Mac Your PC

The following was all written by FreeBurma one of our very knowledgeable commenters and someone I’ve been working with to bring you guys a perfect retail install which will be unveiled in the coming month. It will be important to know all of this stuff if you would like to persue the Boot-132 method because it is not for the inexperienced user. With that said I would highly recommend reading this series to get in touch with your inner geek and for nothing more for some knowledge on what you are doing. Although the reading may seem daunting FreeBurma has actually done an excellent job of making a very complex concept easy to understand. Happy Readings!

Please comment on if any of these if they helped you and on what you would like to read more of!

It’s incredible that we can have the “it just works” simplicity of MAC OS X on our Dell laptops.  Inspiron 1525 guides like the ones found here make every effort to provide an approachable, non-intimidating, method for installation and maintenance.  Other sources of information, like certain famous forums and wikis can be frustrating at best and send all but the most persistent running for the nearest Windows or Ubuntu disc.

It is impossible to list all of the software that make a Hackintosh possible and the developers who put tremendous time and effort into them.  The boot loaders, drivers, bios emulators, utilities and the rest are improving all the time, getting us closer to the ultimate goal of a clean, vanilla, updatable and easy install.

Unavoidably, these tools and guides can obscure what is going on; what is removed, replace or copied; leaving the user with an incomplete understanding of what has been installed, removed, or modified.  When things go wrong users don’t have the ability to recover and continue from a known working configuration.  Additionally, distributions such as iPC install modified software and add components without the user being directly aware of what’s been changed from a generic system and leave your system littered with .orig folders.  To get the most from your system, enjoy stress free updates, and keep things running smoothly you need some skills and the willingness to take on tasks that Apple never intended to be part of the customer experience.

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Lets get some work done

Before we get to the particulars, a few things.  The commands you are about to see require you to execute them with “Super User” privileges.  On unix and unix derived systems like Mac OS X the super user is known as the root user.  As root you can do what you want disregarding permissions.  You need to be careful.  The difference between these two commands may appear subtle (it’s only a space), but one will remove a single folder, the other will try to remove every file on your system.

‘sudo rm -rf /Users/Me/Myfiles/’ is OK and will remove only the folder ‘Myfiles’ in the home directory of the user ‘Me’.

‘sudo rm -rf /Users/Me/Myfiles /’ is NOT OK.  It will remove the folder ‘Myfiles’ and then start removing files, recursively, from the ‘/’ (root) directory.  This is not a good thing!

If you want to get more information about any of these commands, or any shell command, you can use ‘man’ (short for manual).

‘man ls’ will tell you everything and more you ever wanted to know about the ‘ls’ command (short for list).

This guide and others may contain typos.  For that reason you should hesitate to copy and paste commands into the terminal.  Take the time to type the command, think about what your trying to do, and if your not sure of the exact syntax have a look at the man page first.  Always have a second look BEFORE pressing enter.

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Some final words

Repair permissions

Repair permissions is often seen as a general tonic for a whole range of problems. It’s not. It is considered good form to repair permissions after any major application install or system update. Fire up Disk Utility select your MAC OS X partition and click repair permissions.

Have a strategy

You can save yourself a lot of trouble along the way if you come up with a strategy for managing your extensions. Devise a folder structure and keep everything organized.

One possibility is:

‘/Users/Me/Dell1525/Extensions/New’ – this is were you “land” new extensions.

‘/users/Me/Dell1525/Extensions/Current’ as the base for a copy of your current setup. Inside this folder you create folders for Backup, Installed extra, Installed system. Versioning your backups if there is more than one of something isn’t a bad idea. You get the point, a little time now can save major headaches later. Burn these things to a disc every now and again so that you can do a fresh install without having to hunt down all you extensions.

Rescue disc

If your system panics when booting or you lose your keyboard and mouse, you need a way to get in and fix things.

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