Saturday’s Apple: First Experience With Mac OS X 10.5 Leopard Netbook

You might have read that I finally got Mac OS X 10.5 Leopard running on my Samsung NC10 netbook yesterday. These regular PCs on which people like myself try to get Apple’s OS running are often referred to as “hackintosh” computers. This of course refers to the fact that to get Mac OS X running on them, the software has to be hacked in various ways to work. Taking a plain Mac OS X installation DVD and try to get it installed and running won’t get you anywhere really.

In my case I bought the NC10 with the specific purpose of putting Leopard on it and write about it for Shufflegazine. It had got pretty good reviews and I had read that others had successfully put Leopard on them. It turned out to be easier than I thought to install Leopard. See on the internet you can on various places find different hacked versions of Leopard. Some people have taken Apple’s Mac OS X and prepared it in different ways to be installed on PCs. Mac OS X boots in a different way from Windows and does all kinds of things in a different way, that’s why a plan Mac OS X won’t do much on a hackintosh. There are three or four major such hackintosh “distributions”, to borrow a word from the Linux world, including one especially made for the Samsung NC10. That’s the one I used to directly install Mac OS X 10.5.6. And no, I’m not going to tell you where to find these special versions of Mac OS X. Anyway, they’re easy to find if you just search a bit.

There were some things that didn’t work right away and some things still don’t work. Wi-Fi worked right away because I had purchased a Dell 1390 Wi-Fi card and swapped out the one that comes standard on the NC10. I also upgraded the RAM to 2GB and the hard drive to 500GB. So I had internet connection right away, which was cool. Sound didn’t work, same with sleep mode, but they both got fixed after installing “kext” files available online. A “kext” file is a “kernel extension” file and I guess it’s like a driver in Mac OS X.

But all in all I have a perfectly usable Mac netbook that doesn’t say “Apple” on the outside, it says “Samsung” and it even has “Intel Inside” and “Windows” stickers on it. I must say it feels strange and cool at the same time to be able to run my favorite OS on this non-official hardware.

There are ongoing discussions whether doing this is illegal or not. I’m not a lawyer but I wouldn’t be too surprised if it is. But I guess I don’t see the harm as I bought a copy of Mac OS X to do this, I bought the hardware (the NC10) and this will not be my main machine so Apple didn’t miss out on any hardware sales. This is an experiment more than anything and although I will probably be using the NC10 with Leopard for some duties in the near future, at least until Apple comes up with something I can replace it with, it is not taking sales away from anyone.

In the coming weeks I’ll use my hackintosh as much as I can and I’ll of course report back to you here about how it goes. As I said, I’ll be using the NC10 for some duties, at least until Apple decides to bring out something I can replace it with. And with speculations again intensifying over a potential 10-inch Apple netbook in late 2009 that might be a while.

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