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Leopard Already Hacked To Run On PC Hardware
Posted by
Zonk
on Tue Oct 30, 2007 12:08 PM
from the fast-moving-kitties dept.
from the fast-moving-kitties dept.
PoliTech passed us a PC World link, noting that the newest version of OS X, Leopard, has already been adapted to run on a PC. "The OSx86 Scene forum has released details of how Windows users can migrate to Apple's new OS, without investing in new hardware -- even though installing Leopard on an PC may be counter to Apple's terms and conditions. The forum is offering full instructions on how to install the system, including screenshots of the installation process. Not all the features of Leopard function with the patch -- Wi-Fi support, for example, is reportedly inoperable. Historically, Apple's likely next move will be to track down and act against those behind the hack."
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Track Down, Really? (Score:5, Informative)
http://wiki.osx86project.org/wiki/index.php/Main_Page [osx86project.org]
Shame... (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:Shame... (Score:5, Insightful)
Even with no support included they would be swamped with users complaining that it didn't work or was unstable for any number of reasons.
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Re:Shame... (Score:5, Informative)
But they do - at least a very broad range of PC hardware runs every build of Windows they make, for regression testing.
It's not as comprehensive, but they DO bother trying.
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Re:Shame... (Score:5, Insightful)
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Re:Shame... (Score:5, Insightful)
In the end it's more about control and the dollar. They are a hardware/solution company, and NOT a Software company. The percentage they make of OS X sales is not their cup of tea, they rely on their hardware sales.
However there are some CR@PPY PCs out there, things that make even a good distro of Linux cringe. Most notably poor components that have poor support for drivers and don't work well with generic drivers, let alone have decent Windows drivers. I've received some of these and tried resurrecting them via Ubuntu or what-not and encountered a lot of problems to the point that I gave up.
Unfortuantely, these are the PCs Joe Sixpack buys at discount: desktop+monitor+inkjet for $150 after rebates. These are the ones that manage to bring down XP and Vista a couple of times per week. And these are the ones Apple wants no part in.
If they open it up, then every Joe Sixpack out there will give it a go to try on their junk-Machine-5000 to see what all of the fuss is about. When it starts dying 10x more than Windows, they start yelling loudly that OS X runs horrible and has poor support, neglecting to add the fact that Windows runs almost as poorly on those rigs.
Then Apple's image for quality products go down the drain. So, might as well do what they can to keep it off everything they can't control.
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Re:Shame... (Score:5, Insightful)
Moreover, once you take this step, there's no going back-- OEMs will introduce their own OSX machines, subject to their own sometimes dodgy support structures....Honestly, how many instabilities perceived as being "Windows" issues are actually caused by OEM hardware? I can't tell you how many machines I've had to tweak for friends that were overheating/throwing up because of bad system design. OSX would suffer the same issues were that door opened.
Apple's all about control of experience, for good or ill. I'm not going to say you'll never have a non-Apple-branded machine running OSX in a sanctioned manner, but it'd be a huge paradigm shift.
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Support is not just "Customer Support" (Score:5, Insightful)
Bug in that logic: its not only MS that supports your PC - its also the hardware manufacturers. Every component, peripheral and driver on your PC is compatible with - and has been tested with - one or more flavours of MS Windows by the manufacturer. PC component manufacturers have to do that in order to survive in a MS-dominated market. Their customer support lines may be crap but they've still invested serious dosh ensuring that they work with MS Windows. Unfortunately, the OS monoculture often means that they've eschewed platform-independent interface protocols in favor of cheaper "soft hardware" solutions that depend on windows-specific drivers. Even the mfrs that do support OS X may only bother on their higher-end products (e.g. the cheapest printers that don't have PCL or Postscript on-board are usually WIndows only).
