MacOS X on a non-mac system?

G

gwiley

Registered
I got an email from a friend of mine and I want to make sure I give him an accurate answer. Here is his email:

"From what I understand of the current crop of Mac's (G4), the "base"
operating system is FreeBSD. Is that true? And the MacOS is designed to install on top of this? If this is true, then if one were to possess a very fast (2GHz) machine, remove completely the windows OS, install FreeBSD, would one be able to install the MacOS on top of this?"

:rolleyes: Now I know that MacOS does its POST test and then checks the system to see if your running a G3 or G4 then it launches the MacOS X Installer.
I know that the Intel chipsets are CISC and the PowerPC/Gx line is RISC. I guess I know the answer to be no way... but has anyone built code for FreeBSD to take the OS X and make it run on the other systems? I remember Rumors about "StarTrek: The Next Generation" to port the MacOS over to Intel chipsets.

If you can point me to a website to send my MainFrame programmer friend to let me know.

Thanks.
 
You are correct: Intel chips are WAY too different from the PowerPC chip to have the Mac OS GUI work on top of FreeBSD without lots of modification. Probably the only hope of getting OS X working on a non Apple motherboard would be to first get Darwin (the underlying BSD clone) working on some other PowerPC based motherboard. The only other hurdle would likely be making up for the missing Apple Firmware, but I'll bet Darwin would be capable of replacing the basic functionality. This is mostly speculation, mind you, since I don't have hands on access to one of the really expensive ATX PowerPC motherboards.
 
Mac OS does not install on top of FreeBSD. Mac OS X IS the Aqua GUI plus other Apple-proprietary components installed on top of FreeBSD. Using the analogy of Mac OS being installed on top of FreeBSD is not true. Mac OS X and Mac OS 9 may look similar, but that's superficial, and where the similarity ends. Mac OS X is completely new and written from the ground up. As far as I know, and I'm not a programmer or developer, Mac OS X isn't even remotely similar to Mac OS 9 as far as code between the two operating systems.

As far as your friend is concerned about using a 2GHz Pentium whatever processor and getting more speed compared to Apple's dual 1 GHz PowerMac G4's, he's in for a disappointment. There are other factors that affect speed of computers. Clock rate doesn't mean much these days. What's important is the number of instructions per clock cycle, pipeline depth, system bus speed, Direct PCI bus, etc... Intel simply can't compete with two 128 bit AltiVec vector processing units crunching numbers. This is why MHz/GHz doesn't matter when comparing processors between two architectures. Check out the following links:

http://www.apple.com/powermac/
http://www.apple.com/powermac/architecture.html
http://www.apple.com/powermac/processor.html
 
What you can do is, install darwin on x86. There are several x86 darwin distributions, but the most prevolent is the GNU Darwin port. You can get the GNU version for x86 at http://us.dl.sourceforge.net/sourceforge/gnu-darwin/direct_download/x86/
Ofcourse, you can't run aqua, or quartz, just a normal X server. So, it basically has the same functionality as FreeBSD, but uses Darwin as the base instead of FreeBSD. This will not let you run any Mac OS X apps.

Brian
 
Apple doesn't use any plain version of FreeBSD to run OS X. It uses a specially modified version called Darwin that is made to work with the Aqua GUI.

Also, the GUI is specifically made to only work with Darwin, and Mac hardware. It will not work on any PC unless Apple specifically writes the code that way(which I highly doubt they would).

If your friend wants to use Mac OS X then he must get a Mac. That's the only way to run it.
 
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