What do you do when you have to stay home from work because you're sick, but then you get bored just sitting around doing nothing? Of course, you mess around with old computers. What else would you do?

So I dug out this ancient white MacBook I bought a few years ago:

It's a MacBook 1,1 with a 2GHz Core2Duo CPU and 2GB of RAM. The battery is long dead as is the optical drive, and it has a few weird stains and blue colour blotches on the inside that I can't get rid of, not with Alcohol and not with Acetone, but otherwise it's in pretty good condition. The plastic isn't cracked, the hinges are fine, the screen looks fine after the backlight tube had some time to warm up... it's a nice computer.

It had Mac OS X Snow Leopard 10.6.8 installed which is the last supported version, but it originally shipped with Mac OS X Tiger 10.4.7. I wanted to see what it looked like when it was brand new and so I set out to install a version of OS X Tiger on it. The only problem is, I don't have any of the original restore CDs, and the optical drive doesn't work anyway. But surely there are ISOs available online that I can just write to a USB stick and install from there, right?

Well, yes and no.

There are a bunch of different versions of OS X Tiger available as ISO and DMG images on archive.org, and I naively assumed that I could just download one of them, write them to a USB stick with dd (on my normal Linux PC) and then the MacBook would happily boot from that, but it didn't. Either the drive wasn't even recognised by the MacBook as a boot drive or if it was, it started to boot but then failed before it reached the first screen of the installer. And yes, I made sure I got the Intel versions. So it isn't quite as simple as that.

But it is simple if you know where to look and what to do. After a lot of googling and asking around on Mastodon I ended up on this page from the Hackintosh community which describes exactly what to do and also includes a link to a fully featured tested and working installation image. You can create a USB installer from this image, but you need a working installation of MacOS for this to work. I still had Snow Leopard running on that MacBook, so it wasn't a problem.

So here's the steps very briefly:

• Download the image labeled ACDT from archive.org
• Copy it to the Mac and open it
• Format the USB drive with DiskUtility as "Mac OS Extended"
• Run the following command, adjust the paths if necessary: sudo asr restore -source /Volumes/Mac\ OS\ X\ Install\ DVD -target /Volumes/MyVolume -erase -noverify

And bam, that's it. It took a while to write the image to the USB stick because it's 12GB and this old Mac only has USB 2.0 ports, but after it was done I had a working USB installation medium.

I rebooted the Mac, held the alt key as it restarted to get to the boot selector, selected the USB drive and it booted into the installer without any problems and the installation worked without a hitch. A few minutes and one reboot later the introduction video started, I went through the initial setup (there is a screen which "requires" you to enter your phone number, address and so on - press cmd+q to get out of it) and there we are:

Glossy Aqua interface, brushed metal windows, blue wallpaper... it's all there.

I was never a Mac user, not back then and not now, but I always loved the look of these early Mac OS versions. I even had my Ubuntu themed to look like this around 2007/2008.

So now I can finally do what I assume all the cool kids with their MacBooks did back in the day. Create a website with iWeb, record some music with Garage Band, get an old camcorder and shoot cool skateboarding videos that I can then cut with iMovie and burn to DVD with iDVD...

You know what, I wrote that out as a joke, but it actually sounds like fun. Maybe I should do this.

Well, maybe not the Skateboarding. I'm in my 40s. Some things are better left to the youth after all.