I'm a bit of a Mac OS addict, but annoyed at the less han impressive speeds of most Mac systems, even the newer OS X ones.

Since Mac OS X is unix-based, would there be any way f running it on a scratch built machine? What unix style software components would I have to install to get it to work? Would I need any special hardware or can I just use normal PC parts?

I'm pretty up to scratch on OS X and PC building, but I've not done anything with Unix or Linux before.....

Thanks

Ian

Welcome to LQ

What does "republic" have to do with anything in your post??

Oh, and since I can't tell, are you FOR or AGAINST mac? Do you think it is FAST or SLOW I really can't figure out what some of your terms mean, I hope that doesn't sound offensive, it's not meant to be

As far as running linux on PPC, there are a few options:
Yellow Dog Linux
Mandrake PPC
I believe Gentoo? has a port for PPC as well. All can be found at:
www.distrowatch.com OR from google.com/linux for the distro's homepages.

Cool

Sorry, new to this forum, and i typed the wrong thing in the wrong place so i'm stuck wth 'republic' instead of the title I wanted...

Anyway, I am FOR the Mac OS X operating system, but against buying Apple machines, which are too pricey considering how slowly they tend to run compared to up to date PCs.

I'd therefore like to know if I can run OS X on a standard machine, or a machine with UNIX installed, or something. Would I have to use specific harware or will standard PC bits do? What software would I need?

I'm not familiar with a lot of thetechincal terms but I hope that get across the idea...

Ian

Sure does, but I haven't a clue! I'll do what I can to get your post to the eyes that should see it though.

Cool

many thanks

ian

The answer is... kinda, and probably not in the way you were looking for. the OSX core is BSD based, and an apple sponsored Open Source project (sorta, their license is a mess, and I don't think its OSI approved, I'd have to check). That UNIX core is called Darwin, the GUI on top, aqua, isn't a freebie and as far as I know hasn't been ported to the Intel x86 architecture yet. (actually, its probably running fine [and blisteringly fast] on some P3 in the bowels of Cupertino, but if Mac releases the GUI-goop fun part of the OS, there goes their top-down monopoly. Not to mention, here would come the wrath of Redmond, and there would go a MacOS port of Office... wheels within wheels.)

Evidently you can install MacOS's Darwin core and then get a GUI through XFree86's XDarwin port.

Normal Mac OSX apps won't run, even if you do this on a PowerPC based machine, everything is going to need aqua.

Here's a link to Darwin if you're curious:

http://developer.apple.com/darwin/projects/darwin/

Cheers,

Finegan