OSX Screenshots

General Forums Tech
1

Ok, here’s a screenshot of Mac OS X at 1280x800. No big deal.

http://static.flickr.com/31/98492594_6a3bbdb89f.jpg

The really cool thing is this next screenshot:

http://static.flickr.com/36/98492161_c0aff3accb.jpg

(if you click on the screenshots, you’ll get bigger versions).

The cool thing is that this is running on my Dell 700m. And it’s running (surprisingly) with very few bugs or defects. Even PPC apps (such as Firefox) run fine in the Rosetta emulation layer. It is fast! I’ve had it running for a few weeks in VMware, but today I took the plunge and just created a dual-boot config.

If I get a chance, I’ll do a little video later.

2

Nifty Shiat…

3

Wait, are you saying that you have OS X running natively on a regular “IBM-compatible” PC? I thought everyone was saying that that was unlikely, due to the x86 Apples not having a traditional BIOS?

4

The developer release has been installed on a regular PCs some time ago. I am sure the final OS X release wont be as easy to install but maybe it is. Are you running the developer release? or has the final version been released?

5

It’s the other way around that’s the problem – running Windows natively on a new Intel Mac is going to be a problem, since the Mac doesn’t have a BIOS (it uses Intel’s EFI instead).

This is running natively on a Dell 700m notebook. Since the underlying OS is open-source (Darwin is a fork of one of the BSDs), it’s easy to obtain drivers, etc.

This isn’t a developer release, it’s basically the same thing that’s running on the Intel iMacs that are shipping right now.

6

Very interesting, I didnt think Apple would allow that. I guess they see that rampant piracy can makeosx the leading desktop… at least then the leading desktop would have a good foundation rather than windows…

7

Well, the thing about Apple, and the reason OSX runs so well is that they control the drivers and the hardware. It’s also one of the reasons Windows sucks – Microsoft doesn’t have any control of the hardware.

I don’t think you’ll ever see a boxed version of OSX for NCIX-specials. But if you know what you’re doing, you can use a boxed version of OSX for Apple computers and change it a bit to work on NCIX-specials (or in this case, Dell specials).

Lke I said, Darwin is open-source. There’s nothing stopping a geek from using it and its components in any way they feel like doing. That includes installing it on non-Apple hardware. But don’t expect any help from Apple if it doesn’t work.

That’s just like Windows on the new Intel Macs. Sure, you can probably install Windows (well, Vista, anyway, not XP) on the Intel Macs. I’m pretty sure Apple won’t care – it’s your computer. But don’t expect them to help you with it.

As for the “Piracy” thing – it’s not piracy to buy software, add a bit of open-source stuff to it, and install it wherever you want.

8

[quote=“MiG”]

As for the “Piracy” thing – it’s not piracy to buy software, add a bit of open-source stuff to it, and install it wherever you want.[/quote]

It may not be piracy but its against the license agreement :wink:

Speaking of evangelism:

latimes.com/news/science/la- … -headlines

9

If you kill a fundamentalist with an arrowhead that’s proven to be 10,000 years old, could a jury of peers who don’t believe it convict you?

10

Have you read the agreement? It doesn’t tell you what computer you can install it on.

Edit: It actually does! It says you must install it on an “Apple-labeled computer” – thankfully I have all these stickers.

Of course, just to be sure that I’m legal here, everything I’ve said about installing Max OS X 10.4 Tiger on a Dell is just hypothetical, and I’ve never done it.

11

Neat stuff MiG…Which osx disk did you use? Any chance you used the restore disk? Where can one find a good set of instructions to do the same?

12

Hi Dave,

I didn’t actually do this. It’s a hypothetical situation. But if you track me down on Monday, I will hypothetically show it to you.

13

Evil lawyer in me would interpret that as meaning you must label a computer as an Apple before you install it. Stick an Apple label over the Dell sticker before you hypothetically do anything. Perhaps a grease pencil ‘This is an Apple’ would suffice.

14

So if someone were, hypothetically, to get OSX running on their PC, what kind of performance could they expect, hypothetically speaking of course?

Like, would it run completely natively, so the performance would be comparable to the same software running on Apple hardware?

15

A bunch of “it depends” here…

The Apple Intel hardware all has SSE3 processors (Intel Core Duo). I hypothetically installed it on an SSE2 processor (Pentium M). So it’s a bit slower, but just like running windows on a Pentium M or Pentium 4 is going to be slower than running Windows on a Core Duo. I guess.

Then there is the matter of software. If the software is a “fat binary” – ie: has both Intel and PPC parts, then it will run really fast, at normal speed. Most new software will be like this – also known as “universal binaries” that run on either IBM or Intel chips and can figure out which one they’re running on, etc.

An example of this is Safari, iTunes, etc. These apps all run at native speed. I’d say just as fast as my iMac G5, but probably a bit slower than a dual-G5.

Then there are the older Mac apps, which are designed to just run on PPC. If you open one of these apps on the intel OS X, they will be run by “Rosetta” – which basically emulates PPC on the fly. These are not going to be as fast as the universal apps, but since these new Intel CPUs are a generation ahead of the PPC ones, perhaps the performance hit isn’t noticable.

Hypothetically, I’ve tried a bunch of stuff on the Dell running OS X, and Microsoft Office 2004, for example, runs at what seemed to be a normal speed. It’s a PPC-only app, which must use Rosetta for emulation.

Then I hypothetically tried Safari and iTunes. Surfing the web with Safari is super fast, much faster than Firefox in Windows on the same machine. Using the PPC version of Firefox is slower than Safari, though, since it has to run through the emulation layer. The “universal” Firefox is due out in March.

Apple has done this before, when they first moved from the 68k chips in the original Macs to the Motorola and IBM PowerPC chips in the '90s. There were apps that could run on either, or they just did the 68k emulation if they weren’t universal apps.

16

Installed it on a friend of mine’s PC a few months back. It was pretty neat, but the lack of drivers will have you running back to Windows pretty quickly. Video drivers especially. Apply has accelerated drives which’ll work for some PC cards, like the older NVidia and Radeon stuff if I remember, but couldn’t make it work on the newer stuff. Menus and windows were slooow.

Mind you, this is when the OS x86 disc was first released–I think third parties released various open source drivers availble now to help run OS X on a PC.

17

Well, I think the Darwin project must have stepped up the driver thing.

I didn’t have to do much to get it to recognize the video card on this Dell, and it’s super fast drawing video, no delays or anything.

18

any chance we will see a live disk like Linux or a bart’s out there anytime soon ?