What I meant about rebuilding the OS was the adaptation of the OS to the particular box and its peripherals. I've got to read through the current 6.x stable and see what's turned on and what isn't in the generic kernel and figure out if the particular network, sound, and probably the built-in monitor chips are supported by the various devices in FreeBSD or X-Windows.
I also read up on Xcode and Darwinports. It's interesting that just reading through the Mac documentation, I was struck by its self-congradulary tone, its lack of concrete info, and the sort of more precious than thou vibe. Suck my dick. I actually got hostile reading it and trying to find what I wanted to know. I was getting the idea that I would come to a point where I had to buy another over price piece of Mac shit, just to get it going. Oh, you need the special eXtreme Panther Pussy Pac to do that---its only two hundred and fifty bucks...
Anyway, I think I going for the Duo-something processor box which is a cool thousand dollars less.
CG