This post was published in January 2009 and may contain facts or opinion that are no longer current.
Format the USB drive as Mac OS X Extended (Journaled) with “Master Boot Record” selected from the options drop-down.
Choose to restore the OSX86 ISO that you’ve downloaded via BitTorrent to the newly formatted USB drive.
Use the OSX86Tools application to set up the USB drive: click Install EFI/Run FDISK, and then choose “Run Script”. Enter your password in the terminal window that appears, then choose 4 to run Chameleon EFI. You’ll have to select which disk and partition you want it installed on. This is the part I had a little issue with - I had to use the exact version that Wired provides (don’t update if it prompts you to).
Eject the drive from your Mac, connect it to the NC10. Boot from the drive, and go through the fairly mundane install process (hint: it’s just like every other install of OS X, pretty much). Reboot, and you have a copy of Leopard running on non-Apple hardware.
This is another place where I had a problem. Because I’ve got Ubuntu installed on the same machine, I’m using Grub to choose which partition to boot to. In Ubuntu, you can cd /boot/grub/ and edit the file called menu.lst. Copy the layout of one of the existing ones (down the bottom), replacing the location of that partition with the location of your OS X partition.
Hackintosh from Alex Muller on Vimeo.
Nice job mate. How are you liking OS X? I bought a MacBook Pro back in November, my first Mac, and I love it. I’m an old *nix geek so I love having all my fave utilities at the command line.
I’ve been on a MacBook for a couple of years now, but OS X is just so much nicer than Windows. I couldn’t handle XP on the NC10 (more than anything, it was actually pretty dull). As for Ubuntu - while nice, I’m not up to learning another OS inside out right now.
Lack of USB support sounds like a real pain. I would otherwise seriously consider running a hacked up mac as my main machine. My experience with Windows 7 makes me realize why I love macs.
Does the Wi-Fi work? Are there any problems with it/ would there be if I were to just fully install OS X?
I’m afraid I could never get Wi-Fi working properly, so I had to uninstall it - you could give it a go with an up-to-date copy of OSX86 though, there might have been some progress since I first wrote this.
Jasper: I’d love to have an update to this at some point, I’ll see what I can do.
Tom: I used an external hard drive, but I suppose an 8GB memory stick would be fine too!