A friend of mine bought a used iBook G4 on ebay and asked me if I could "upgrade" it to 10.5.6. I thought this can't be that complicated and said yes, which turned out to be a bad decision after all. He gave me a disk image file of the MacOS X 10.5.6 Install DVD (6.2GB in size) and the first thing I wanted to do is to burn this dmg onto a dual layer DVD+R recordable. Of course, I did not have such a medium at home and after all, they're not really cheap (~€4 for a good quality disc). Burning dmg files directly onto discs is no possible on Windows as it seems and I don't think that k3b allows for burning dual-layer discs currently, well, I haven't really tried though, so if anyone can confirm that this would have worked, please tell me.
I tried several tools to convert the dmg file to a format which is writable with Nero or any other burning tool on windows, like dmg2iso, dmg2img (the successor of dmg2iso), MagicISO, PowerISO, ... None of them worked. dmg2i* complained about a corrupt plist in the dmg file, MagicISO said that the file is damaged and can't be read or cannot be found (that's an oxymoron, if you ask me, how does the tool know that the files is damaged if one of the possible error causes is that it cannot find the file?), PowerISO said quite the same.
I then wanted to verify the dmg file by trying to mount it with MacDrive, which worked out of the box and I could access all the files in the disk image.

I then booted the old Mac, copied the dmg over there and verified that it really works. I then played a bit with "hdiutil" just to find out that it actually is able to convert the dmg to a CD/DVD Master image (.cdr) with the following command:

hdiutil convert /path/to/filename.dmg -format UDTO -o /path/to/savefile.cdr

After I did that, I had an about 6.2GB .cdr file which I then in turn copied back to my windows machine to burn it there to the DVD DL medium (the iBook G4 did not have a DVD writer, that's why).
After burning the disc I verified with MacDrive that the disc is accessible and plugged it into the iBook then. To my surprise, nothing happened. Well, nothing is not correct, it just spat the disc out again as if it would be unable to read it. I know that the drive in the iBook is capable of reading DVD DLs because my friend burned the dmg file onto the disc and tried to boot off of it (which of course didn't work ).
I then tried to tune the settings of my burning tool, created another .cdr file now with Disk Utility instead of hdiutil which resulted in a 7.2GB .cdr file (the dmg was compressed, mhm) but nevertheless, this image also didn't work on the iBook after I burnt it onto the disc.
After having wasted 4 DL discs, I restored the dmg file on the Mac onto my brand new 16GB usb flash disk and tried to boot from it, which didn't work as the firmware of this specific iBook model doesn't seem to support booting from USB devices (firewire would have been possible, but hey, who has firewire??).

OK, as a last resort, I wanted to somehow install the new version from the harddisk, meaning that I'd have to re-partition it but of course, there was just one partition on the 30GB disk and this partition held the system partition and was not resizable. Duh.

OK, reinstalling with the old MacOSX version (10.3, I think), changing the partition layout to have a spare 8GB partition after the system partition and after the installation has finished, I restored the dmg to this partition and from that point on, everything went smoothly.
After the installation has finished, I removed the second partition again and resized the volume on the first one to extend to the maximum physical space and everything was good again.

Time wasted: ~15hrs
Time worth: ~1500€
Revenue gained: 1 DL disc and a breakfast
Perception: Next time, say no.

A few months of no updates in here, but that'll change now I'm going to write down what really bugged me the last few weeks - at least the stuff I can still remember.

Yesterday I had to do my first (real) bootcamp installation.
Of course as always I didn't read the documentation and I thought it would be more complicated then it actually was.
I guess my biggest mistake was that I assumed that this whole Bootcamp stuff is really cool (well, it has to, hey, it's from Apple!!11).
After starting the bootcamp wizard I created a windows partition and afterwards I put in the Windows CD. After reboot, it started to install everything and when it first prompted me for the destination partition during Windows setup, I realized that bootcamp does not what I expected from it (I thought it would create a pre-defined answer file for the windows installation and does everything automatically).
OK, I then recognized that the partition bootcamp created was FAT32 (!!), hey, that's not really the best platform to run XP on it. At this point in time I wasn't fully convinced that Bootcamp is crap, so I thought "There must be some really important and cool files on the pre-created FAT32 volume" but I still wanted to use NTFS for my windows installation. So I decided to convert the existing volume in the XP installer. Bad idea. After reboot, I got a "No media found" prompt when the system tried to boot from the disk.

