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Installing Mac OSX on an IBM Thinkpad T42

I'm sure many of you have seen the recent posts at places like Slashdot with people describing how they got Mac OSX to work on an Intel based x86 machine. I was just as skeptical. I've been looking at buying a Mac Mini to play around with since they were introduced, but i could never really justify it to myself. I really do like OSX, but I can't find anything I would want to do on it that I can't do with XP, other than sharpen my UNIX skills of course. So anyway, Idecided I would take the plunge and try to separate fact from fiction. Until I can do it myself, I have a hard time believing some of these stories.

I followed the trail of links from Slashdot and found the instructions listed below. I followed them pretty much word for word, so I will just add my comments in BOLD. I deleted a lot of his extraneous comments, so for the full monty, go here.

"First of all, you can’t install OS X on a new partition, it needs it’s own drive. Since I only have one harddrive, it means I’m wiping windows and all my files in the process. You can easily follow the same steps but instead install it on a second harddrive in your PC. Here is how I have succesfully install OS X x86 NATIVELY on my laptop!
I luckily had a spare 20G laptop drive sitting around, so I was able to test this without wiping out my Windows XP install

1. Download “VMWare files for patched Mac OS X Tiger Intel” from your favorite torrent site.

2. Copy tiger-x86-flat.img from the archive to an external USB drive (it’s 6gb)

3. Download Ubuntu Live CD (link) … be sure you get the “Live CD”!! This step only takes about 30 minutes if you have a decent cable connection, and Ubuntu is a very EASY distro.

4. Burn the ubuntu iso, stick it in your pc, and boot it! (make sure you have your bios set to boot to CD)

5. Once ubuntu boots and the gui finally comes up, hook up the USB drive you copied the 6gb image to. A window should pop up showing the contents of the drive. Take note of where its mounted. It should be /Devices/Yourdrivesvolumename
Actually, I found that it's under /mount, so beware.

6. Open a terminal window and cd to that directory. Do an “ls” to make sure you are in the right place (you should see the 6gb img file.)

7. In the terminal window type:
dd bs=1048576 if=./tiger-x86-flat.img of=/dev/hda
Replace hda with the correct drive! If you only have one drive, its probably hda. Thats what mine was. You are about to erase this entire drive so make sure youve got it right and make sure you want to do this! Hit enter. It takes a while… took my ThinkPad about 10minutes.

8. When it’s done, remove the ubuntu disc and shut down the pc. Disconnect your usb drive. Thats it! When you power it back on, OS X should boot!
Well, at this point, I thought I would be home free. NOT! When I booted, I got a pretty nasty error screen, telling me to reboot. Time to use the "-x" command, like he says below.

For whatever reason, mine hangs when its loading. If this happens to you, boot with the -x option (hit a button at the darwin screen when you boot your pc. enter “-x” and hit enter). Should work without any problems, and I dont see any restrictions being in safe mode.

You’ll notice there is a login screen, and you dont know the password! This image was created by “deadmoo” and we can easily change his password. Reboot the machine again. Again, hit a button at the darwin screen. This time type “-v” and hit enter.
When I did this, it entered the verbose mode, however, the machine would hang at the VID: VRAM line...basically checking some memory. After much Googling, I found that one should enter "-s" at the Darwin screen to get into Single User Mode. Now proceed.

At the command prompt screen type:
sh /bin/sh
passwd curtis
(change the password to what you like)
passwd deadmoo
(change the passwrod to what you like)

Done! Now reboot once more, and again use the “-x” option. Everything should boot, and at the login screen enter your new password.
WELCOME TO THE OS X x86 CLUB! Look ma, no vmware!
For windows users, there is a port of dd for windows you can use here."

So what's the verdict? Yes, it works as advertised! I was able to boot into OSX and run most of the apps (excluding iTunes). I believe this has to do with the fact that my Pentium M processor is only SSE2 (not SSE3) enabled, so therefore Rosetta doesn't function properly.

Overall, the OS definitely does NOT run as fast as a native Mac, but that wasn't the point of the exercise. The coolness factor is there, but quite honestly, I'm just gonna pop my old XP drive in again. Hope this helps any of you that pop by this page.