OT: Hackintosh

If you just want to play with MacOS, then running it in a VM was pretty straight-forward the last time I tried (a few years ago). I had an iPod and needed to be able to run iTunes (I also wanted to run tax software locally). I haven't had either of those needs recently, so my MacOS VM is rather unused these days.

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Grant Edwards               grant.b.edwards        Yow! I don't understand 
                                  at               the HUMOUR of the THREE 
                              gmail.com            STOOGES!!

MacOS or OSX?

You post a question like this and don't give a valid email address?

Somehow you expect people to admit they have done such things and give you pointers on usenet?

Good luck.

Geoff.

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Geoffrey S. Mendelson,  N3OWJ/4X1GM/KBUH7245/KBUW5379

You kinda can't run OSX in a VM:

"....A hacked Mountain Lion disc image. Sadly, this won't work with a vanilla Mountain Lion installer, so you'll have to find a compatible hacked version. The hacking group Olarila has put a great installation ISO together, and you can find it by searching Google. If that doesn't sit well with you, you can head over to the Mac App Store and buy a legit copy for yourself, so you can at least pirate with a clear conscience."

*Sigh*

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Les Cargill

Read what you've wrote. You'd want *me* to post a valid email address announcing to the world that I (potentially) want to do this -- yet give a "back channel" so others *don't* have to make a similar (potential) disclosure?

And that *doesn't* sound silly to you?

Note that I've not "given a valid email address" for MANY YEARS. And, it's not like I'm continually posting "illicit activities".

Note, also, that someone who self-selects based on firsthand experience (the point of my qualification, above) -- unlike folks who just want to offer an OPINION -- can make statements without LEGALLY implicating themselves in any illicit activity.

Heck, THEY can even post using a non-valid email address! (Wow! What a concept!)

If you're done feeling self-righteous...

You do, of course, realize that I can obtain the exposure to OSX by:

-- borrowing a piece of kit that has it installed

-- purchasing a Mac and returning it for a full refund

-- going to an Apple store and playing with a floor model etc.

In fact, a colleague that I spoke with this morning has offered to loan me one of his systems ("I'll bring it in next week"). So, I don't even have to dick with "incompatible hardware" -- or, let the neighbors know that I've any experience with Macs.

Gee, AND I am still fully within the legal constraints of the law, my colleague's licensing conditions AND the moral indignation of a USENET "morality cop"!

*Plonk*

Doh. OS X (I think it was snow-leopard).

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Grant Edwards               grant.b.edwards        Yow! BARBARA STANWYCK makes 
                                  at               me nervous!! 
                              gmail.com

The obvious *suggestion* that "X" == "10" (as folks like Adobe have adopted)

*might* be true (I've not used an Apple OS since MacOS 7 or 8.something).

But, if they have indeed chosen the name with that rationale in mind, it seems misleading. MacOS was a much cruder operating environment, hugely different codebase, etc.

I'll wait a week and play with a "real" Mac...

MacOS was PPC only ( SFAIK ) so....

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Les Cargill

Are you trying to imply that it is so bad, that anyone that does that stuff is *SO* embarrassed that they need to hide?

it started out on 68K

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umop apisdn 


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I doubt that any single application gives you the "Mac" experience. I have used Mac's enough that i can get around OK. In terms of being smooth and consistent Mac's are about 10 years ahead of M$. BTW OSX is BSD based, so you are at least one leg up for developing new device drivers. Just the same my workplace provides Win7 and at home i prefer Linux. I have to keep Win7 at home for compatibility reasons. Oh well.

?-)

Systems have different "feels", assumptions, expectations, etc.

Contrast DOS with (any) Windows; Windows with MacOS (e.g., vintage 7 or 8); Solaris with MacOS; etc.

E.g., I found the MacOS approach to apps far more efficient in terms of screen real-estate. And, wonder why such an obvious change never made it to other GUI's!

Then, of course, there are the maintenance aspects of The System -- how "under the hood" is exposed to the user, what happens when you "break the rules", etc.

[let's not even go into programming API's...]

Just installing *apps* can reveal big differences in how each system approached that concept (dependency resolution, tracking installation changes to make backing out the app possible, etc.)