I somewhere read that Bootcamp 1.3 was only FAT32, but I had 2.1 installed, so I opted for more. I did a complete reset on this mess and started over just to find out that even leaving the FAT32 partition in place (I wanted to convert it later on) didn't work. Still: "No media found".
OK, so there's definetly something wrong with the bootrecord on this partition and Bootcamp is just an Apple Wizard for "Create a partition and label it Bootcamp" but as you can't label a partition, you need to create a filesystem on top of it and as MacOSX still isn't able to handle NTFS properly out of the box, it created a FAT32 disk (don't know what it would have done when I would have increased the partition size beyond Windows' FAT32 limit).
To keep things short: What finally worked was to let the Windows installer reformat the already created partition with NTFS so that the bootrecord gets created properly.
To make this partition "visible" to MacOSX I had to manually label it "BOOTCAMP" and that's all it took to make this work.

I had to do this today and found out that even in VNC terms, MacOS is different. Usually, running `vncviewer $IP` works as expected, but on my linux box I only got a short flicker and was thrown back to the command line:

tuxx@vi-edv003:~$ vncviewer $IP
VNC viewer version 3.3.7 - built Dec 30 2006 12:48:54
Copyright (C) 2002-2003 RealVNC Ltd.
Copyright (C) 1994-2000 AT&T Laboratories Cambridge.
See http://www.realvnc.com for information on VNC.
VNC server supports protocol version 3.889 (viewer 3.3)
Password:
VNC authentication succeeded
Desktop name "Userâs Macintosh"
Connected to VNC server, using protocol version 3.3
VNC server default format:
  32 bits per pixel.
  Least significant byte first in each pixel.
  True colour: max red 255 green 255 blue 255, shift red 16 green 8 blue 0
Warning: Cannot convert string "-*-helvetica-bold-r-*-*-16-*-*-*-*-*-*-*" to type FontStruct
Using default colormap and visual, TrueColor, depth 24.
Got 256 exact BGR233 colours out of 256
Using BGR233 pixel format:
  8 bits per pixel.
  True colour: max red 7 green 7 blue 3, shift red 0 green 3 blue 6
Using shared memory PutImage
ReadFromRFBServer: rdr::EndOfStream
ShmCleanup called
tuxx@vi-edv003:~$

OK, I thought, let's try the Windows RealVNC client, but the situation didn't change. I then tried to play around with the VNC options and found out that the only way to connect to your MacOSX VNC Server (Screen Sharing service) is using the following command line arguments to `vncviewer`:

vncviewer -encodings "copyrect hextile" $IP

The Windows VNC Viewer would only connect after setting the "Preferred encoding" to "Hextile" and the Colour level to "Full (all available colours)".
I guess you can imagine what having all available colours transferred through a VNC connection means in terms of speed and latency...

Ideas, anyone? (BTW: This does not only happen on my hackintosh, but on a real Apple PowerBook too).

Alright, it seems as if the basic software I need for my daily business is well supported on OSX. Today I installed the latest (to me) available version of the Cisco VPN client for MacOSX (which is vpnclient-darin-4.9.01.0100-universal-k9.dmg) as well as the latest available Citrix ICA Client for OSX. Both pieces of software work as expected, establishing a connection with the VPN client on OSX is a lot faster than on Windows XP or Vista but I'm not very surprised by this because after all, we're on a *nix system here, so well, it seems as if OSX is ready for my daily business. I haven't tried the remote desktop client so far because I don't know where I can invoke it (it's all a bit different in here...) but if that thing works too, I think I could get familiar with this OS.
I still don't know what software I need to have installed on this OS, e.g. antivirus software, spyware stuff, etc. but I'll keep on searching. So if you know a software I should definetly try, please drop me a line here.

