Psystar's Rebel EFI Hackintosh Tool Reviewed, Found Wanting

CWmike writes "While the world focused on Microsoft's launch of Windows 7, Florida-based Psystar quietly launched Rebel EFI, a software product that should worry Apple a lot more than Microsoft's latest operating system. Rebel EFI allows users to run Apple's flagship operating system, Mac OS X Snow Leopard, on non-Apple hardware. Computerworld test drove the making of a Hackintosh out of a generic PC with the company's new software package and found a product that has a lot of homework still to do. Reviewer Frank Ohlhorst's final analysis: 'Psystar's Rebel EFI (a free trial is available) is an interesting tool, but it is very limited when it comes to the selection of hardware that you can use. The company really needs to create a compatible hardware list and post that on its Web site — and it also needs to create some usable documentation. As it stands right now, you can use Rebel EFI to build a Mac clone, but unless you stick to relatively generic hardware, you will be disappointed.'"

Comments

Or, if we are about the open source,

[James_Duncan8181]

http://chameleon.osx86.hu/
The same, but FOSS. Some even suggest the same codebase, but I of course would never be cynical enough to suggest that or that running strings on both if someone had a spare moment might be interesting.

Re:Or, if we are about the open source,

[Darkness404]

As for unethical, it's not unethical in the least unless you're stealing the code directly

Which is basically what CherryOS was doing. They took the PearPC code, slapped a CherryOS logo on it and distributed/sold it.

It's hypocritical beyond belief whenever somebody says that it's unethical to use Apple software in a way that Apple doesn't approve. Makes me wonder what that makes anybody that runs software based heavily on designs lifted from elsewhere.

I don't think you understand what he was saying. He wasn't saying that it was unethical to use this to run Mac OS X but rather it seems to be heavily borrowed from a F/OSS project much as how CherryOS basically took PearPC and changed it to make it look like a different product. That is unethical.

Re:Or, if we are about the open source,

[Bobartig]

I just searched WestLaw for "EULA End User License Agreement", and came up with 100+ documents, most of them reading over and over "the EULA clearly restricted blah blah", "...were clearly enforceable under California law", "EULA... was a validly binding contract.", "EULA.. was enforceable", etc. etc. Way to post nonsense with absolutely NO research to back it up.

So let me fix that for you.

*HUNDREDS* of cases about violating EULAs have been brought to court in the US, and in many cases, they were found enforceable.

Just a couple weeks ago I was in district court listening to a case regarding an EULA, and discussing various aspects of it. There was no discussion of whether it was enforceable. Clearly it was, but that there was dispute as to the scope of the contract itself.

Re:Virtualization

[ya really]

I am waiting for the ability to run it ala VirtualBox or Vmware Player/Workstation.

It's been done for ages:
http://pcwizcomputer.com/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=75&Itemid=45
It says 10.5.2, but it works with at least the last version of leopard from my knowledge.

Re:Virtualization

[MtHuurne]

You can run a virtual Mac in qemu using the "-M mac" option.

Re:So in other words...

[camperslo]

Pystar is trying to get around Apple suing them for the "clone" of Snow Leopard. This is supposed to be a "generic" MacOS clone..which seems to me would make it pretty much UNIX BSD.

Not sure how that got modded up... it's entirely wrong. While the hardware Pystar has sold might be called a clone (it's just PC hardware with known-compatible chips), they are NOT providing a clone as an alternative to OS X. The OS X that is installed is the actual retail version. They're loading some things to allow it to install (emulating the Mac EFI, IIRC), and providing some drivers/patches to get some hardware to work.

[sigh]

[Space cowboy]

OSX uses the xnu kernel (a derivative of Mach). It is not based on BSD, and only provides a BSD userland to make things easier for developers/users. Xnu is open-source.

Having said that, a huge chunk of the user-visible runtime is not open-source, and Apple maintain an actively protective stance over it. I agree with the lawsuits comment...

Simon.

Re:[sigh]

[TheRaven64]

XNU is a hybrid kernel, which means it's basically a monolithic kernel but it runs something that looks a bit like a microkernel and puts all of the important system servers in the kernel's address space. The Microkernel is Mach, which was released under the CMU license (roughly equivalent to the BSD license) by CMU. Most of the services (e.g. process management, networking, and so on) are provided by the BSD server, which is now mostly based on FreeBSD. You'll note how easily libdispatch was ported to FreeBSD. This is because it uses the kqueue interface to the kernel, which XNU only has because it was copied from FreeBSD (and then slightly modified to support things like Mach ports). Almost any system call you issue in OS X will be serviced by code taken from FreeBSD. The biggest difference is the driver subsystem, which is completely new in OS X.

Re:Virtualization

[snuf23]

From your link:

"As you can imagine, the VMware Fusion team was pretty excited when Apple modified their licensing to allow Mac OS X Leopard Server to run in a virtual machine on Apple hardware."

So in order to run an OS X VM you need to run it on a Mac. Somehow I don't think that would help the original poster get rid of his Mac Mini.