Martin Cleaver, masterfully.

My trusty laptop (an IBM X30) died a few weeks back. My data is fine but there’s something very unstable about the machine itself. After almost 5 years of intensive use, a survival from someone spilling coffee over it when I first came to Canada, and having accompianed me on many trips around this planet, the laptop been on my “must replace” list for over a year.

After too many years of frustration with Windows XP and confirmation from most of my friends that Windows Vista is a disaster, I have resolved to switch to MacOS. I’d been holding out for a mac subnotebook, and rumours were plentiful last October that this was imminent. Finally that rumour has now been “confirmed” by Apple for a 15 January 2008 announcement at Mac World.

I’m buying my first desktop in years, having been laptop-centric since I went to Australia to do my MBA in 2002. I figured I need a desktop for 1) multimedia playback 2) downloads while I am disconnected 3) to efficiently work with virtualisation technologies such as Xen and VMware, which I am increasingly using with my clients in my wikiconsulting practice to help fit rationalise their infrastructure. I of course will still get a laptop but with everything going web-centric and with my change to being self-employed I want my laptop to be less powerful but more portable than ever.

With the Mac laptop purchase imminent I did consider purchasing a Mac desktop. But, those Mac desktops are really extremely expensive for the processing power they provide. And besides, I’d need another machine for running Linux and a few MS Windows Apps I can’t do without. (Some of these I ran in VMware workstation on my defunct X30).

So there I was, thinking through the dilemma, should I buy an overpriced desktop Mac or get a PC? Or both? (I also own a Playstation 3 running Yellow Dog Linux and on which I am typing this article). Here’s my conclusion…

Like the PS3, older Apple Macs (G4’s, iBooks, etc) run on the PowerPC chip making them fundementally unlike PCs which use the x86 family of chips. However, newer Apple Macs (iMac, MacMini, MacBook, MacBookPro) do run on x86 chips, making them very like PCs. So alike, in fact, that since the 2006 switch to x86, Apple Macs are, operating system aside, pretty much using commodity piece of PC hardware inside those branded shiny (and overpriced) Apple boxes. Branding does nothing to detract escape hardcore techies who of course immediately jumped on the challenge of making MacOS run on PCs.

A year or so ago the effort needed to get OSX running on generic X86 was out of the reach of most tech-centric people. Not enough was known about which hardware components and not a big enough community was looking at the problem. I think that has changed. The OSX86 (or Hackintosh) project is really alive, with very well documented lists of what works and what doesn’t and thriving message boards talking through issues. Don’t get me wrong, it’s still the realm of techies: there’s a lot of configuration steps to follow.

So, with this in mind, I set out to buy components that wouldn’t just satisfy my virtualisation needs but to function with osx86 too. After all, in the world of Windows and Linux PCs practically everything can be made to work so the hardware cost is never going to be wasted if I happen to get the exact components that the OSX86 project works best with. My criteria was very simple: buy cost-effective components that demanded the fewest headaches and workarounds. The choice of graphics card is especially important.

With that in mind, here’s what I bought in Toronto, totalling $1060 CAD + taxes, yesterday:

• Gigabyte GA-P35C-DS3R - $155 CAD
• XFX 7600 GT 256M PCI-E - $145.00 CAD
• Intel Q6600 Quad Core 2.4/1066FSB 8M Cache - $279.99 CAD
• Pioneer 212D 18xDVD-RW SATA - $31.50 CAD
• Seasonic S12-550 550W Energy Plus - $119 CAD
• WD500AAKS - $101.99 CAD
• Silverstone Lascala SST-LC13-B Black ATX - $113 CAD

The above were from Filtech, except for the case which I bought from Canada Computers. I usually shop at Canada Computers but they were out of stock of the CPU and graphics card and when things go wrong its easier to have just one company to resolve issues with. The people at Filtech seemed like nice guys

I’ll pick it up this afternoon as Filtech kindly offered to put it together at no charge.

So, what’s next?

1. Partition disk (OS only - I keep data on a RAID Synology Cubestation I bought last month)
2. Hypervisor install - XenExpress or VMware Server on a CentOS base
3. Operating System install - at least Ubuntu, Windows XP - get all programs up so I can work productively again
4. Think about running osx86 inside either Xen or VMWare

If (4) doesn’t work out I can dual boot the machine osx86 and vm, but hoping to get everything subserviant to the hypervisor. After all, what’s the point in having a quadcore machine if you can’t tax it a little?

More than ever, right now is a really busy time. I can see my evenings being booked for weeks ahead!

Footnote:

Apple do prohibit the use of MacOS (OSX), their Operating System, on non-Mac branded hardware. Nevertheless, in this world of increasing remix, such a stance is ignored by many in the tech community. Indeed, many believe that Apple would be well served to encourage the use of their Operating System on PCs whilst Microsoft is hurting from the widespread distaste of Vista. (IfI recall correctly, Apple’s penetration of the laptop market jumped from 23% to 27% from June 2007 to December 2007 while their desktop penetration remains less than 10%).

This entry was posted on Friday, January 4th, 2008 at 10:53 am and is filed under Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.