As a side note; as with my other OSX86 posts this isn’t intended to be a comprehensive walk-through. Instead I want to explain some of the things I learned and let you know more about the process. This way you’ll be in a better position to make the right choices yourself as you learn what’s actually happening.

This post is written from the point of view of using Kalyway, but if you’ve chosen iATKOS then don’t worry. The differences are minor and easy to figure out.

Warning!

Unless you’re very lucky it will take several install attempts to get a working system. I strongly recommend you try one package at a time until you find what works. E.g find the working CPU packages before you start selecting Video/network packages. Also be sure to keep track of which packages you have tried.

Beginning Setup

Place your patched Leopard DVD in the tray of your DVD drive, make sure “Boot from CD” is enabled in your BIOS, and restart your machine. When the machine restarts you should hear the DVD start to spin and see some text from Darwin, the OS X boot loader. After this you’ll be at a command prompt ready to start the setup.

(Note: All commands should be entered without “quotes”).

If you’re using Kalyway at this point you can type “vanilla” to test whether your hardware will run with an unmodified kernel. Mine doesn’t so I can’t tell you what a successful test looks like, but if your machine reboots itself the test failed

At the command prompt you can press enter to continue normally, or “-v” to switch to verbose startup where each step of the process is displayed on screen. Verbose is especially useful for diagnosing “Kernel Panic” problems, a situation where the kernel encounters an error during startup. We’ll talk more about this later.

Disk Preparation

After the initial OSX startup screens the first task is prepare the partition or disk where you’ll be installing OSX. This is done by using Disk Utility which is in the “Utilities” menu bar. If you are setting up a dual boot machine I’ll assume you’ve already created a separate partition as described in the preparations post and you can skip the next paragraph.

If you’re installing OSX on an empty disk then you must first create a partition table for the disk. The partition table  is what defines the layout of your disk and there are two choices,  “GUID” (Globally Unique Identifier) or MBR (Master Boot Record) table. You can think of a GUID table as being Mac-only so if you plan to dual-boot either now or later then you must choose an MBR table. To create a new partition table select the “Partition” tab and choose a new scheme (1/2/3/etc partitions). Make sure the format is “Mac OS Extended (Journaled) and apply the changes. Note: This will erase all data on your disk. If you are setting up a dual boot follow the next paragraph instead.

If you’re installing onto an existing partition then you will need to format the target position to the Mac’s HFS+ (Mac OS Extended, Journaled) filesystem. If you’re reinstalling OSX make sure you still do this to prevent old files causing conflicts. To format a partition first select it the left hand list. The names you see here are likely to be entirely different from those you see in Windows/GParted etc so verify the information at the bottom of Disk Utility is as you’d expect. To perform the actual format click the “Erase” tab, choose a Volume Format of “Mac OS Extended (Journaled) and select “Erase”.

After you’ve got a freshly formatted Mac OS Extended partition, you can exit Disk Utility and return to the installation program.

Package Choices

Proceed through setup and look for the “Customize” button since this is how you select the packages needed to get OSX running on your PC. The exact packages you see will depend upon whether you’re running Kalyway or iATKOS, but they share a lot in common.

Vanilla kernel or not: You first package choice depends on whether you are able to run the Vanilla/Stock kernel or not. Only Core Duo chips have a chance of using the vanilla kernel. As mentioned above you can test this with the Kalyway DVD before starting setup, but with iATKOS you will have to try it and see.

If you choose the vanilla Kernel make sure you also choose the vanilla ACPI. Similarly, if you CANNOT run the vanilla Kernel, make sure BOTH the Kernel and ACPI packages are unchecked.

CPU Patches: There are two other packages that may be required to get a working machine; SSE2 and CPUPowerManagement. These are for CPUs which do not support SSE3 instructions, and for motherboards where the power management interface is sufficiently different that it causes problems.

In my experience the CPUPowerManagement package is often the cause of trouble for some machines. Don’t worry, if you need to disable it by installing should be able to fix power management later.

Driver Packages: Although there’s a good selection of drivers for ATI/NVidia cards, the selection of network and sound drivers are very sparse and you’ll likely have to install additional kext files after setup. Try and pick the correct package for your ATI / NVidia card based upon whether it’s desktop/laptop, and the amount of memory. My Geforce 8800 works perfectly with NVInject. Multi-monitor and hardware acceleration function fine in OSX (I was surprised, but delighted).

