I have a dual boot machine FC4 and windows XP. I would like to install Mac OS X v10.4 as the third OS on my PC.
I have an AMD athlon XP 2000+ with 384MB RAM and 64MB of graphical card. Is my machine configuration good enough to run Mac OS X v10.4?

I would be glad If you share your experience of installing Mac OS X as the third operating systems on your machine or give me some instructions about how to do it.
thanks

An amd athlon xp 2000?

So you'd like us to help you steal a copy of osx.

Um, no.

If you go out and buy a new intel mac and want help, fine. If your trying to do something your not supposed to be, go somewhere else.

ummm, how on earth did you jump to this conclusion??

you could have at least asked a few questions before making these kind of accusations...

there's no need to get nasty with one another...

let's all just take a deep breath and relax...

i found this website, which might be useful: http://www.osx86project.org/

their wiki has installation info: http://wiki.osx86project.org/wiki/in...llation_Guides

unfortunately, after a quick glimpse, it sounds like OS X won't work on AMD CPUs (yet)...

How on earth? It's an ATHLON.

Mac OSX is for sale for macs only. There are no athlon macs.

No. In the past, all Macs used PowerPC processors, which use a different instruction set than the Intel/Athlon X86 platform. When Apple started making the Intel Mac, they had to make a different version of OSX so it could natively run on the X86 platform. Although Apple makes Macs now, the new version of OSX will still not run on your run-of-the-mill X86 processor. Apple and Intel have worked together to change certain areas of the Mac Intel to prevent the install of OSX on a non-Apple machine. Either way, this is probably not the best site to get help on installing OSX. But either way, good luck.

~Justin

As jeelliso points out, Apple has taken pains to make sure that no computer other than one produced by Apple itself will ever be able to boot the Mac OS. Even the version of OS X written for the Intel processor cannot be booted without Apple's proprietary "firmware" (Apple's version of the BIOS) present in an EFI (Extensible Firmware Interface) chip on the Apple Mactel motherboard. Although the hardware of a Mactel motherboard is not fundamentally different from that of a "standard" x86 motherboard, there is NO non-Apple motherboard in existence which is capable of booting or running OS X for Intel processors. Unless Apple has a change of heart and vision, mohtasham, your AMD Athlon XP 2000+ will NEVER be able to run OS X.

Apple's much bally-hooed "Bootcamp" is largely just a modification of the "firmware" (again, the Apple BIOS) which incorporates into the firmware chip's instruction set support for a traditional PC BIOS. This enables the chip to recognize a Windows boot loader on a disk and therefore load and run Windows.

Of course, if the Apple firmware chip can load and run Windows, it can load and run Linux. Hackers to date have succeeded in using Bootcamp to set up Mactels to dual boot the Mac OS X and either Gentoo or Ubuntu. However, triple booting Mac OS X, Linux, and Windows has not yet been accomplished, even on an Intel Mac. This is because Apple does not currently support partitioning of hard disks on the Mactel to more than four primary partitions. The first of these must be used for Bootcamp itself. That leaves only three partitions, one each for OS X, Linux, and Windows. Linux, of course, will not install into a single partition, so a triple boot installation on the Mactel has proven elusive. There are various ways, theoretically, to hack around these limitations, but it is awkward.

As things now stand, however, triple booting of OS X, Linux, and Windows will never be possible except on an Intel Mac.

this is not true AFAIK...

linux will install onto 1 partition and no swap if you have enough ram.

That's not enough operating systems!!! Why don't you add Solaris 10, and FreeBSD and boot them all from grub???

Now that's interesting... Does the Mac setup allow for logical partitions within an extended partition as opposed to just four primary partitions? Because I have two partitions taken up by windows (one is the on-drive backup so I can reinstall it with all the software installed - this came with the computer and I'm reluctant to remove it), and yet I can run two different variations of linux just fine (I'd run a third if I had the space)...

You only need one primary partition to be able to boot to any number of logical partitions if you set a boot loader in that partition. I have grub setup there, and it boots fine to my Ubuntu and Gentoo, both of which are logical partitions... and my swap partition is an logical one as well.

I actually had plans to set one primary partition on my external USB drive to GRUB then to have about 5 different variations of linux to play with, but then I found my computer can't boot from USB

yup, and even without a swap partition, you can still make a swap *file* on your root partition...

Actually, I seem to remember reading an article once about how of every operating system Apple makes (the Macs from way back in the day all the way to OSX), they make an Apple version that runs on their computers (which is released), and then they secretly design a complete clone of the same operating system that runs perfectly on the x86 pc, but never release it. Maybe its some kinda fail safe or whatever, as I can't imagine why they would want to spend all that money on development and not release it... or maybe its because they can see how their os compares to Windows on the same hardware...

Maybe theres a long shot at being why cs flipped, meaning that to get to that copy of OSX we would have to break into Apple's top secret trade secret vaults and what not. :P