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Steve Jobs’ Waking Nightmare of Complete and Total Inelegance

So I hit up Newegg.com and got my ~$200 worth of parts together — the nifty Shuttle KPC case, 2 GB RAM, and a 1.8 GHz Intel Core Duo chip (I already had a 250 GB IDE hard drive and Netgear WPN311 Wifi PCI card lying around) and I was going to write this big long honking thing about building a Frankenmac/Hackintosh but then Rob Griffiths from Macworld already beat me to it.

Bottom line: Building a Hackintosh is probably not worth your time. It’s amazing how much stuff “just works,” but here are the major problems:

1. Updates. Point software updates (10.5.2 to 10.5.3 etc.) won’t happen unless you get updates via Bittorrent from Some Dude Who Has Already Fucked Around With Them. No offense to Some Dude, but this strikes me as a really bad idea.
2. Wifi. This was the big fat stopping point for me — after four hours of what I will charitably describe as “dicking around” with .plists and .kexts I never got my Netgear PCI card to stop freezing after choosing a wireless network. Apple is in the enviable position of having to support only a couple wifi cards, and while the Netgear is super “out of the box” compatible with Windows and Linux, Mac OS X doesn’t need to know about it. So it doesn’t.
3. Sleep and boot. Neither worked great, requiring kernel fiddling and partition twiddling and boot DVDs left in the the drive.
4. Install. Installing from an IDE DVD-ROM drive was a pain in the ass thanks to not being able to install a hacked Mac OS X via USB DVD-R drive, so I had to have cables and junk strewed all around. Also, Some Dude has tricked out the Mac OS X 10.5 install, “helpfully” adding apps to /Applications and modifying the background colors, icons and dock. This is analogous to getting your car back from the shop and having “Grape Job!” scratch-n-sniff stickers “helpfully” added all over your leather dashboard.
5. The Mac Mini. Frankly, if you figure it out by the hour, unless your time is worth absolutely nothing, the amount of time you’d spend on hardware and then dicking around with a hacked mac during its lifespan would total up to way more than just picking up a new $600 Mac Mini. And then everything would work out of the box and keep working.

Stats: I Xbench’d the Hackintosh, and performance was pretty good for a $200 machine:

Results 115.24
System Info
Xbench Version 1.3
System Version 10.5.1 (9B18)
Physical RAM 2048 MB
Model Mac Pro
Drive Type Maxtor 6Y060L0 Maxtor 6Y060L0
CPU Test 104.29
GCD Loop 212.34 11.19 Mops/sec
Floating Point Basic 102.59 2.44 Gflop/sec
vecLib FFT 83.55 2.76 Gflop/sec
Floating Point Library 83.83 14.60 Mops/sec
Thread Test 132.61
Computation 136.39 2.76 Mops/sec, 4 threads
Lock Contention 129.03 5.55 Mlocks/sec, 4 threads
Memory Test 124.75
System 121.03
Allocate 170.66 626.74 Kalloc/sec
Fill 125.49 6101.37 MB/sec
Copy 91.25 1884.64 MB/sec
Stream 128.71
Copy 120.45 2487.77 MB/sec
Scale 120.40 2487.40 MB/sec
Add 138.49 2950.23 MB/sec
Triad 137.93 2950.75 MB/sec
Quartz Graphics Test 157.95
Line 125.77 8.37 Klines/sec [50% alpha]
Rectangle 166.61 49.74 Krects/sec [50% alpha]
Circle 135.69 11.06 Kcircles/sec [50% alpha]
Bezier 129.68 3.27 Kbeziers/sec [50% alpha]
Text 381.51 23.87 Kchars/sec
OpenGL Graphics Test 278.54
Spinning Squares 278.54 353.35 frames/sec
User Interface Test 171.48
Elements 171.48 787.00 refresh/sec
Disk Test 42.54
Sequential 54.36
Uncached Write 49.55 30.43 MB/sec [4K blocks]
Uncached Write 51.27 29.01 MB/sec [256K blocks]
Uncached Read 58.41 17.09 MB/sec [4K blocks]
Uncached Read 59.62 29.97 MB/sec [256K blocks]
Random 34.94
Uncached Write 12.89 1.36 MB/sec [4K blocks]
Uncached Write 76.65 24.54 MB/sec [256K blocks]
Uncached Read 78.06 0.55 MB/sec [4K blocks]
Uncached Read 90.38 16.77 MB/sec [256K blocks]

Anyway. As a computer, the Hackintosh is a shambling failure, but as a fun learning experience it was a success — I now know way more about the inner workings of .kexts and /System than I ever thought I’d have to know, and the Shuttle KPC will be a lovely PC or Ubuntu box, just not a Mac. Speaking of, Ubuntu 8.04? Literally everything worked out of the box.

~Jeff