Boot Packages: To boot the system you will need a package that handles whether your drive is uses an MBR or GUID partition scheme. Some OSX86 installations will set this automatically for you, with others you must choose. If you are able to choose you must pick the package that corresponds to your choice in Disk Preparation. For most people, this will be MBR.

Installation and on!

At this point you should have selected all of the appropriate packages so continue through until setup begins. After setup completes your machine will reboot and you will end up with one of several results.

The next post in this little series will cover these problems in more detail and show how to achieve the result you want but I’ll briefly explain what you may see after install and what it means.

1) Your Windows/Linux login screen

You have a boot partition on your disk with another OS and this is being used instead of OSX while booting. As far as I know this can happen with iATKOS since it leaves your existing boot choice intact. To fix this you need to either configure dual-booting on your existing OS, or flag your OSX partition as the boot partition using something like GParted. When you have done this you may still encounter #3 or #4

2) The Leopard Startup video

(or if you left your machine for sometime, a screen which asks to help identify your keyboard)

This is great! It means your computer can boot and run OSX!

There’s a catch however – If you’ve just completed installation then the chances are your machine booted from DVD and the OSX installer found and booted your OSX disk partition. When you eject the disc you may still encounter #3 or #4.

3) A black screen with a blinking cursor or error message at the top left corner

This can happen when your OSX partition cannot be booted from. In my experience this can occur with Kalyway, or when trying to setup a dual-boot machine. To fix this you usually need to repair/set information on whichever partition you wish to boot from (e.g. Vista/OSX).

GParted will allow you to make this choice by setting the flags on a partition. If you find you can no longer boot from your original partition then you may need to repair the information it contains. How to do this depends on your OS, for Vista pop in your setup DVD and choose “Repair” during setup.

4) A machine which boots and either before or during the Apple startup reboots, then does this continually in a loop

This signifies a hardware incompatibility during the boot process. If your machine reboots before the Apple logo then it’s likely to be a kernel error, e.g. your machine cannot run the vanilla kernel. If it reboots during the Apple logo then it’s a Kernel Panic. Kernel Panics are when the kernel encountering a fatal error during startup.

If you enter -v at the boot prompt then each stage of the boot process will be displayed and if a kernel panic occurs the problem kext (Kernel Extension) will be displayed. This should help you identify the package involved (e.g. PowerManagement).

–

Good luck, and don’t be disheartened if things don’t work the first time. It took me three or four attempts and a lot of Googling before I was rewarded by the Leopard startup video – and it then took several more hours of googling before I had things booting from disk instead of DVD

(I’m going to assume that you’ve decided to use Kalyway but if you’re using iATKOS don’t fret, these still apply and I’ll cover any differences).

Your OSX86 emergency kit.

It’s best to assume that something is going to go wrong, and when it does these items will help you recover from it. These are vital if you’re trying to install OSX on a separate partition for a dual boot system.

• A backup of anything you care about on your machine. Accidents can happen..
• A boot disc that allows you to change the boot partition on your harddrive (I recommend the GParted Live CD)
• A way to repair the boot record of your existing OS. (E.g. the Vista install DVD).

Your OSX86 wishlist Kit

While not strictly necessary, these items can make the install process a whole lot easier and less time consuming. The first will certainly make things a lot easier if you encounter problems, particularly if you can’t boot back into your other OS or get your network adapter working.

• Access to the Internet by some other mean than the computer your installing.
• A spare external/internal drive or partition drive with around 10GB or so free space. When you have the basic install working you can then clone it before adding drivers/10.5.2 etc incase anything goes wrong.
• A good book/magazine to read.
• a kext file for your network adapter on a thumbdrive or similar (see below).

Partitions

To install OSX you need a separate partition of at least 5GB. It can be empty/full and formatted to whatever filesystem you like. During install your first step will be to use DiskUtility to format it to “HFS+ Journaled”, the Mac filesystem.

The partition must be a primary partition, you cannot use an extended partition. As a refresher; You may only have four primary partitions on a hard disk. If you wish to have more than four the others must be logical partitions located within a primary-extended partition.

