I opened up my favorite webstats analyzer, awstats, and noticed a huge rise in my traffic comming in as a result of search engines (the most notable, Google). In past months, I’ve had only 10 or so hits, but in the last few days I’ve had almost 60 hits. To say the least, I was very suprised; that is, until I saw that 70% of those hits were the phrase “osx86 torrent.” I really should post more about this issue, as it has increased my readership 5 fold.
Anyway, this got me thinking: how popular is Apple? Apple has less than 5% of the overall computer market, and yet a story about them increases my search hits 5x. Something to ponder on…
In related news, I saw a Digg article that links to a site that is meant to compile a list of hardware that is ‘OSx86′ compatible. That is, hardware that people can easily pirate OSx86 onto. Now, I don’t have the money to be building another new computer, but I was curious, as someone on the forum mentioned that a motherboard and CPU combo (cheap MB), cost around $110. So, I went on Newegg and composed a list of components that would make a fairly nice PC to run OS X on. The final price (no monitor, keyboard, mouse, HDD, or DVD included, as I already have plenty of those laying around) came to around $250. And that’s all name-brand components (save the case, which really doesn’t matter). However, I have neither the money, time, nor the (lack-of-a)consience to pirate software in that reguard. I’ll just stick with my little 400 Mhz G3 (running a legal copy of Tiger, I might add 
).
…can make a big difference. I’d been wondered why Firefox looked so much better when running in Fedora rather than Debian/Ubuntu. It came down to something very simple: the GTK theme. It struck me tonight when I was working on Ubuntu and I opened up Firefox (exhibit 1, below). I had never really thought about GTK themes before; I mean, I knew they existed, but the only time I had ever even been exposed to changing them was when I installed Gaim on Windows. So, anyway, I started looking around for a utility to change the GTK theme to something more stomachable. I did just a moment of Googling before I found this utility. After finding it, I immediately searched my Ubuntu Apt repository to see if it was there, and to my dismay, it was not. So, I grabbed the RPM that he had, and used alien to convert it to a DEB, so I could install that on Ubuntu. The conversion and installation was painless, as was the new ‘Human’ theme (exhibit 2, below) that I chose to replace the default. I can die happy now.
Exhibit 1:
Exhibit 2:
Well, unless you’re a regular scavenger of the popular torrent sites, you may not have been aware that the DVD ISO for Mac OS X x86 (which I’ll refer to as OSX86) had been leaked finally. However, before everyone here starts clicking the links that I just posted, and starts downloading the torrent, it’s not possible (or at least, no one has posted working instructions) to install it on your average generic PC. There are a few things standing in the way at this point:
• There is a Infineon 1.1 chip on the Dev Kit mobo, and the DVD won’t even boot on your system without this (and I haven’t found a mobo on the net that has this chip).
• Even if you could install it, most of the GUI components (as well as the Rosetta component) also require the Infineon chip to be present.
• I’ve also read that Apple only included support for the graphics card shipped with the Dev Kit.
• You have to have a processor that supports the SSE2 (and some have speculated SSE3) instruction set. This would be any Pentium4, but if you wanted it to run on an AMD processor, you’d have to have an Athlon64, as the AlthonXP series and below do not support these instruction sets.
It appears that the person or group that posted the torrent (read: the idiots who broke their NDA with Apple) knew full well that people wouldn’t be able to install it on their PCs. He simply wanted people to start hacking it. Also, I’ve seen a rumor that mininova (which, from all I can gather, was the first site to get the torrent) has removed the OSX86 torrent, at the request of Apple Legal, but if you go search for ‘x86′ on mininova, you’ll see that it’s been up since July 30.
In related news, someone has claimed to get OSX86 working in a VMware session. There is at least one site saying that they have verified the claim. However, I really have a hard time believing it at this point. There have been other various reports of people getting OSX86 to boot to the console, and I don’t doubt it…but what good is it if it only gets to the console!?! The only reason people like OSX is for it’s pretty GUI. If I wanted a text-only console on an x86, I’d install Linux…oh, wait, I have.