Acer notebook running Mac OS X 10.5
1 05 2008So, what can you do with an old PC notebook and some time on your hands? Why not try getting Mac OS X Leopard to run on it.
Turned out not to be too difficult at all, if you look around you’ll find detailed walkthroughs on how to get it done.
These are some specs of my old Acer TravelMate 8006 LMi notebook:
Intel Pentium M 755 2 GHz
512 MB DDR SDRAM
ATI Mobility Radeon 9700 - 128 MB
As you’ll see in the video above, it takes a little while for Leopard to boot but it does run pretty slick. Unfortunately my wifi card (Intel2200BG) was not supported out of the box so had to go with a third party port for Darwin which is not quite there yet making wifi connectivity a bit of a pain to set up.
You mileage may vary in getting it installed, what worked for me was formatting the partition as Master Boot Record using Disk Utility in the setup and then customizing the install, deselecting everything except for the EFI boot loader for MBR.
From there onwards the install is pretty straightforward, when you boot up again afterwards it appeared to be stuck on the Apple boot screen. That is in fact not the case, it for some reason takes an incredibly long time to get through it the first time you run — probably close to 45 minutes.
Its an interesting proof of concept, nice to play around with but I think I’ll end up installing something like Ubuntu after I’ve tested it some more — unless of course Apple decides to officially support it (and pigs fly) 
Hi,
Is it leagal to install Mac OS on non mac hardware, considering that You own a legal copy of OS but not the hardware.
Nice Pet.
Except the airport issue is there anything else that makes it non stable
environment for using it as a main dev machine?
@savvasmalamas - I’ve not tested it extensively as a development machine, with 512Mb RAM I’m not really considering running Eclipse or Flex Builder on it.
Software I’ve tested so far runs pretty well and have had no crashes so far. The display driver is not perfect, can currently only run on 1024×768 but there might be something out there that fixes this.
@ashvin - the jury is out on whether its legal, certainly Apple’s EULA doesn’t allow OS X to run on non-Apple hardware but there is debate on whether that is enforcible.
I own a copy of Leopard and wanted to try this as a bit of a geeky challenge — won’t give any legal advice on whether or not to do it so proceed at your own risk
Peter,
I also installed it on USB harddisk before for my Thinkpad X61 tablet having 4 gigs of ram. Except HDD operations, was working fine and was able to get resolution of 1400 x 1050 (I dont remember height exactly) with dual monitor support. It was a great experience.
Will try to install Windows and Mac together on laptop’s harddrive and will see how it works.
About legal-illegal, as you said - take a risk