You don't get a real appreciation for those types of things "playing on a showroom floor". Rather, you have to see what is *really* involved installing a printer, talking to a thumb drive, etc.

[E.g., neighbor was tickled that he was able to install his printer (getting the wired AND wireless aspects of it working) *without* having to give me a call!]

No experience, but note that many features of the OS X UI use a multitouch touchpad, so if you don't have one of those you miss out on a lot. External Bluetooth/etc devices work fine, so it doesn't have to be in a laptop.

(Curiously, I installed Android 4.4 on an old (2010) laptop and discovered that the touchpad had been multitouch all along, just previously no drivers had enabled it)

From what I looked, it's mostly about the right CPU/chipset. If it matches a platform that OS X already runs on, chances are good. You may have to swap about wifi card or whatever for one drivers are available.

Just google what you have and see if anyone's done it for that hardware. Expect it to be substantially more hit-and-miss than the usual Linux install.

Theo

Ha! Neighbor didn't even *show* me that aspect! Amazing! I guess he is still thinking in terms of his old PC (use mouse to get from A to B). He was more interested in showing me the MS Office "counterparts" ("Pages", "Numbers"??) that he would be using (as that's where he spends most of his time).

Excellent! Thanks, that's the sort of thing I was looking for!

Hmmm... I'd never considered what (technologically) would differentiate between single and multi-touch. To me, gestures have always been "tracks through 2-space"

Oh, OK.

Yeah, that's what it looked like. I couldn't see any obvious pattern and wasn't keen on typing in every machine I *might* consider using. Likewise, just because something is NOT listed doesn't mean it *won't* work (even if someone else has tried -- poorly -- and failed).

Thanks, Theo! A colleague will be providing me with a machine with which to play (hopefully next week). At least now I'll have a heads up on what things to play *with*!

I'd look at it the other way around: there are relatively few Mac machines. So see if anything you have roughly matches those. For starters, Apple only use Intel hardware, so AMD, VIA etc are out straightaway. That's not to say that it has to match exactly, but you might have less difficulty if you have something similar to hardware Apple support (in a recent version especially)

Theo

The key difference is that "singletouch" devices can track only a single contact at a time. So they can't track the "squeezing" motion (two fingertips coming together) to cause a zoom-out (for example). IOW, multitouch is basically trying to resolve two (or more) gestures on the same device at the same time.

Technologically multi-touch is a bit more of a challenge, since you can no longer do a simple detector on each axis. Nor is a detector on each axis that can resolve more than one position enough (that would resolve to four possible positions with two touches, with no way of knowing which are the real ones).

The problem is in some ways analogous to keyboards without n-key rollover. A simple scannable array of switches (keys) can easily (and cheaply!) detect a switch closure (key press), but if you press two keys at once, it gets confused. Fortunately you don't see that on real keyboards anymore (the last time I saw a non-n-key-rollover keyboard was probably about 1980, before then it was actually an advertised feature), but you do still see the effects on many (particularly inexpensive) calculators (where it's even worse, since keyboard scanning is usually tied to the LCD refresh, so when you press several keys at once, you mess up the display as well).

Yes, I understand the difference in *application*. Rather, I was commenting on what the differences in *implementation* would likely be. I.e., how to resolve two (or more) "contact points" concurrently.

"Coordinated" (X+Y) detection can resolve the location of two different contacts (if the technology can "see" both -- e.g., cameras being an intuitive option). I have a whiteboard digitizer that could, conceptually, track each of the five "utensils" (4 pen colors plus an eraser) concurrently on that surface. (AFAIK, it makes no attempt to do so -- people tend to write with one hand at a time and prohibiting erasure WHILE writing seems an easy user-constraint)

To be honest, I've never been interested enough to explore the technological options. As I said, to me, a gesture is a one-handed (if hands are used) action that just packages a "route through space" as a recognizable entity ("gesture").

Good point. AFAICT, one of my laptops has seen some attention on this front. Just not sure I'd want to scrub the laptop just to "play".

OTOH, if my colleague fails to "come through" for me, it seems like it would be the least troublesome way to proceed...

This may be of interest:

(if slightly out of date) There's plenty more info on that site.

One of your Atom boards might be a useful target, depending on the spec, though probably only for Snow Leopard or earlier. It was particularly popular on Atom netbooks.

Theo