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And now, something I’ve wanted to try for about two weeks now: installing Mac OS X Leopard on the Samsung NC10 Netbook. I followed a guide from Wired to try and get me through the process. On the "things you need" list, we have:

• A Samsung NC10 (or similar)
• A USB drive of some description
• A copy of OSX86 courtesy of The Pirate Bay
• The OSX86 tools from Wired

Format the USB drive as Mac OS X Extended (Journaled) with "Master Boot Record" selected from the options drop-down.

Choose to restore the OSX86 ISO that you’ve downloaded via BitTorrent to the newly formatted USB drive.

Use the OSX86Tools application to set up the USB drive: click Install EFI/Run FDISK, and then choose "Run Script". Enter your password in the terminal window that appears, then choose 4 to run Chameleon EFI. You’ll have to select which disk and partition you want it installed on. This is the part I had a little issue with – I had to use the exact version that Wired provides (don’t update if it prompts you to).

Eject the drive from your Mac, connect it to the NC10. Boot from the drive, and go through the fairly mundane install process (hint: it’s just like every other install of OS X, pretty much). Reboot, and you have a copy of Leopard running on non-Apple hardware.

This is another place where I had a problem. Because I’ve got Ubuntu installed on the same machine, I’m using Grub to choose which partition to boot to. In Ubuntu, you can cd /boot/grub/ and edit the file called menu.lst. Copy the layout of one of the existing ones (down the bottom), replacing the location of that partition with the location of your OS X partition.

And there you have it. A lot works out the box, including Bluetooth; not included is support for USB and Airport, but that may be forthcoming. One thing I was concerned about was that the USB ports might not work in Windows after installing Leopard either (the Wired article is ambiguous) but they do. This video’s a little crummy, but I needed something to make this post interesting (and distract me from the fact that I’ve been in my room revising for a few days):

Hackintosh from Alex Muller on Vimeo.