OS X on Thinkpad

[atct86]

I have heard runnign OS X on a differnt partition is possible. How would i go about doing this?

[christopher_wolf]

Well, first look at;

http://www.osx86project.org/

That should give you a pretty good idea of what is involved. Also, athough OSX is pretty useful; I wouldn't go and rely on it cohabiting well with Windows on another partition. Keep in mind that there are certain things that won't work, or might be buggy, on your system with OSX. Do a search of the Forums there and you will find some people that have apparently put OSX on their Thinkpads (T42 and T40 if I remember correctly). You could even PM them asking various questions. HTH

EDIT: Oh, some other things I should mention about this; it is, what would be classified with most OSes, an "Unstable" Release...Meaning there are tons of things that could go wrong. Also, it isn't meant to be an easy "install" of an OS you can boot into everyday without problems. It shouldn't be attempted unless you have done heaps upon heaps of OS installs, know the Hardware of your system inside and out, and have a (really) good working "Troubleshooting Skill" as things may not always go according to plan. Just some disclaimers...

[revolutionary_one]

Also, take into account that if you want to install any external Mac apps (that actually make the OS worth running) then you WILL NOT be able to run it on most of your thinkpads. As in order to run Rosetta and a host of other features you will need sse3 which is not supported by a majority of the thinkpad chips currently out.


Peace.

[melmo]

Also, take into account that if you want to install any external Mac apps (that actually make the OS worth running) then you WILL NOT be able to run it on most of your thinkpads. As in order to run Rosetta and a host of other features you will need sse3 which is not supported by a majority of the thinkpad chips currently out.
Peace.

Actually, some smart guy has written a patch for OSX that allows Rosetta to run with only SSE2. Sure, it's slower, but it works.

I wish my T42 had an ATI 9600 in it so I could use CoreImage and QuartzExtreme. Ah well.

[stangri]

well, since there's no legal Mac OSX release for the owners of the non-apple hardware we're in shady waters.

if you're OK with losing all your current data and your current Windows installation (or you can back it up), installing the patched Mac OSX on the T40 is pretty straightforward. I don't think there's a way of not letting the Mac OSX installer wipe out your whole disk before you could create the MacOS partition.

You can also have both Windows XP and Mac OSX on different partitions of the same HDD and you can have the Windows XP bootloader + small application (look up chain0) to enable the dual-boot functionality.

Rosetta works quite well on T40 actually -- the difference between the Intel and PPC-builds of *some* of the applications I've tried was only the start-up time, I didn't notice any performance degrades. Of course some others wouldn't work at all, I'd blame it on the pre-released version of the Rosetta tho.