Where have I been wasting my time lately (apart from loooong hours at work that is).
Was interested to see what Snow Leopard was like. And had an effectively spare server/desktop that had three disks, Vista on the main, Fedora on the second and the third spare; so though I would see what Snow Leopard was like.
The only pre-requisite required to install OSX onto a normal intel server is to get your hands on a server, or boot CD that supports an EFI boot loader (I believe EFI is extended firmware interface) for the initial install. I’m supprised Apple isn’t being hit by one of those anti-trust things everyone has been throwing about lately, OSX x86 will actually run happily on any x86, Apple just choose to ‘select’ specific vendors/hardware combinations and lock generic players out. And the ‘upgrade’ DVD is a full install as reported by many review sites, it’s only called upgrade to trick users into buying the more expensive full version.
But enough of that. The two most common boot CD loaders are iBoot (I didn’t try that so can’t comment on how well it works) and the Empire EFI boot loader. I believe the Empire EFI boot loader was the one the company Pystar used to build x86 OSX servers before Apple had them shutdown, the company just released the boot loader wild on the web to avoid it being lost, it’s easy to find, thats what I used.
The only issues I had in the end are that is simply won’t recognise the Linux didk at all; so I have ended up with a dual boot Snow Leopard and Vista machine with a disk containing Fedora I can’t boot (well I can boot it into maintenance mose and use grub to install the boot loader that will let me boot Vista and Linux but then I can’t boot Snow Leopard, sigh. So at the moment it’s a dual boot Snow Leopard and Vista server).
Actually Vista could not recognise the Fedora disk either. It was origionally a three disk Vists machine and when I installed Fedora poor old Vista then reported that the disk with Fedora on had a hardware problem; which was rubbish, Vista just doesn’t like Linux either, the disk was fine.
Anyway, the steps I used to trial Snow Leopard using the Empire EFI boot loader (ON A COMPLETE DISK, there are lots of tutorials on the web for using multiple partitions if you want to go that way) were
(1) Get the Empire EFI boot loader off the web, easy to find, burn it to a CD/DVD
(2) Purchase a retail version of the Snow Leopard upgrade DVD, lets keep it as legal as we can, and its only $60NZ [except at Dick Smiths where it is around $90, don’t buy it there] (it’s a dual layer DVD, any DVD reader that can play a DVD movie should be able to handle reading it).
(3) Boot from CD/DVD from the Empire EFI boot loader
(4) When prompted swap out the EFI CD/DVD and put in the retail version of the Snow Leopard upgrade disk, tap F5 as prompted, and the OSX install DVD becomes an option
(5) Select the OSX upgrade CD, hit enter, start a standard install
(6) When it gets to disk selection it probably won’t reconise any disks, from the utility menu at the top run the disk utility, select the disk you want to install on, select partition, set it up to use one partition and use the customise option to select the GUID partition type, and then overwrite your disk with that partition setup. Then exit the disk utility, the disk is now available to install OSX on
(7) just continue the install. Let it run all the way through. At the end of the install you will get a big error page thrown up saying the install failed; it’s a lie, it just couldn’t reboot at that point, so we carry on…
(8) we need to get the Snow Leopard upgrade DVD out and the Empire EFI boot loader back in, thats a bit painfull as you can’t eject the Snow Leopard DVD while it’s on the error screen. Basically give it a few minutes for the OS to sync changes made to your physical disk (remember *nix disk writes are buffered in memory for a while), then reboot/power-recycle/whatever and somewhere in there remove the Snow Leopard disk and put back in the Empire EFI boot loader disk; no hurry, it won’t boot off disk or DVD at this time, you are just trying to get OSX to release the Snow Leopard DVD so you can swap it out.
(9) Boot again, from the Empire EFI boot DVD. This time there will be a OSX disk shown in the boot menu, select that and it will boot just fine. But we are not done yet…
(10) When you are happily running your new Snow Leopard system, the EFI DVD will show as an icon at the top right of the screen, double click. From the folders displayed go into “postinstall” and run the MyHack app. USE CUSTOMISE. Select the ‘chocolate kernel’ option, you can review select the other packages as you see fit for your hardware.
(11) Commit/OK your setup, and wait until it finishes. It may seem to hang around 98% for a long time (less than 1min remaining could mean 30mins), but WAIT.
(12) Eject the Empire EFI DVD, all done now
(13) Reboot, it will boot off the hard disk without any problems now
ADDITIONAL NOTES (1)
The only other major prob I had was it did not recognise my 1Gb ethernet card and there were no kexts on any forums for my card. So I just purchased (another $60NZ) an apple USB to Ethernet dongle, thats the one where the packaging clearly says it will only work on a macbook air (Apple really do try to lock you to their ‘prefered’ hardware don’t they) but ignore that, it works fine on any x86 with Snow Leopard and I got internet connectivity by just plugging it in.
…however, in a dual boot environment with windows you probably should have purchased the retail disk as the windows drivers for the USB dongle are apparently on the disk in the parallels setup area somewhere [more antitrust or sneaky marketing ?, the apple USB to ethernet adapter where the packaging clearly says will only work on macbook air, will actually work on a windows machine quite happily if you have the retail version of snow leopard… the sneaky bit is there are no publicly available windows drivers for this dongle and Apple don’t have any for windows users… but they provide windows drivers on retail versions of the OS for those people that may want to use the OSX parallels feature to boot a windows OS. So Apple have no windows drivers available to the public, but they have perfectly working windows drivers for those that purchase OSX. Probably legal to fib like that in the US so we’ll leave this conversation]
ADDITIONAL NOTES (2)
Can’t install most software, that would be anything from source (incuding essenials like x3270). The reason is that the GCC compilers for OSX can only be installed by registering on the Apple Developer site. I’m on enough junk email lists, thank you. That probably explains why there is so little software for OSX, I won’t be porting any of my stuff to it either.
SUMMARY
It is really easy to install Snow Leopard on an ordinary x86 machine, all the Apple rubbish about requiring specific hardware is just that, rubbish.
However the issue of not being able to even get GCC without registering for a developer account sucks (ok sun did the same thing and I registered there, but I’m not going to do it for every company that wants an email address).
Will recomend any developer sticks with a Linux solution.
Oh, and the standard install didn’t put in solataire; spent ages searching the web before I found Physol, couldn’t do any work until then.
