Run Mac OS X Lion Dev Preview 4 on a 32-bit Core Duo Mac… Sort Of
Many owners of the oldest 32-bit Intel Macs were discouraged when they found that Mac OS X Lion’s system requirements demanded a 64-bit Core 2 Duo processor or newer. These users were discouraged, but not deterred, because some have managed to get the latest Lion developer build running on older Core Duo Macs… sort of.
First some background. In earlier developer previews, running OS X Lion on a Core Duo Mac was just a matter of deleting a plist file and then it would magically boot. Simple enough. That changed in later dev previews, and in Dev Preview 4 things get a bit trickier. Now onto the current state of affairs…
The Bad News
This isn’t really a usable solution yet, because Finder.app doesn’t run (it’s a 64 bit application, therefore won’t run on 32 bit hardware) and launchd consumes too many system resources.
The Good and/or Optimistic News
Lion DP4 is booting on these 32-bit Macs! This means that after the public release in July we will almost certainly see a modified Lion kernel and Finder that runs as expected on the oldest Intel Macs. This is much less of a stretch than some of the other crazy Mac OS X installations out there (remember all those Hackintosh machines running on Atom, Pentium 4’s, AMD CPU’s and other unsupported hardware?).
OK so enough blabbering, let’s go over the process that works right now to boot Lion on ye old Intel Macs.