OT: OS X Disk Utility vs Linux

[Kurt Granroth]

Craig White wrote:
> On Sun, 2009-04-19 at 15:00 -0700, Kurt Granroth wrote:
>> Say you are experimenting with dual-booting OS X (hackintosh) on your
>> existing Linux machine.  A word of advice: do NOT let Disk Utility touch
>> your existing Linux drive in any way.  At all!  Not even to reformat one
>> innocent little unused partition!
>>
>> If you do, then when you reboot, the BIOS won't recognize your partition
>> map at all and even grub won't work.  Reinstalling grub isn't enough,
>> either... you'll need to use fdisk to rewrite your partition table.
>>
>> Now back to your regularly scheduled programming... ;-)
> ----
> My own thinking is that 'Hackintosh' is the worst of the Macintosh...the
> software without the hardware. It's the Apple hardware that is
> interesting...the software, meh.

Heh, well, I tend to think the *exact* opposite.  The Apple hardware is
nice, but ultimately replicatable by other hardware companies.  It's OS
X (and iLife and the rest of the software) that gives Apple its unique
edge.  No software == just another PC company.

> The Apple software does some really strange stuff. I actually spent a
> fair amount of time playing with Mac's and partitioning, etc. getting
> old iMac's to work as dumb terminals on LTSP and also installing Linux
> directly on them. Apple requires its own efi code because the Macintosh
> computers don't have standard bios at all.

No doubt about that.