Today I did some further testing with my OSX installation. I now know how to input '<' and '>' (simply press the key labeled with '^' on your keyboard to get the '<', '°' for getting the '>'. But more than this, I tried to install some software on top of this system.
Firstly, I wanted to give the 30-day trial of VMware Fusion a try. Installation went smoothly, application looks really nice (really maccy, though, but I got used to it quickly) but when I tried to import a virtual machine copied over from our ESX servers that didn't work. I haven't tried VMware workstation or Server by now, but I think that this won't work either as Fusion seems to have a different file format (let alone the extension which is .vmwarevm).
Exporting one of my VMs as virtual appliance did somehow not work on our ESX setup, but I can try this later on.
No problem, such a virtual machine is created in just a few seconds, I thought. Not having an installation CD at hand isn't a big problem as I'm able to install most operating systems here via our TFTP server, _BUT_: I need to press CTRL-ALT to activate the PXE menu and guess what? Right, VMware releases the input grab if you hit CTRL-ALT.
OK, I know this problem from the Windows versions of this software and clicked through all available buttons and configuration items looking for a place to change the keystroke for input release. Unfortunately, I haven't found it by now but I guess that's not my fault.
VMware Fusion smells like it would love to assist me in any possible way to get my virtualization thinggie done, f.ex. after having created a virtual machine you can't just power it on if you don't have a CD image or physical CD by hand. You need to say "No, thanks, I don't want to boot this VM right now", go into the settings, disconnect the CD-drive (now don't think that this will work, because the radio button down there is still on "use no CD-image" and although you disconnected the CD at all, Fusion complains about an invalid setting... grml) and boot the VM.

The next thing I tried to install was the A1 Mobile Connect Software for MacOSX which works a treat without any further hickups. More to come, tomorrow I'd like to install the Cisco VPN client as well as some other work-related software for testing purposes. I'll keep you updated

It was one of these days when I had nothing better to do at evening than googling around without any special reason. This day was yesterday, BTW, and suddenly I stumbled upon a website describing a method of getting OSX installed on nearly any x86 based PC. I wanted to write this article completely on my new hackintosh, but I just recognized that some of the important keys for writing this blog entry don't work, like f.ex. < or > as well as some other things, so stay tuned, I'll switch back to my other PC and will continue this article in a second...

Well, back to life.
I'd like to summarize the steps needed to get this beast installed (for educational purposes only, of course, doing things like this is illegal as you might have guessed).

First of all, get the patched installation medium of your choice (I chose iATKOS v1.0ir2 which worked quite fine on my system) and burn it to an empty DVD-R.
Boot your system off this medium and follow the onscreen instructions. Before "Agree"ing to the License statements, click on "Utilities" -> "Disk Utility" and create a volume for your OSX installation. Be careful while doing this, you can easily erase all the data on your harddisk(s) with one wrong click!
I for myself didn't want to kill my notebook and therefore I used a currently unused notebook lying around at my desk at work for this experiment. It's a Lenovo Thinkpad R60e, nothing special, but it contains hardware that seems to be fully supported for osX86-like experiments...
When using the entire disk for your OSX installation, make sure to choose the MBR partition type (no Apple or GUID stuff, MBR is just fine) and create a new partition (or format an existing one dedicated to your new OSX installation) with the Apple HFS+ filesystem.
As I've gone about more than ten times through this installation process today I can say that it doesn't matter what filesystem type + options you choose, I decided to stick with "Mac OS Extended (Case-sensitive, Journaled)".

Close the disk utility and read the installation instructions and hints carefully. At this point it is good to know what hardware _EXACTLY_ is built into your target system. I booted a linux live CD prior to installing OSX on this system to get the necessary information. You should print out or write down the output of the following commands just in case:

1. Determine your CPU type and the available extensions
cat /proc/cpuinfo

Pay attention to the "flags" and "model name" sections.

2. Your builtin extension cards and chipsets
lspci

Note the chipset of your graphics card, sound card, wired and wireless
NICs as well as the motheboard chipset.

3. All other relevant information that might help you
dmesg 

Ok, writing down dmesg isn't funny, but you know what you're looking for

4. MAC-Adress of your wired NIC
ifconfig eth0 | sed -n 's/.*HWaddr \(.*\)/\1/p'

This is only needed if your wired NIC isn't supported out of the box and
if the driver to be used has the zero-MAC issue (e.g. after initialization,
the NIC has its MAC address set to 00:00:00:00:00:00)

If anyone is interested in the outputs for my Lenovo Thinkpad R60e, here are the files:

