MacOS on an IBM laptop???
Thursday, June 1st, 2006A few months ago, my responsibilities at work required that I carry a laptop computer with me. I was given an IBM Thinkpad T43 laptop computer. It’s a decent system, with ample processing power, disk space and memory. Sadly it runs Windows XP. Since I work a lot with Sun customers I needed to install Solaris 10 on the laptop. However Solaris does not cut it as a desktop system, let alone a portable. Most of the software I need is in Solaris, my main complaint is the lack of support for hibernation. The laptop cannot go to sleep in Solaris, or if it does it will never wake up (unless you power cycle it).
My ambition was to run Mac OS on this laptop. Since Apple sells intel based systems, MacOS should theoretically run on intel based computers, provided the hardware was supported.
After a bit of searching I found lots of documentation at www.osx86project.org. But nothing I found was straighforward for my particular hardware. After some tinkering here’s the process that worked for me:
0. Use partition magic to shrink the windows partition to give enough space for MacOS (20 GB)
1. Boot Debian Linux on the laptop using a Debian install CD.
2. Press Alt-F2 after the system has finished detecting the devices
3. Press Enter. You will get a shell prompt.
4. fdisk /dev/ide/host0/bus0/target0/unit0/disk
5. create a new primary partition
6. Set the partition type to AF
7. Reboot with the MacOSX CD
8. Run Disk Utility to format new partition
9. Go through the MacOSX install process
Soon I was greeted with the familiar MacOS X login screen.
Initial tests showed good performance (except for graphics and sound which tended to be a bit choppy).
It turns out the Network Adapter (Broadcom NetXtreme Gigabit Ethernet) on the T43 is not supported yet.
The wireless adapter (Intel(R) PRO/Wireless 2200BG) is also unsupported.
Without access to a network, an OS is pretty much useless.
So I scrapped this idea, installed vmware under windows, and created a virtual machine that ran MacOSX. It’s slow, but it works.
Someday, I’ll have a laptop that runs all my favorite OSs. It could be this IBM thinkpad or it could be an Apple MacBook/MacBook Pro running Solaris, Linux, MacOS, and Windows XP. It’s only a matter of time.
-- Posted in Geeks Paradise