If you need to create an empty partition (or resize an existing one) I highly recommend using the GParted Live CD. Burn the CD, reboot, and it will boot into a Linux shell that allows you to move/resize/create/delete partitions. Two notes;

• If you are using Vista and move your Windows partition then you may have to use your Vista install DVD to repair it afterwards.
• If you encounter a graphics related error when booting GParted, just select the “Vesa” option from the startup menu.

If you’re like me you’re probably planning to install OSX on a small partition and resize it later if you decide to stick with it. This is a mistake.

Moving/Resizing HFS+ partitions is a fucking pain you really want to avoid. Try googling on the subject and you’ll see what I mean. While you cannot easily move/resize HFS+ partitions, it’s easy to merge one with an adjacent partition to increase the size. For this reason, if you’re going to start with a small partition for OSX be sure that after this partition there is enough free space (or partitions that can be erased/shrunk) that can be merged into it. Don’t create a small partition at the end of your drive. The chances are you’ll have to reinstall at a later date.

Kernels

The kernel is the heart of an operating system, on OSX the kernel is named “Mach”. When it comes to OSX86 you have two choices; The vanilla/stock kernel that is provided by Apple, or a patched/hacked kernel.

Actually you don’t really have a choice. If you are using a Core Duo (or Core 2 Duo) CPU, and a motherboard that is either Intel manufactured or uses an Intel chipset, then there’s a chance you may be able to use the vanilla kernel. If not you will have to use a patched kernel that has support for other processors. Patched kernels are necessary to solve problems with hardware that is different from that used in regular Macs.

(As a side note a Pentium D is not a Core Duo. They’re both Intel chips, both contain multiple Cores, and both use SSE3. But you will still need a patched kernel for a Pentium D).

With the 10.5.1 Kalyway disc you can check before installing whether your system will work with the vanilla kernel. After booting from the install DVD at the prompt type “kernel” (no quotes) and your machine will attempt to boot using the vanilla kernel. If this fails (hangs, or goes into a reboot loop) you’ll have to join those of us with patched kernels.

If you are using iATKOS then unfortunately the only way to tell is by performing an install using the vanilla kernel and seeing what happens!

You should also find out beforehand whether your CPU has support for SSE3. SSE3 is a set of CPU instructions found on more recent Intel processors and is used by parts of OSX, particularly for Rosetta (the PowerPC emulator). You can use Everest 2.2 to check your processor. If it doesn’t support SSE3 you’ll need to select an SSE2 patch during install.

Hardware

Aside from ATI/Nvidia cards, both Kalyway and iATKOS come with a limited set of drivers in their install packages. Unless you’re very lucky you will almost certainly have to track down and install the correct kext (Kernel Extension, a Mac term for a driver) files afterwards.

To do this it’s important to know exactly what hardware you have in your PC. Often the name displayed is somewhat generic, for example my network Adapter was displayed as a “Broadcom 57XX”, so you must find out the exact device ID. To do this you must open up Device Manager, view the Properties for the device, select the “Details” tab and select Device Instance Id from the list.

In the above example you can see the Vendor ID is 10EC, with the Device ID being 8029. For each piece of hardware you should record these details along with the displayed name. It’s a lot easier to get this information within Windows than it is to find it later on.

The most important piece of hardware is going to be your network adapter so try and find the correct kext file ahead of time. When you get your network adapter working you can hunt the others down from within OSX. (for the device above you would try googling “osx86 kext 8029″). The insanelymac OSX86 forums are a great source of information, but be prepared to do some searching.

Although I managed to get by Broadcom 57XX adapter (device ID 1677) and Sigmatel Audio card (9210) working with very little trouble some people aren’t so lucky. The good news is that you can get a cheap USB network adapter for about $20 that’s supported without the need for additional drivers. The bad news is that for other hardware such workarounds becomes progressively harder.

Summary

Successfully installing OSX86 on your PC can range from trivial to extremely difficult, most of which will depend upon the hardware in your computer and how you approach the install process. The information above should give you some tips for preparation and clarify a few things you might not be aware of.

Next up I’ll cover the basic steps to take during installation and explain a few terms such as Guid/MBR/EFI and how they may (or may not) apply to you.