Now, if you try and sell a "minority" OS product then - until you reach a critical mass and convince hardware mfrs to invest in supporting you - all of that behind-the-scenes support becomes your problem. Linux can scrape by because its got a lot of free labour backed up by multiple sources of commercial backing - but even that has had a hard time. You also have the problem that the vast mass of users buy a PC with Windows installed and are pretty much incapable of installing an OS.
So, say you get the hack and illegally install OS X. The motherboard, WiFi card, ethernet, bluetooth, video card, sound card, web cam etc. in your PC may or may not work with OS X and if the answer is "not" then tough titty - who ya gonna call? Pay $200 to Apple for a copy of OS X and you're going to expect Apple to support your hardware.
Basically, its going to cost Apple a lot of money to break into the "aftermarket OS" market - something that Jobs has already tried and failed at once (NeXTStep) and which, even if successful, would risk eroding Apple's hardware sales.
Bottom line - the MS Monoculture means that there is no "aftermarket OS" market (see: BeOS, NeXTStep, Netware). Even the Linux movement is having an uphill struggle giving away a desktop operating system (not so much in the internet server market, but what with the whole Internet being built on free *nix-oriented code its bloody amazing that anybody even considers Windows).
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Historically, indeed. (Score:5, Funny)
I guess this means... (Score:5, Funny)
Deja vu times infinity (Score:5, Insightful)
This is why you are not running a major corporation, son.
Quality = Branding (Score:5, Insightful)
Armchair quarterbacks (Score:5, Insightful)
I got a Flat-6 into my Beetle! (Score:5, Funny)
Reverse doesn't work, sometimes I can't turn left, and sometimes it stalls on the highway. But take that Porsche and your integrated Engine/Car financial model.
it's all psychology (Score:5, Interesting)
Think about it. Right now, to actually use OS X, you have to really hate Windows and Linux enough to pay a lot of money for a new Mac, set up the hardware, and switch. That's a big commitment, and cognitive dissonance will probably keep you from disliking it. Furthermore, you'll become a vocal advocate for OS X, both because you really hated Windows and Linux in the first place, and because you really like OS X now.
If it were easy to switch, a lot of people who are only mildly unhappy with Windows and Linux would buy OS X and stick it into their beige box. Many of them would likely conclude that the hassle of switching wasn't worth the improvement (if any) for them and just go back to what they were using before. And they'd tell others about their experience, destroying some of the aura of quality and mystery surrounding the Mac.
So, the reason you can't get OS X for your PC is likely that it is in Apple's interest to keep the cost of switching pretty high: it means they won't get a huge market share, but they skim off the best customers and the ones that are the most vocal advocates for their products.
Leopard just as easy if not easier to hack (Score:5, Informative)
I am a registered ADC developer and so I had access to all the seeds. That was a god send for dealing with the new 64-bit Objective-C runtime but I also figured that since I had the seeds, well, why not see how compatible Leopard is with non-Apple hardware.
There are legit reasons to do it. For instance, a base Darwin system can be made out of entirely open source software. Until you start decrypting binaries or (given the DMCA) tell people how to do it, you're not breaking the law. Running binaries you compile yourself is also not breaking the law nor the license.
So I did some research into it and looked at the various hacked kernels that are out there as well as some of the available source patches. After doing some research on it I realized that a good bulk of the typical kernel patch is due to lack of the "/efi" node in the device tree. Well, boot-132 (the non-EFI bootloader) is open source and after a bit of hacking I modified it to look for the ACPI and SMBIOS tables and put them in the appropriate sub-nodes of the efi node.
Assuming the right processor (e.g. Core or Core 2) that's enough to get any kernel Apple has ever made to boot without modifying the binary or recompiling from source. Unfortunately I used a P4 as a test rig so I had to do a tiny bit of hacking. It's pretty easy since the source is available so you can just fix it and recompile. Or if the source isn't available (e.g. source for Leopard isn't yet) you can still quite easily patch the machine code to ignore the processor family.
