The way to go about installing OSX on your PC these days are fairly simple. You figure out what instruction set your PC supports – is it AMD or Intel, and does it have SSE2, SSE3? Then you download a prepatched distribution for your particular system, install a vanilla attempt, and start tweaking drivers to get your system working.

Here’s the specs of my system:

Asus P5K-E WIFI motherboard with intel P35 chipset, 1333mhz FSB
Intel Core 2 Due E6550 2.33 Ghz dual core processor
8gb Patriot Viper DDr2 memory @ 800mhz
NVidia GeForce 8600GT 256mb video card
1x WD Raptor 150GB 10k sata hdd, three partitions (liux ext3, windows ntfs, osx hfs+)
2x Seagate 750gb baraccuda storage drives, one NTFS, one FAT32

When I started this process I already had linux and windows running, which I wanted to keep. I tried both the iDeneb and Kalyway distribution and found iDeneb to work the easiest.

I used Ubuntu to create a partition for this install, and left it unformatted as a primary partition on my main hard drive. I popped in the iDeneb 10.5.5 dvd, used the Disk Utility to format this partition as a mac extended (journaled) partition, and customized my installation as follows:

- Kernel: Sleep
- Chipset: ICH*
- Video: NVinject256
- all the available applications (specifically we want osx86 tools)

Everything else you can install later.

Once the install was done it booted into osx (with the cd still in the drive).
From the “applications->iDeneb App->osx86tools” folder in finder I launched osx86 tools, and clicked “Download and Install Hardware Drivers”. This is basically pure awesomeness. It will prompt you to install probe utilities – do so, and then restart the computer. Once you’re back in osx, launch osx86 tools again, open the same Download and Install Hardware Drivers box, and it will start probing for hardware.

I selected “AD1988b” for my audio driver – experiment to see what works! Everything else was listed. IMPORTANT: Before installing, I REMOVED the listed Graphics controller by selecting it and clicking “remove item”, since I found that this driver conflicts with the already-installed driver I selected during setup.

Click “Download and Install”, and after a couple of dialogs your install would be complete. Reboot your computer (keep that disc in the drive) and you should have an awesome setup ready to go now.

Setting up multiboot

I was getting annoyed at having the dvd in the drive to boot osx and I wanted access to the other OS’s on the system. To enable this I wanted to reinstall GRUB on my MBR, which I did by using an Ubuntu live cd, and the help of Restoring GRUB and OSx86 installation guides. Restore GRUB to the main harddrive, then add osx to your grub list.

You should be all set now! Go on and install Quicksilver and enjoy OSx!

PS: Using Parallels desktop, you can turn your windows partition into a virtual machine inside OSx so that you can run all those expensive apps you bought for windows inside osx. its awesome!