I decided to have a look at the current status of the next iteration of Apple’s Mac OS X operating system, 10.6 Snow Leopard on PCs. Snow Leopard is Apple’s response to Windows 7’s aims. That means you can expect a lot of under the hood changes to OS X to make it more efficient faster and fun however will visually be very similar to Leopard.

Currently there is a developer seed of 10.6 Build 10A222 leaked on the net and the OSx86 community have already begun work on it. A lot of Leopard kexts and patches still work under Snow Leopard so you can expect your device to still work, you can also expect full 64-bit mode if your system can support it. Let’s have a look at what you will need to experience Mac OS X 10.6 Snow Leopard on a PC.

Firstly a new EFI compatible bootloader is needed. Chameleon aren’t looking to support Snow Leopard until gold master currently as they are endeavouring to amalgamate the the present spread of patches into a single bootloader now the 64K barrier has been broken, an exciting prospect and congratulations to Zef. In the meantime, Netkas’ own EFI comaptible bootloader, PC_EFI, supports Snow Leopard as of version 9. You can find details of how to install this at Netkas’ blog. With this new bootloader you can try the 64-bit mode using the boot flag -x64.

Secondly if you can’t use a vanilla kernel then you will need a patched kernel. The 10.0.0d3 kernel is recommended for later systems however there is an AMD/Intel legacy kernel available from Dmitrik so have a look for this.

Although Snow Leopard is fairly stable I recommend waiting for something nearer to Gold Master before experimenting and when the whole community will be working on it including the notorious ToH.

(continue reading…)