I finally took the plunge and built a Hackintosh. For those of you not in the know, a Hackintosh is an assemblage of PC components that will run the Mac operating system with the help of a few hacks and workarounds. The resulting machine may not be as physically appealing as one of Apple’s products which are undeniably beautiful, but it provides the experience of using one of the greatest operating system currently operating on the cheap.

I’ve been seeing articles floating around the internet for a while regarding rolling one’s own Macintosh from inexpensive PC parts and the idea certainly held appeal for me being that I’ve taken to tearing apart, augmenting, recycling and re-purposing both Macs and PCs rescuing them from an inglorious fate residing in a dark closet or utter destruction in a trash truck or a dumpster. I felt confident with assembling a PC, but what about the hacking part? What if this compilation of processors and chips does not equal a Mac? Sure, I would have a really nice PC that would work wonderfully under Ubuntu or one of the many wonderful Linux distributions, but would I wind up with a Mac? What if I threw together all of the parts and spent a few sleepless nights obsessively chasing down posts on various internet forums only to wind up with a pile of PC parts and utter disappointment? I wasn’t willing to take the gamble. Maybe if things got better wallet-wise, I would, but I couldn’t justify spending a few hundred bucks just now.

My buddy Dan was willing to take the chance, but I had to build it. He ordered the shopping list for compiling a budget-build Hack mini and had it shipped to my place. The parts arrived from hither and yon, and now the ball was in my court. I had to put it together…

TO BE CONTINUED…