Has anybody done this?

I was thinking of giving it a try, but I don’t see how you actually buy the OS, on the apple store it looks like you can only buy an upgrade. Is this actually everything I need to install form fresh, or would I need some original license to accompany it?

Plenty of material online (tonymac).
You need pretty specific hardware to do it successfully.

I tried making a HackPro a couple of years ago, followed the guides on Tonymac, bought the SnowLeopard disc and recommended components etc. It didn’t work. Kept getting Kernel panics during the install. I’m not sure what component wasn’t compatible and didn’t fancy RMA’ing perfectly working parts to try others. So I gave up and installed Win 7.

Plenty of people have done it though so give it a bash.

I was quite lucky in that my i5 PC had a well supported motherboard and graphics card. It took a lot of playing around but I got it working fully.
Great if you like to tinker…

The semi-legit route is that the Apple Store (online at least) will sell you Snow Leopard for £14: http://store.apple.com/uk/product/MC573Z/A/mac-os-x-106-snow-leopard – which you can then update via the Mac App Store.

Read this and the articles it links to: http://www.tonymacx86.com/43-simplest-mac-os-x-installation-guide.html

Can be a bit painful if you’re trying to get it going on any old kit, rather than buying new hardware that is known to work. And if you read all that stuff and aren’t sure it’s for you, it probably isn’t.

I’ve tried it many times, and its always resulted in a nearly-usable system that was almost there but not quite.

Closest I came was a Dell Mini9 netbook. Apart from sleep, it worked ok.

In the end I bought a Macbook. Never looked back.

I’ve done two Dell Mini 10s that have worked really well (apart from sleep). They’re going to be for sale soon if you’re interested (160gb HD and dual boot with XP).

As a user of Ubuntu and XP (home) and OSX and Win7 (work), one has to ask why?

Macs have pretty hardware, but other than being able to use office whilst avoiding Windows, I don’t get the appeal…

I have a spare Hackintosh going (its in the loft)

Right now I’m using a hackintosh as my main PC

Mobo: gigabyte x48-ds4
CPU: Core2Quad 2.3
RAM : 2 x 4GB
Disk 1 (Main) : 256GB OCZ SSD
Disk 2 (scratch) : 2 x 300GB Raptor 10k in RAID-0
Optical : OEM Lenovo cross-flashed to iHAS, and flashed again to iXtreme (for burning xbox360 discs)
GPU 1 : nVidia GTX 260 896MB
GPU 2 : nVidia GTX 260 896MB
Sound: Creative Soundblaster 5.1 USB (model SB1095)
Monitor(s) : 1 x Dell 23″ (1920×1080), 2 x Dell 20″ (1050×1680) (mounted vertically)
Wireless : PCI-Express with Broadcom chip
Mouse : Apple Magic Trackpad
Keyboard : Apple Wireless
Bluetooth : Cheap £4 Amazon USB

Running OSX 10.8, I’ve just not got round to OSX 10.9 yet.

EDIT: Hardware list is probably easier to read!

Yes

Built a mac pro clone 3 years ago and its still going strong and is my main workhorse. Still a very fast and stable machine for what I do.

I7-875k
16 gig ram
Gigabyte H55m board
4 x 1TB drives
Geforce GTX-285
Firewire Audiophile sound

I’ve ran it on Snow Leopard, Lion and Mountain Lion but have reverted back to SL as I like it the best.

Its not hard to do provided you read up plenty before you buy your components. Back when I done it Gigabyte was the Motherboard of choice. Rumour has it that Gigabyte manufactured boards for apple back then.

Did a samsung nc10 a few years ago which worked well after I changed the wifi card.
It was only ever a very poor imitation of a MacBook Air, which I now use.