Victory at long last.    Long ago I left the Apple IIGS for Windows 95 and hadn’t looked back since. This handy little guide brought me home.  I named my VM Sex Panther, because 60 percent of the time, it works every time.  That’s about the success rate I’ve had with these hacked together distros for Leopard.

In addition to VMWare’s 6.5 Workstation offering a fantastic test environment, the best ISO out there I’ve found to date is the iDeneb.  The customization options are commented so that even the average person can make sense of what they’re clicking.  Success rates may vary, but I now have my development environment set up.  If you plan on undertaking a similar project, I highly suggest either paying to become an apple developer for $500, buying a license for Leopard (even though this is against the EULA), or taking the easy way out and spending the $600 on a Mac mini.  Next on the docket is a review of the training videos/materials available through apple.

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There are a few options out there for people that want to utilize a PC to develop for the iPhone, but I can almost guarantee that none of the apps developed using these tools will see the light of day in the Apple Appstore.  Regardless this might be a good starting point for learning.

I’m starting to see VMware as my savior as much as I’ve been trying to avoid virtualization.  More on that in a later.

This tutorial by PJ Cabrera misses out on a lot of the features that the Apple SDK provides, but it’s a working solution for Windows and Linux developers.  I’m already feeling a bit more in my element.  This was released last summer, but unfortunately this was not a major interest of mine at the time.  The basic premise of this method is using the Eclipse C Development Toolkit, an open source project, to release applications for jail broken phones.  Not an ideal solution, but again, it could be a good launch point to start learning the process of writing code in C.

Another option I ran across in my quest is called winChain.  At first glance it looks like the bees knees for installing the environment and getting coding, but after reading the comments below the guide it seems far from simple.  Another cause for concern is the last update date – December 7th 2007.  The iPhone OS has evolved significantly since the last update of this tool, so it gives me cause for hesitation.  I think I’ll try the final route I want to look at – I’d like to develop the way Apple intends people to develop rather than hacking together something similar.

Back to the doldrums of the osx86 project.  This is basically the same as my Hackint0shing article minus the commitment of altering my native partitioning/OS.

To be continued . . . VMWare and BEYOND!

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1: Taking a perfectly good PC and attempting to install Mac OSX 10.5.6 using a questionably obtained ISO.

2: Placing your face in your palm while repeatedly installing an operating system not natively meant for your computer hard ware.

3. Winning the battle but losing the war.

Related Words for: Hackintoshing

frustration, annoyance, masochism, repetition

Above is the word I had to invent to keep my sanity while trying to get OSX running on my XPS M1730.  After my mild frustration in finding out that developing for the iPhone requires OSX, I found some information on getting things running without much hassle on the x86 (PC).  Hackint0sh.org has a lot of fantastic information, and a community of people dedicated on running Mac software without owning a Mac.  Realistically after looking at some of the hardware requirements, I would have been better off buying a netbook for a development PC.  The one recommended for the XPS M1530 (same hardware as the M1730 but with a 15’’ screen) is the iAtkos distribution.  There are a few other distros floating around out there, but this was my best chance at getting everything working.

My first roadblock was getting rid of my Raid0 array – how I hated to do it, but it’s all for the greater good right?  I killed the raid, and tried to use the DVD I burned to boot – everything appeared to come up fine at first, but the screen dimmed a darker shade of gray and it told me I had to reboot.  Around the 2nd time of rebooting I was reminded of what someone much smarter than me once said; Insanity: doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results (Albert Einstein). While true, at this stage of the process I had not yet lost my sanity.

I had a hunch that I needed some shiny new partitions started for the installer to load, so I fired up a gparted boot disk and set some up.  Success! The installer loaded with all the shiny menus one would expect from apple.  Excitement set in that this might just be crazy enough to work.  It’s asking me where I want to load the OS . . . but not giving me any options @#$@!?  After poking around for a few minutes I found the Disk Utilities from the dropdown menu at the top, and was able to create a partition for OSX, and upon closing the utility I now had a new home for the operating system.

Installation Successful . . . This is a term that we’re going to start using loosely from now on.  While the DVD declared “Mission Accomplished” we were far from such.  After attempting to load from the hard disk for about the 5th time, I went back to the google and did some more research.  An obscure forum post on insanelymac.com suggested using the advanced boot flags of –v –x –f.  It was by doing this I discovered that the ACPI driver had failed to load.  To the Bios Batman!  Switching from ACPI to ATA, the OS decided it would load – the only problem now is getting past the keyboard identification wizard.

After a few hours of installing / reinstalling  . . .  waiting, crying and cheering I had finally loaded into the OS.  With the aid of a USB Keyboard and Mouse attached to my behemoth laptop, I was beginning to wonder why I hadn’t just done this on my desktop computer.  One could only imagine my disappointment at realizing my Intel wireless NIC had no supported drivers either natively or hacked together.  I’ll have to find time to go through this process at least one more time, on hardware that I know is supported.

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