Building a hackintosh, an Apple computer which uses off-the-shelf hardware, can be a pretty daunting task. In the past I’ve struggled with confusing walk-throughs, been frustrated with shitty custom builds of OSX and generally thrown in the towel after about 4 hours of abject failure.

But all that changed when I found this article.

All you’ll need is something reasonably modern – in my case it was the following hardware:

• Gigabyte X48-DS4 Motherboard
• Intel Core 2 Duo 3.2GHz
• 4Gb of DDR2-800 RAM
• Samsung F1 Spinpoint 1Tb

I also didn’t have a large enough USB memory stick, so instead I used an 80Gb 2.5″ hard disk and an IDE to USB adaptor. If your motherboard is able to boot from a USB key, it should be able to boot from one of these too.

Following the guide is relatively easy, but there is one step which was missed (at least in my case), and that’s the installation of Chameleon on your hard disk once you’ve finished the install. Unless you want to keep your USB key permanently plugged in to your system, I’d suggest you go through the boot installer steps again once you’ve finished and use the ID of your main hard disk.

Enjoy!