Mac on Your PC

It's one of those things that a few of us in the PC world have wanted for a while: Mac OS X on our own Intel hardware. Build the machine and put whatever OS on it we wanted. What would be better than a very user-friendly UNIX variant?

Beginning with a leaked VMWare build and followed by some brilliant hacking with the Darwin kernel (the open-source core of OS X), this is now possible - albeit not entirely legally.

From what I've, err, read (right, that's it), Osx86 (as it's commonly know as) has actually reached a rather stable state. It even runs reasonably well on AMD hardware. Sure the project has a few instabilities (crashes when entering sleep mode), but it's come a long way considering it's a clever port of an closed system. Current working versions are 10.4.8, and there are experiments in progress for the latest Leopard (10.5) builds.

The Osx86 community has even put together a cobbled series of drivers for most commonly used hardware. Patched together in an hacked Mac install disk, it's possible with access to BitTorrent to try it at home.

For those who are interested in spending a little time tweaking, it's a surprisingly easy way to try before you buy. A great site for information is Insanely Mac with numerous forums, or it's older Wiki site.