What kind of developer would I be if I did not develop something for my iPhone?
The main issue keeping me from this was that developing iPhone applications require the iPhone SDK, which only runs on a Mac. Macs are expensive and I cannot afford to buy one simply to write a free application. The solution was to pull my hair out getting OSx86 installed on my old Dell D610 Laptop. This task was a major pain in the butt and I’d like to help anybody else out in the same boat I was in.

There are a few general guides on getting OSx on non-Apple computers, but I could not find any information on version 10.5.7, which the SDK requires.

The process took me about thirty hours of sitting in front of a computer, so have some nice music readily available. I ended up using iATKOS_v7, simply because I got furthest with it. If you have any problems with the install, which you will, Google your problem with the String “OSx86” in front of your problem.
I’d encourage you to verify the MD5 checksum is correct to avoid wasting time. It is also very important that you burn the image at a very slow speed. I used 1x speed on a high quality DVD. Trust me, it matters.

In you BIOS, disable as many devices as you can. Parallel, Serial, Wireless, etc.

Insert your disk, boot from disk, press F8
Use the Boot flags: -v -x
Wait about ten minutes. The longest part should come shortly after it says “Jettisoning kernel linker”. If you get errors, Google is your friend.

Note:
For the section ahead, I found that if you take your time the system freezes. Go as fast as you can through the prompts and get your hard drive formatted quickly to avoid freezes.
If it loads the plain blue screen but freezes, try plugging in an external monitor or try this Paper Clip hack
If it brings up the nice wallpaper, this is a good sign. Hopefully the ‘Continue’ and ‘Preparing’ prompts will appear. Continue through said prompts.

Once at the installation location prompt, go up top: ‘Utilities’ -> ‘Disk Utility’
Click on the hard drive / partition you want, click erase, and format as HFS Journaled.

Note:
When I got this far and wasn’t able to successfully install the OS, my hard drive would be bricked and I would receive boot errors. Most disk formatting tools would not recognize the drive. The best solution was to boot with a Windows install disk, format it with NTFS-quick, and then then turn off the computer once it starts copying the files. I then took the drive out of my laptop and connected it to my Windows machine with an IDE to USB connector.

In Windows, start the device manager. Right click on your hard drive and delete it.
Then, in command prompt, enter the following commands:

Remove the hard drive and you should be set! If at any point during the setup process you get a hard drive error, format as NTFS and repeat these steps. I bricked and unbricked my hard drive countless numbers of times trying to get this to work.

Back to the Leopard install:
Exit out of the disk utility and go back to your hard drive selection screen.

Click on your hard drive, click install, and then click ‘Customize’. Now, customize. Select the appropriate kernels and drivers for your machine. After a day of guess-and-check, this configuration ended up working for me:
(In addition to the pre-selected options)

• Kernel – Voodoo 9.7
• VGA – Intel – GMA 950 – GMA 950 Laptop
• VGA – Intel – GMA 950 – GMA 950 Rare
• System – SATA/IDE – Intel SATA/IDE
• System – USB
• Network – Wireless – Broadcom BCM43xx
• PS/2 Mouse/Keyboard – Voodoo PS/2 Driver with Trackpad Plugin

Go back to the install, click install. Skip the disk verification disk. If there is something wrong with it, you’ll find out during the install. I found that the installation takes about thirty minutes. At one point my status bar doesn’t move for about 15 minutes. Unless you get an error, don’t assume it is frozen!
Once it completes, click restart. You will go back to the DOS-like prompt and it will look like it’s frozen. Once again, let it run it’s course and shut down.

When it boots back up, you should get the chameleon/Darwin loading screen. Press any key and then enter in the flags -v -f. You should only need to enter in those flags the first time you boot.

Note: If it stalls and you get the “No” sign (as in, no smoking symbol), you might have included the wrong items in the ‘Customize’ part of the install. Before you start back from scratch, try using -f, -v, and -s for boot options. You can also specify your hard drive with rd=disk1s3 or whatever yours was. I got around this by having the install DVD in, booting off the DVD (Yes, it sounds silly) and after pressing F8 entering Boot: cpus=1 rd=disk0s1 -v -x . For some reason, this allows you to boot the OS on the hard drive. You should probably start over and reinstall Leopard with the correct drivers, but this does get you around the problem.

If Leopard loaded properly, you will be guided through the setup. Once in OSx, enjoy! Make sure to enable what you disabled in the BIOS (Especially the Wireless).

My audio did not work out of the box, even though we installed the VoodooHDA driver. The process of patching the OS involves installing ‘kext’ files, which are basically single-file archives. Rather than using the terminal to move them around, a great tool called Kext Helper does it for you. For the audio, you will need two kexts: AppleHDA(~2.4MB) and HDAEnabler(~30KB). Install them with Kext Helper, reboot, and boot the the flags -v -f. If your audio still does not work, try installing the kext AppleAC97Audio(~600KB). The volume control buttons on the D610 will work.

As with most installs, Ethernet did not work for me – but I did not spend a single minute trying to get it to work. As long as I have wireless, I am happy. I was able to install the iPhone SDK, VLC, and Firefox on Leopard and I think that is all I will need.

Please post any experiences or success stories you have!

Tags | 10.5.7, D610, Leopard, OSx, OSx86, PC