Although everything is running smoothly it took me multiple installs (10+, easily) to get to this point. Partly this was due to exploring the different patched releases, and partly because of later either breaking (or thinking I’d broken) the install while installing drivers or Apple updates.

Although I managed to find answers to the questions I had and solve all the problems I encountered, doing so was a tedious process that involved searching both Google and enthusiast message boards. While there are a lot of “how to install” topics, the answers or hints to most of the problems I encountered were buried mid-way through a 32-page followup of of comments and discussion.

In the hope of making this information a little easier to find, and to cement things in my own mind, I’m going to write a series of posts that detail most of the answers and solutions I found. I’ll also include some tips that should save time for people who want to experiment with OSX on their PC.

First up we’ll start by looking at the differences between the two main packages for installing OSX on your PC – iATKOS and Kalyway.

Overview

Without a great deal of effort a regular OSX 10.5 (Leopard) DVD cannot be installed on your PC. The differences between the hardware used in PCs and Macs require various patches to be installed before Leopard can run. Fortunately two camps of people have done a fantastic job of merging these patches with the Leopard installer, resulting in a DVD package that CAN be booted and installed on a regular PC. These packages are referred to as iATKOS and Kalyway and can be found on your favorite torrent site or newsgroup. (Note: there are other patched installs that show promise, but these two are currently the most streamlined and well known).

The Legal Bit

Because both packages come as complete Leopard installs they are some obvious legal issues involved. In addition, the Leopard software agreement limits its use to an “Apple-labeled computer”. If you plan on using Leopard you should absolutely purchase a legal copy, after which downloading a patched version is a legally gray but likely defensible area. The agreement refers to an “Apple-labeled” computer and not “Apple-manufactured’, so putting one of those Apple stickers that came with your iPod or something similar on your computer should also be enough to comply here.

Which Package?

As far as choosing between iATKOS and Kalyway I did several installs with each, and although iATKOS was less problematic I have to say overall I prefer Kalyway. (Some of the problems I experienced with Kalyway could have been due to previously installing iATKOS on the same partition. It was wiped between installs but as we’ll see later this is only part of the story).

In addition both packages install 10.5.1 of Leopard meaning additional work is needed to upgrade to 10.5.2. Using the official Apple 10.5.2 update is the fastest way to break your new install. Only Kaly has released a package to upgrade to 10.5.2 and while in my experience this worked without problem on an iATKOS install, I prefer not to complicate things.

The quality of both packages is impressive and both offer a selection of compatibility options for the hardware in your PC. Kalyway has a few less options as some things are determined automatically, but you can also pre-test whether your machine will be able to run with an un-patched kernel prior to installing. On the otherhand iATKOS is a smaller download, quicker to boot from DVD, and installs faster.

iATKOS seemed easier to get working in a dual boot setup with Vista. Kalyway seemed to be a better experience once installed. Kalyway comes with some preinstalled apps and theme changes that most people seem to dislike, but then these are easy to revert and some of the apps are things you’d install anyway.

From my experience here are the Pros and Cons of each.

iATKOS

Pros

• Smaller, fast to boot from DVD, quick to install. (It will likely take several installs to get things perfect so this is handy).
• Does not automatically set your boot partition. Good for setting up a dual-boot system.
• More options in the setup screen allow you some extra choices and knowledge about what is patched in your system for later updates.

Cons

• Has several things stripped out for size reasons. It’s difficult to know what these are or what may be affected later.
• Some customizations (Red Apple, About box) are not easy to remove
• I believe since the R2 revision of their package the team behind iATKOS has fragmented making future updates or packages less-likely.

Kalyway

Pros

• DVD allows you to test whether your system will boot with the vanilla Apple kernel without having to do a “test install”
• Automatically sets your boot partition to the new install. Good for installing OS X as the sole OS on a PC.
• Basically a vanilla Leopard install with patches.
• Kaly seems extremely active in the OSX86 community and has released patches allowing OSX86 users to upgrade to 10.5.2

Cons

• Comes with customizations you are unlikely to want (desktop, colors, dock, some apps).

My vote? Kalyway.

In my next post I’ll cover the things you should be aware of prior to attempting an installation of either package and explain a few of the things I found confusing.

Lifehacker have a great guide to installing Kalyway on your PC, complete with pictures.