For many years it has been a tradition, that if you wanted to play with Mac OS, you needed to get a mac. If you wanted to play with Windows, you needed a PC. A couple of years ago, that changed dramatically when Apple computers switched to the Intel architecture. From then on it was possible to run Windows on a Mac. More and more the architecture and design of the OSX operating system changed towards this great architecture to the point that its latest version ONLY works on Intel Macs. Time to take a good look at Apple’s revolving doors who only seem to swing one way. Windows on a Mac : No Problem. OSX on PC hardware ? Never gonna happen. Luckily a couple of clever geeks started building

“Hackintosh” systems. With some high-tech tinkering and tweaking they where able to find special and tricky ways to run OSX on your PC hardware. But it required specific hardware, special drivers and quite a lot of hacking. Getting the thing working was far more important then actually DOING anything with the distribution you were using.

I dove down this path a couple of weeks ago in search of a central MAC in the house to use as an Itunes server. Because I did not have any Mac hardware to spare, I tried the Hackintosh distribution IATKOS. I tried and failed to get it working on a physical system, but I DID get it working inside a Virtualbox VM

on my Linux Server. So now I have a central, virtualized Mac, running in my network.

Iatkos is not a “legal” solution if you don’t own a copy of Lion. ( You can download it without having an official version of Lion, but thats not very neighborly of you). It also breaks Apple’s rule that you are not allowed to run OSX on Non Apple Hardware. Wether you break these rules or not is your own prerogative. We don't encourage or condone your behavior, so you get to decide. Have fun with our little step by step guide on getting your IATKOS VM up and running using the free cross platform virtualisation solution VIRTUALBOX.