Hackintosh from Start to Finish (Part 3): Key Pre-Installation Concepts

Before we get started installing the operating system, there are a few key things you need to know. Like anything else, there's always a benefit of knowing what you're doing before you go ahead and do it. In the hackintosh world, there's a few key things that will make your experience much smoother. The better you know the following terms and their functions, the easier this process will be for you.

DSDT

• Makes your motherboard able to talk to OS X at the best of it's ability
• Some functions of the Chimera bootloader require a DSDT
• As previously stated, I recommend getting a motherboard that is in the DSDT database.

 Bootloader

• Emulates Apple's EFI, which is required for booting Mac OS X.
• Chimera
• Chameleon
• The bootloader is required to be installed to the hard drive in order for Mac OS X to boot on its own 

Kext

•  Kernel extensions (kexts) are the "drivers" of Mac OS X
• Kexts allow OS X to talk to all of your hardware
• Network cards, FireWire cards, graphics cards, etc 

 MultiBeast

•  The best post-installation utility around
• Installs Kexts (drivers) for the most popular hardware 
• Also installs the Chimera Bootloader, as well as the DSDT
• For DSDT, put the appropriate DSDT.aml on the desktop, and select UserDSDT Install in MultiBeast.
• Install system definitions (Gives your computer the same identity as Apple's computers, such as a Mac Pro or iMac.)
• This can affect overall system performance drastically!  

 FrameBuffer

• Tells OS X the available ports on the graphics card
• Frame buffers are entered in the org.chameleon.boot.plist (located in /Extra folder) file as: 

<key>AtiConfig</key>

<string>Frame Buffer Here</string>

• Here's a list of valid frame buffers for ATI/AMD cards (These don't apply to NVidia cards):

Pithecia
Bulrushes
Cattail
Hydrilla
Duckweed
Fanwort
Elodea
Kudzu
Gibba
Lotus
Iomoea
Mangabey
Muskgrass
Juncus

I hope this post helped you learn some of the key terms in the hackintosh world. Feel free to check me out on YouTube for the rest of my "Hackintosh From Start to Finish" series, as well as a variety of other tech content.