as promised. tried and tested. tweaked by yours truly.
now i do not condone this type of activity nor do i condone downloading from torrents and hacking software and hardware. just had to put that up to be on the safe side. screenshots and reviews coming soon.
for those who didn’t know, you could’ve just built a hackintosh. that word stirs up a lot of controversy for you mac people, i know. it pisses off certain people when mentioned that i myself built a hackintosh using the ever-famous OSx86, a developer’s version of OSX version 8 i believe released for developers, by developers.
all osx86 really requires is an intel machine. then, as long as you don’t install the software for the mac hardware, you should be fine by installing your own drivers. there were some limitations with osx86 however. you can’t update or patch your OS. doing so will completely destroy your install thanks to apple’s security measures, so you were pretty much stuck with osx86, which is good-enough for most anyway. so what about those who wish to install leopard on their own systems who didn’t have the cash to dish out for a macbook or powermac?
first off, you’re going to need to download this patch. it will create an x86 version of leopard. this is the only way to get leopard on your machine. period.
then you will need a DMG of leopard. you can do this by creating an image using the disk utility from any mac and just for safe measure, the naming convention should be “osx-leopard105.dmg”. this is how it’s named on all leopard install disks for some reason. better to be safe than sorry.
you can also get a working DMG torrent. make sure you get the SSE3/SSE2 intel version.
if you choose the first option, this is what you’ll have to do to create your DMG file:
- unzip the files and drag them onto your desktop. it should be two files and three folders.
- open the 9a581-patch.sh shell file using notepad or whatever. at the top of the file, replace the “XXX” with the username on whatever mac you are currently on.
- open up the 9a581PostPatch.sh file. edit the fourth and fifth lines to look like this:
PATCH="/Volumes/LeopardPatch/leopatch/" # path to the patched extensions
LEO="/Volumes/Leopard" # path to leopard installation
- save and close both files.
- now open up terminal and type “sudo -s” and enter your admin password. then type “cd desktop” and hit enter. this is where you patch the dvd.
- now type “./9a581-patch.sh” and hit enter.
- this part will take some time, depending on the mac you’re on. while this patches up, download the patched sse2 kernel from here. i’d teach you how to patch the kernel myself, but i couldn’t figure it out.
now once you are ready and setup, open up terminal once more and type the following code:
sudo hdiutil attach -readwrite $path_to_patch_dvd -owners on
replace the path to patch dvd to the location of the actual ISO on your desktop. this is where the ISO will mount in read/write mode. then drag the SSE2 mach_kernel you downloaded before to the ISO and replace the exisiting file. then just eject the mounted volume and burn it to a dvd.
once created, get the machine you want to install leopard on and put the dvd in and set the boot order in your bios to read from the dvd drive first. find your way to the boot prompt and enter “-v -x” and press enter.
after about 20 minutes, you should see the mac graphical installer.
hopefully you should have an option to format the harddrive first. i HIGHLY recommend doing this when possible.
just name your volume leopard and choose Mac OS Extended journaled as your format. also select the master boot record as your partition scheme. if you plan to install windows or vista, make sure to leave some room for a seperate partition. i’ve had problems splitting the partitions later on after the install. i guess it’s the way leopard installs on a harddrive. it would’ve helped to defrag, but it’s best to take care of this issue now rather than later.
now the final step is to simply install leopard. it’s all a matter of just following the on-screen instructions and choosing your new partition as the destination. one last thing is to click customize before your installation and de-select additional fonts, language translations and X11. none of these were installed on the patched kernel so that there would be enough room on the dvd.
now if you did everything right, leopard should now be installed. again, if you are not geeky enough or confident, just get a hold of the torrent. the download should take no more than a week. just make sure to get the sse3/sse2 intel version.
for those of you who are worried about messing up your machines, don’t. any problems arise? just format your harddrive and try again. so far, my install has not messed up any of my hardware. video card runs great, ram doesn’t overheat, nothing fried on my motherboard. leopard will run pretty slow if you don’t have enough ram, however. it’s like the vista for mac’s, only better.
vista is gay, btw.