• Lenovo Thinkpad R60e - lspci Output
• Lenovo Thinkpad R60e - cpuinfo Output

Now click "Agree" and choose the destination partition to install OSX to (should now be visible in the wizard after formatting it with HFS+). Before hitting the "Install" button click on "Customize" to make changes to the packages and patches being installed.
I can't tell you what to choose here because that depends heavily on the hardware being used, but for the Lenovo Thinkpad R60e, the following options worked:

[X] iATKOS v1.0i Main System
[-] Bootloader
    [X] Darwin x86 bootloader
    [ ] Darwin EFI
[ ] Patches
[-] Drivers
    [ ] VGA
    [-] System
        [ ] S-ATA
	[X] AppleSMBIOS.kext netkas
	[X] Intel Speedstep
	[ ] Ext2fs
    [-] Network
        [X] IO80211Family.kext 10.4.5
	[X] Wireless patch

Now apply these settings, click install and wait for about 20 to 30 minutes for the installation to complete.

After reboot, try to pull out the DVD to see if the system is able to boot from your harddrive. Mine was not and so I had to look for a solution to this problem which I found here. This howto was written for getting the GUID bootloader fixed so it needed a few adoptions to make it fix the x86 MBR bootloader. Here's the magic:

1. Boot with the DVD
Insert the iATKOS boot DVD and wait for the Darwin/x86 prompt to appear

2. Start a rescue shell
Press F8, then type `-s` at the prompt

3. Change to the bootrecords directory
cd /usr/standalone/i386

4. Copy an image of the partition boot record to your OSX partition
dd if=boot1h of=/dev/rdiskXsY bs=512 count=1

(where X is the disk number and Y is the partition number on which you installed Leo)

5. Copy an image of a valid MBR to the MBR of your hard disk
dd if=boot0 of=/dev/diskX bs=400 count=1

(where X is again the disknumber)
If you already have a bootloader installed in the MBR and want to include
the Darwin/x86 bootloader into the existing bootloader have a look at the
many {dual,triple,quad}-boot HOWTOs available on the osX86 project wiki.

6. Reboot the system
reboot

Take out the DVD, your system should now boot off the disk

If this didn't work for you, don't worry, you can still boot your installed system with the help of the installation DVD. Simply leave it in the drive and wait for the timer to count down, it will then boot your installed system.

Click through the "Customize your MAC" dialogues and try to configure your network. Configuring the network didn't work for me (neither the wired nor the wireless connection), because the wired NIC (Broadcom BCM5751) wasn't supported by the installed kernel and the wireless NIC won't let itself configure with this network setup thinggie, so I chose "This Mac is not connected to the internet" and continued.
So now let's have a look at my NICs.
I found a kext (kernel extension??) file for the BCM5751 cards with the help of Google, copied it on a USB stick and installed it on my Hackintosh as mentioned below:

1. Search Google for AppleBCM5751Ethernet.kext and download the zip-file

2. Copy the zip-file to your Hackintosh (I used an USB-stick to transfer the archive)

3. Plug the stick into your Hackintosh and copy the archive to a temporary folder

   cp /Volumes/<label-of-your-usb-stick>/AppleBCM5751Ethernet.kext.zip /tmp

4. Change the directory and extract the archive

   cd /tmp && unzip AppleBCM5751Ethernet.kext.zip

5. Change the ownership of the contents to meet the system requirements

   chown -R root:wheel AppleBCM5751Ethernet.kext

6. Change the permissions of the contents to meet the system requirements

   chmod -R 755 AppleBCM5751Ethernet.kext

7. Move this extension to the default extension store

   mv AppleBCM5751Ethernet.kext /System/Library/Extensions

8. Reboot for the changes to take effect

After Reboot, your system should recognize the NIC, check this by clicking on "Go" -> "Utilities" -> "Terminal".
Ah, well, the Terminal. Nice, BTW, but not as good as it could be, there are some things that drive me nuts when using this terminal emulation, but I'll elaborate about that later on.

