Feek's adventures with OS X

[Feek]

It's a strange coincidence but a couple of days after Will posted this thread I was building a spare Dell Latitude D620 at work and the boss happened to mention that particular laptop is quite hot for the Hackintosh install of OS X. We've talked about this before, he knows I played around with OS X in a VM a while ago. He has a couple of Macs and so does another guy in our department. Unlike the other guy who is a clear Mac fanboy, the boss isn't like that, he likes and uses Apples but doesn't ram it down peoples throats.

He found a good instruction guide for getting OS X onto the Dell and we started the downloads going - Sadly they didn't progress very quickly at work so that evening I started them going at home and burned them onto disk for the next day.

It's been quite a busy week at work, I've been the only techy in so my OS X building time has been regularly interrupted by 'proper' work, but no matter, I persevered and although it really wasn't as simple as suggested by the guides after three days I ended up with this:



A fully working, fully patched OS X installation on a Dell laptop. A Macindell

I got to that stage on Friday afternoon, but it wasn't enough. Sitting and playing with a clean installation of any OS is boring, one needs to use it properly to experience what it's like. The boss said I could bring it home for the weekend but that's not what I wanted to do, I knew he wanted to dump some OS X applications on it, and besides I'd done some research and found out that the motherboard in my home PC is very compatible with OS X, it only needs a few bios tweaks to ensure everything works.

So onto Friday evening.

I unplugged my hard drives, leaving only a spare one connected and booted from the OS X disk I have.

An hour or so later I had this.



And when I click on More Info... I get this.



It went on like a dream and patched to the current version with no problems at all. I did a Software Update and it's all updated, no issues.

So that was Friday evening. I've been using it all day yesterday and what do I think?

I like it. I'm not sure how much I like it, but it seems very smooth and very simple, perhaps too simple. It's difficult to explain but I like to know what's going on in the background and I feel as though I don't know. I've not learned anything from the installation at home but I learned a lot when I was building the Dell at work. We worked out that over those three days I've probably installed OS X more times than our two Mac users combined!

But everything works and it works well. Installing applications is a breeze.

1) Drag icon from here to here.

OK, done that, where's step 2) ?

There isn't one. That's it.

Working out some of the keyboard shortcuts is proving interesting. I've just about got used to using windows-c and windows-v for copying and pasting (the windows key is the equivalent of the apple key) although with it being in the wrong place on the keyboard I'm sure that when I'm back at work tomorrow I'll be messing things up!

I've got NeoOffice installed instead of MS Office, that works, I've got Firefox in and running just like I'm used to it, I've got an installation of Eve working using CrossOver Games and I've got a messenger program running (Adium). Time Machine is working and doing backups and both my printers work.

I'm not really sure why I'm doing it except for "because I can"! I shall continue to report.