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back to article Leopard on a PC?

Can I purchase any Intel box and install Apple's Mac OS X Leopard operating system on it?

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  1. Tony Smith, Editor, Reg Hardware (Written by Reg staff)

    Why would you?

    Frankly, you'd be better off buying a Mac. You get a decent machine that will run Leopard better than a version of the OS shoe-horned onto a PC. And since Macs are Intel-based and come with dual-boot software - Boot Camp - you can install and run Windows on it to.

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  2. Proton Wrangler
    Jobs Horns

    Not without genius engineering skills

    Steve Jobs is, in fact the Devil.

    Macs use a completely different pre-boot system called EFI, rather than the traditional BIOS which loads a known boot block address from disk and starts executing it. So there'd be a big software effort to write an EFI environment for your chipset.

    Then, I believe Apple Intel Macs also have a "Trusted Platform Module" which gives some kind of secure way to verify the the identity of the machine and who manufactured it.

    I'e seen photos on the web of someone's machine supposedly booting MacOS in a virtualized EFI environment, but it was supposed to take over an hour to boot.

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  3. Moo

    No, you can

    With a little googling yo can learn all the necessary preparations, a modified Leopard install DVD, an Intel or even AMD PC is enough.

    It doesn't boot ages, just regular 12 seconds (faster than some G5s).

    Trusted schmusted they have all been taken care of about like two years before now.

    Your biggest pain will be your graphics card though. Your onboard intel GMA will suit you best, but not seperate ones.

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  4. gabor
    Jobs Horns

    @Tony Smith

    Why? Well, here is a good reason: to run it on my 900g sony vaio x505.

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  5. Tom Paris
    Happy

    Treat it as a trial version..

    Like a hell of a lot of folk out there I installed JAS 10.4.8 on my PC, the biggest problem for most folk is the graphic card but I easily found drivers for my Nvidia 7600 at insanelymac, I played around with OSX for about six months and liked it so much I went and bought a real Mac, as I read on the insanelymac forums – think of the hacked installs as trial versions, you might wanna take note of that Steve Jobs or even release a official trial version for all those Dells out there, like a lot of addicts we just need a free shot at it before we get hooked six months down the line..

    At work I use a Windows machine for all my business applications but at home I use a Mac as it's so focused for a home user, iTunes, iPhoto, iDvd and IMovie are just so easy and convenient to use, my wife just loves iPhoto and the “events” ordering layout and skimming over Events is so intuitive..

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  6. andy rock

    RE: Why would you?

    two words: expensive hardware?

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  7. Kenny Millar

    Any Rock you are wrong

    Take a look at the spec of the hardware and compare it to, say a DELL with the SAME SPEC (including graphics card don't forget!)

    I think you'll find that Apple hardware is competitively priced, if not cheaper.

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  8. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    Good idea for a trial version for PCs

    As a long time PC/Windows user who is pretty thoroughly annoyed with Vista I think a trial version - perhaps like Ubuntu's LiveCD - would be really useful. With the new version of Logic coming out, a good time to get those of us who use PCs for music interested in switching, especially as much of our USB outboard and PCI kit will work.

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  9. Dave Aronson
    Thumb Up

    yes, expensive

    Kenny, not everybody wants top of the line HW. Putting OSX on a PC would allow people to put it on a *cheap* PC. If they decide later that they want a faster CPU, better graphics, whatever, then they can go buy a Mac... or a fancier PC. Whatever. It's their choice, which seems to be the point of the exercise.

    -Dave

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  10. Jason

    Hardware Offset

    OK, as we know Apple makes it's money from hardware. So charge the same as Vista Ultimate for OS X for PC, may not totally offset the hardware profit, but with the number of copies they sell it'd hit the high volume low cost strategy, and their profits would still increase. Hell they could even leave it the same price and just provide no support whatsoever; you run it on a pc, you get it as is.

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  11. Ross Fleming

    RE: Why would you?

    To quote George Mallory "Because it's there!" :o)

    Some people see a challenge and just have to do it. Obviously I'm not comparing a Leopard installation to climbing Everest, but techie aficionados like to rise to these sorts of challenges.

    I put 10.4.8 on for a bit of a play - it worked perfectly. Granted, all it did was make me want to buy a Mac... If I could get it to work on a Windows version of VMWare or similar I'd be as happy as a pig in the proverbial

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  12. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    Yes you can, but

    Yes you can.

    No it's not simple at all (you need tiger installed on that pc and there are two pages of instructions to follow).

    No it doesn't work on any pc (sse3 required, rest of hardware limited to available drivers).

    No I don't think Steve lets you do it.

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