To do system related tasks and configuration, you need to switch to a privileged user. Using `su -` doesn't work (dunno why at the moment, but I'll find out) so you need to use the `sudo -s` command. Enter the password of the user you created during the installation wizard and you should get the root prompt (indicated by the '#' sign at the end of the prompt).
Now type `ifconfig` to see all available network interfaces. Watch out for interfaces named "en0" or "en1". In my case, "en0" was the wired NIC and "en1" was the wireless NIC.
As this all is a big pile of hackery, the BCM5751 kext doesn't read out the MAC-address of your NIC correctly, so it's set to 00:00:00:00:00:00 by default which is bad. Now it's time to get the piece of paper you wrote down the MAC address to earlier and set it manually (please note that setting hw-related options with ifconfig is only supported when the connection is down, so don't plug the cable in or deactivate the interface):

ifconfig en0 ether 11:22:33:44:55:66

Now everything should be set and you should get your network connections up and running. BTW: You'll have to do this after every reboot of your Hackintosh unless you find out how to make this change permanent and if you do, please tell me!
The next thing I tried was to configure the wireless NIC (an Atheros AR5212 in my case), which did sort of work out of the box, but as I mentioned above, the installation wizard won't let me configure it and all of these funky "Turn Airport On" buttons didn't work, so what could I do?

I decided to ask the "OSX Network Assistant" for help by starting "System Preferences" -> "Network". At the bottom of this dialogue there's an "Assist me..." button, click on it. Choose "Diagnostics...", select the AirPort item and click through the wizard. Don't worry if it yells at you with "Can't turn Airport on" in the first place, it was able to activate it in a second try although there was no visual confirmation that Airport was really turned on and so I was very excited to see my SSID in the list of available wireless networks. BTW I'm also unable to control the state of my AirPort with the "tray icon" in the Finder title bar (I don't know what this is called by you Apple guys, so please don't beat me for calling it a "tray icon"). From now on, everything was straight forward, after entering the WPA passphrase, I was connected and online in just a few seconds.
Unfortunately, these settings are not permanent, so I need to walk through this wizard each time I boot my Hackintosh, but I can live with that at the moment. Again, if you know a way of making this permanent, please don't hesitate to drop me a few lines about that.

All other hardware seems to work fine right now, I can play sound, watch movies and according to the "System profiler" I have accelerated graphics too (I can't really confirm by now as I don't know how to do this, but give me some time...). Maybe I'll try to tune the performance of the video card a bit with an article I found on either insanelymac or at the osX86 project wiki, don't remember anymore. It's about turning of some CRT related stuff, etc.
Some things seem to be broken though, e.g. when installing updates OSX complains about "Your computer is not connected to a power source" although it is properly connected (maybe this is due to me having no battery plugged in?) and there are a few other things that seem to be buggy too, but hey, it wasn't supposed to run at this hardware at all, so after all, I'm quite satisfied with the current state of this installation.

As you might know, I'm not a big fan of any fruits (especially apples) and therefore I'm not feeling very comfortable with this system by now, but maybe that'll change once I figured out how to get rid of the remaining annoyances :)

Some questions to be answered:

• How can I input > and < or even a | on this system?
• Why do the key strokes Home, End, Page Up, Page Down, etc. not work?
• Do the Fx-keys have any special function on an OSX system?
• Why does Shift-PageUp/Down not scroll the Terminal window?
• Why does CTRL-U not work properly in the terminal application?
• Why is the Mail application unable to delete Mails on my IMAP server (Error message: IMAP command "UID COPY" failed. Error in IMAP command returned by server)
• How can I get the system back online if it fell asleep? None of the known-to-me key combos work...
• ...

It's already late down here and so I'll stop this entry by now, but there will be updates for sure about this topic, so stay tuned :)

Oh, well, a few additional things:
The windows logo key on your keyboard is mapped to the MacOS option key by default.
Trying to type the '@' sign might kill running applications if you're used to type it using AltGr+q. On your Hackintosh, use "Option (Windows logo key)" + "l (small 'L')" to get the '@' sign.
You should register yourself at http://forum.insanelymac.com because it contains a lot of useful information about this whole experiment and all of the downloads (additional drivers, patches, etc...) can only be downloaded by registered users.
Oh and last but not least, if you're going to make "Software Updates", don't include newer MacOS Versions in your updatery, otherwise your system won't boot anymore after installing this update ;)
If you don't like the MacOS Terminal check for an application called "X11" in the "Utilities" menu. You can get a friendly xterm there which feels like being on a real operating system ;)

Oh, and because everyone likes to see screenshots, here's a screenshot (simply press "Alt + Shift + 3" to make a photo of your current desktop) of my Hackintosh system: