I've always been a bit curious about how life would be if I would work on a Mac. But the price has always held me back. After all, will I like working in OS X? Will I be able to let go of my Windows habits? So, I set out to look for a cheap way of trying out OS X. I Googled stuff on Hackintosh, downloaded the Kalyway iso image, freed my old Dell Inspiron 1300 from Windows XP and ended up with this.
A perfectly running copy of Mac OS 10.5 Leopard. Admittely, I ran into a few problems. The sound didn't work before manually patching the drivers, the printer installation was very unix style with the CUPS system and the display didn't work at all. For this last problem, I not only had to find and install updated drivers, but I also had to trick OS X into believing there was a monitor connected to the external VGA port.
And even with this hardware patch (consisting of a bent paperclip), there is no support for "Core Image" and only software emulation of "Quarz Extreme". This means there are no fancy animations in Keynote or no playback of DVD movies.
Conclusion
It was a nice experiment that gave me a workable Mac OS X Leopard installation on a 300$ Dell laptop. But in the end Max OS X didn't convince me. Yes, it does what it needs to do. But it does this no better then Vista or Ubuntu. On the other hand, the new Macbooks are fancy pieces of hardware. And Keynote does not run on Windows.
So maybe, someday, I'll buy a Mac. But today the Dell is converted to Vista, since my Aunt will use it for her introductory "getting acquainted with the computer" lessons. And at school, a computer equals a PC with Vista.
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