slot on the board. I initially dismissed it, but in the end, out of desperation, I tried it, and it fixed it!.

For others that have the following symptoms, try moving the video card.

• Boots to a blue screen, then goes black


• Mouse is inverted (up is down, left is right)


• Mouse is VERY jerky

Once that was sorted out, I soon discovered that the on-board ethernet would not function, being a nForce chipset, and after reading numerous posts, there was only a partial working kext for it that did not support SMP, and would crash under heavy load. Again, I was going to give up, but found another obscure post referencing an updated ethernet driver, which I tried, and the system became rock solid with both cores enabled.

I do not use the onboard audio, I use a SBLive, so I installed the Kx driver for Mac OSX and it started to work instantly!

The last thing to get working was the nForce SATA, and PATA. The iAtkos came with a driver that worked, but not too great. I found an updated driver called SuperNForceATA which was compiled for Snow Leopard (10.6), and would not load on my sytem, it did however come with the source. So I downloaded xCode and compiled it for 10.5, installed it, and off it went.

I now have a FULLY functional Mac OSX install on a PC

I have decided to start a page dedicated to WORKING osx kexts in the next few weeks. Enough for now, have to go and help out the wife :)