Once you've got that the only thing between you and OS X is a way to get the kernel to decrypt the binaries. Amit Singh has illustrated the magic poem which is actually not the decryption but instead a secondary protection mechanism. In some earlier Leopard seeds, that mechanism didn't appear to be used anymore. The real decryption is two AES keys, also widely available. The interface between the kernel and the decryption kernel extension is public. That is, there's a function pointer variable in the source and basically you just write a function that does the AES decryption and then set the appropriate function pointer to the address of your function from your kernel extension's initialization routine. That's all I'll give away on a public forum though. And I'm not giving anything away here, it's public knowledge, right in the source code to xnu.
I post here not to tell people how to hack it but to illustrate that it's not some difficult scheme. I have a good laugh reading the various osx86 forums about how cool these hackers must be if they can crack OS X. It's not as if Apple tried to make it hard. I mean, putting the decryption hook in "Don't Steal Mac OS X.kext" is a pretty dead giveaway. The other good meme is the thought that the methods of hacking need to be kept secret so Apple doesn't figure them out. Believe me, if I can reverse engineer the hacks then I'm quite certain Apple has several people who can. If they even want to. I see no indication that anyone at Apple is trying to prevent hacks. They write code that works on their machines. If it happens to work on other x86 machines, it does. They haven't ever done anything to stop it.
Re:Why is a patch needed? (Score:5, Informative)
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Re:Freedom (Score:5, Insightful)
I would love to be able to play with OS X on a couple non-Mac machines I own, but I would never ever request that Apple open the OS for operation on generic hardware.
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Re:Freedom (Score:5, Insightful)
1. Actively supporting third-party hardware
2. Being indifferent to third-party hardware
3. Actively interfering with attempts to run on third-party hardware
Please excuse my ignorance in these matters, because I genuinely don't know. Is Apple doing #2, or #3? It's plausible that, as people claim, #1 interferes with Apple's desire to guarantee quality. But #2 and #3 should be essentially equivalent in terms of the quality that Apple can deliver for its customers, and hobbyists would be a lot happier with #2.
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Re:Freedom (Score:5, Informative)
2. Being indifferent to third-party hardware
3. Actively interfering with attempts to run on third-party hardware
Please excuse my ignorance in these matters, because I genuinely don't know. Is Apple doing #2, or #3? It's plausible that, as people claim, #1 interferes with Apple's desire to guarantee quality. But #2 and #3 should be essentially equivalent in terms of the quality that Apple can deliver for its customers, and hobbyists would be a lot happier with #2.
The problem is twofold.
Firstly: Apple is all about a brand, an experience if you like. It's a bit hard to explain to an IT crowd who are used to being able to mix and match what they like and don't mind too much if something breaks, but the whole point of Apple as a company is "sell elegant stuff which JFW". The "don't care if it breaks, I'll just fix it" customer mentality has never been particularly important to Apple.
If someone's experience of Mac OS is "oh, that's the thing the kid down the road installed on my PC and it never really worked properly", then it's very hard for Apple to get the message across that they sell elegant stuff which JFW.
Secondly: If Mac OS can be made by hobbyists to work well with non-Apple hardware, suddenly Apple finds that every PC OEM on the planet has just become an Apple-cloning company. Something similar [wikipedia.org] almost destroyed Apple some years ago, they're not about to make the same mistake again.
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Re:Why is a patch needed? (Score:5, Informative)
This is the same reason why you need BootCamp [wikipedia.org] to emulate BIOS in order to boot Windows on an Intel Mac.
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Re:Question (Score:5, Insightful)
It's not hard to do the math: Take their current earnings per Mac and then the projected earnings per copy of OS X. How many boxes of OS X would you have to sell in order to equal a Mac sale?
If they get, average, $250 per Mac, then two copies of OS X at current prices would be required to break even. So if all Mac sales die, overnight, they would need to jump up to something like 16% US or 7% worldwide to make up the difference. To make it a profitable endeavor, therefore, they would need to sell 3 copies of OS X... or 32% US/10% worldwide.
