I downloaded video ‘proof’ of OSX booting up on an x86 based notebook, so the rumours are true! It booted amazingly quick on a 1.6 mobile Intel Pentium (532MHz bus) with an ATI mobility radeon 9600 (768MB Ram). I had originally read about it on Slashdot, but…it pointed over to this site which was of course suffering the ’slashdot effect’ where thousands of users across the globe are clicking on the link to check out the big news of the day and end up totally swamping the poor guy’s server just because he had an interesting article up one day.

The site was already getting pounded pretty bad, so they had posted a ‘torrent’ link. Bit torrent, if you don’t already know is a peer to peer file sharing tool (written in python) offers a more efficient method of distributing a big file than just posting it on a single server which can suffer from a bandwidth bottleneck. The trick with Bit torrent is that you *must* share the little bits you get with other clients in order to download faster through a sort of ‘forced altruism’. If you have a firewall or router you may need to port forward several high ports to use it effectively.

I dropped by http://www.osx86project.org/ to see if the rumour was true. They were being careful on their site because there are some DMCA issues involved here that I won’t pretend that I have investigated, but suffice to say - it seems that it is indeed true. I just looked at it quick, but the ‘hack’(?) involves using VMware (not free), a software that allows for multiple independent operating systems to coexist on a machine, PearPC, an open source PowerPC emulator, and a Tiger (OSX 10.4) DVD boot disc.

Currently, the procedure is not for the faint of heart, but I imagine it will get easier as more work goes into it. OSX is an awesome OS and it would be really nice to have it available for x86, but the thing I really like about my Macs has been the hardware quality. I would been just as happy in Linux I think, but I could never find an x86 based laptop I thought was *built* well enough to entrust with my personal ‘digital life’.