Mac OS X Unleashed

Mac OS X Unleashed

By John Ray and William C. Ray

Pre-Installation Considerations and Tips

In the early days, to be able to install the Mac operating system, all you needed to do was to copy a folder called System Folder to whatever device you wanted to be bootable—that was about as complicated as things could get. In fact, although the Mac OS has its own installation program, you can copy your OS 8 or 9 System Folder to another disk if you want to make it bootable. In OS X, the operating system occupies far more space than just a System Folder. Although they are not viewable in the Mac OS X file listing, there are several directories that are tied to the BSD Unix subsystem and cannot be directly moved or copied to other disks in a user-friendly manner. A few of these directories are listed here:

If these directories are removed from the system, Mac OS X will refuse to boot. Interestingly enough, the actual file that Mac OS X uses to boot the computer (the kernel) is named mach_kernel and is located outside of what appears to be the OS X equivalent of the System Folder.

To be able to successfully install Mac OS X, you must run the included installation program. Attempting to install by copying the files directly from an OS X install CD or from an existing installation will very likely fail.

Evaluating Your Hardware

Because of the additional applications required to support Mac OS X, the system requirements are greater than previous versions of the Mac OS. We're no longer talking about 120MB of hard drive space and 32MB of RAM—instead, Mac OS X requires 128MB of RAM and 1.5GB of available storage.

Note

If you're not interested in using the Classic environment, you can run OS X with only 64MB of RAM; Classic will be inoperable. I recommend upgrading as soon as possible, but the system will boot and be functional.

In fact, the Mac OS X hardware requirements might be steeper than Apple states. According to Apple, Mac OS X 10.1 runs on the following computers:

Unfortunately, although the operating system might "run" on these computers, it is misleading to say that it is usable on all but the most recent Macs. Users of original iMacs and iBooks might want or to stick with an earlier version of Mac OS.

Note

Owners of earlier 604-based Macintoshes (7300, 7500, 7600, 8500, 8600, 9500, 9600) and 604-based Macintosh clones from Umax and Motorola are in luck! An application called Unsupported UtilityX will enable you to install Mac OS X on your hardware. Although you should not expect outstanding performance, it does provide an upgrade path for older Macs. http://eshop.macsales.com/OSXCenter/framework.cfm?page=UnsupportedUtilityX.html.

The general consensus is that a 350MHz G3 is the lowest-end computer under which Mac OS X runs comfortably. If you're using a slower computer, you're likely to experience extreme sluggishness in launching applications, slow startups, and poor multimedia performance. If you're a non-Mac user and your first OS X encounter is on an original iMac, you're likely to swear off using a Mac ever again.

Tip

Although some might disagree with this stance, it seems only fair to point out that Mac OS X is a far greater resource hog than Mac OS 8 or 9. I think that users should stick with the operating system that offers the best overall experience, rather than upgrading for the sake of having the latest version.

Mac OS X is optimized for the G4 processor with Altivec, so G3 users might experience delays in heavy graphic operations such as anti-aliasing and image transformations. The best possible system on which to use Mac OS X is a G4-based multiprocessor workstation; and, if reports coming from Apple are correct, there will be many more such systems to choose from in the near future.

Additional Hardware Support

Although OS X supports the base model machines that are listed on the hardware page, there are a number of issues that might affect the usefulness of any machine. In the shipping version of Mac OS X, there are only a few supported devices ranging from printers Some issues you might experience with OS X 10.1 are documented here.

As you can see, the hardware support at shipping is less than stellar. You should check with your hardware manufacturer to make sure that the critical components of your system will still be functioning after an upgrade.

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