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Re:Why do it at all?? (Score:5, Interesting)
Put it this way: my Hackintosh in it's original incarnation had a 2.6ghz Celeron, 1GB of RAM, 160GB of Hard Drive space, a DVD Burner, and a Geforce 7300LE. Now, this was kind of a toss up between a bare-bones Mac Mini at the time. The mini had it in processor speed, but the $599 machine had less ram, less hard drive space (and a slower hard drive), and a slower video card. That and it wasn't really upgradeable. The hardware for my Hackintosh costed $250. I actually did buy a copy of OS X Tiger (though just one for my G4, but I don't use the G4 99% of the time), but that was only $100. So for $350 total, I've got a machine I like more than Apple's $600 machine. Later on for another $250 I've traded up to a Core 2 Duo 1.8Ghz in that machine, a 7900GS, and 2GB of RAM - now I'm still $100 cheaper and it's FAR better than the Mac Mini, especially for playing WoW. And even then, I still had the original CPU and video card left over which went to live in my Linux machine.
Bottom line is my Hackintosh does more than Apple's hardware for less money, and if it ever gets behind I get whip it back into shape with nothing more than a few dollars and a screwdriver.
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Re:Why do it at all?? (Score:5, Insightful)
Unless I'm completely misunderstanding this procedure, the worst case scenario is you have to reformat the disk and reinstall Windows/Linux/whatever.
That hardly qualifies as "bricking" to me.
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Why Apple won't sell you OS X for your PC... (Score:5, Insightful)
Apple isn't a software company. It's not interested in selling you an OS and some tools for a few hundred dollars/pounds/euros. Apple is a hardware company, albeit one which also designs its own software to complete its system. It's interested in selling you a complete experience, one that marries custom-designed hardware with custom-designed software, for several hundred/thousand dollars/pounds/euros.
Selling its software only with its hardware has been very successful for Apple. It has many benefits (eg, it allows it to focus software R&D only on a handful of hardware configurations, which makes post-sales support orders of magnitude easier) and is the backbone of modern Apple.
Your idea of getting the OS out there to as many people as possible was tried by Apple in the mid 90s and failed miserably. Several third party clone manufacturers (APS Technologies, DayStar Digital, Motorola, Power Computing, Radius, and UMAX) quickly gobbled a share of the hardware market... but that share was gobbled from Apple itself, as Apple users bought the cheaper clones to run Mac OS 7.x rather than Apple's comparatively more expensive hardware. The rest of the market (mostly DOS and Windows-based PCs) barely noticed at all.
Rather than gaining it market share (and thus sales) the Mac clone experiment almost became Apple's suicide note. Sure, we can sit around and talk about the "what if..." scenarios and talk about what might have happened had Apple tried it out before Windows had become so entrenched but the simple reality was that by the time that Apple did try it out it was too little, too late for it to capture the market away from Microsoft's baby.
How bad was the cloning? Well, the first thing that Steve Jobs did when he rejoined Apple was sit down with the clone makers and try to renegotiate their licensing terms to raise Apple's per-computer revenues. The clone makers refused and Jobs effectively withdrew their licences (the next version of the MacOS was released as MacOS 8, and the clone makers existing licences only covered 7.x). Apple's hardware sales recovered, eventually, but Apple never once gained any benefit from the exercise in terms of revenues.
Apple today is all about presentation. To that end, it carefully controls every aspect of the user experience. Putting its showcase OS out there in the wild would destroy that simply because for every user that had a good experience installing OS X onto a non-Apple configuration there would be many more that would have nightmares dealing with installation on hardware that wasn't compatible, features that didn't want to work, inconsistent support, etc.
As a technically adept individual, I'd love to run Apple's OS on all my PCs. It would in many ways be a dream come true. However, for the reasons that I've outlined, that will never happen. Apple doesn't want it to happen so it won't happen, and I understand why perfectly.
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