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Mac-on-Linux is not like VMWare on x86!! VMWare emulastes an entire x86 machine, while Mac-on-Linux allows direct acess to the hardware by OS X (or some kind of PPC Linux flavor) run inside of it. This is very important because it makes Mac-on-Linux much faster (there is almost no lost of speed)..

Try Mac On Linux (Like vmware for PPC, PPCLinux only obviously)

Or try Sheep Shaver, a portable PPC emulator, although they admit to not being able to run OS X yet. (And you still need a PPC ROM image)

How about a way to run Max OSX apps in Linux???

Well, if you're on a PPC architecture already, there's Mac-On-Linux. Though, I'm sure that by the tone of your comment, you actually meant x86. Well, ask and you shall receive. For the x86 folks (or just about anyone on Linux), there's PearPC. And you know what? They're both open source...

The reason why I wouldn't ditch OS X is because of Mathematica, which AFAIK does not run on PowerPC Linux of any flavour Yellow Dog included.

Hey, to anyone who wants to run Mac-only applications on top of YDL (or probably any Linux distro running on a PPC processor) you might want to know about Mac-on-Linux. Apparently it's capable of running pretty much any version of the Mac OS from System 7.5.2 to OS X 10.3.x, at near native speeds. I've never had the chance to try it myself but it looks pretty interesting. The site says it's not an emulator, which is why it's fairly fast. Check out the multi-session support too. You can run 2-3 different versions of Mac OS at the same time. Probably more, only limited by memory and cpu speed.

WINE does not currently run on PPC hardware, at all, since it is an API implementation, not a emulator. There is a project going to combine WINE with a hardware emulator (BOCHS) and that will then work, but very slowly.

There is a Mac-On-Linux project that is in some ways similar to WINE on x86, and you can run MacOS 9 on top of Linux on PPC. For more information see their site

Don't get me wrong, I use Linux on my IBM laptop all the time, but on OS X I can run the same programs and also all the nice Mac OS X only things like iTunes.

Yes, you can dual-boot. Furthermore, with mac-on-linux, you can run your OSX installation in a window on linux. Not emulation, either...it just boots the os native.

Here's the link to Mac-on-Linux, along with the screenshots.

Here's the link to Mac-on-Linux, along with the screenshots.

Linux won't run on Apple's hardware?

MacOS won't run on other PPC systems? I guess it won't run on non-PPC systems either?

I suppose I won't even ask about Darwin.

Already been done: www.maconlinux.org

On a slight tangent, it would be nice to see Apple embrace this, maybe even help the project out with specs/docs.

I don't see it happening. I'm surprised they haven't gotten around to legally harassing the MOL people yet. I suppose that bit of look-n-feel fun will have to wait for affordable third-party PowerPC mobos to make the scene.

Well, it's not so much WINE-like, but for Linux PPC users, there's Mac-on-Linux, which has worked very well for most commonly used apps (in my opinion).

Not at the moment that I know of, but MoL is apparently being ported to Mac OS X. (This comes up on the mailing list from time to time.)

Not at the moment that I know of, but MoL is apparently being ported to Mac OS X. (This comes up on the mailing list from time to time.)

Mac-on-Linux is a start. I've used it in the past, and it was quite snappy (on par with VMWare for x86). Unfortunately, it is only hosted under Linux. But for guest operating systems it claims to support Linux, MacOS 9, and MacOS X.

I've occasionally had the desire to do some sandboxed work on my Mac (I use VMWare for the PC all the time), but I can't bring myself to install Linux on my Powerbook. Removing FreeBSD and installing Linux on my PC (for VMWare) was hard enough.

But, if you can live with Linux as your host OS on your Mac, give MOL a shot.

-Peter

No, but why don't you just dual boot OS X and a PPC build of GNU/Linux? There's a bunch of distros available (YDL, Mandrake, Debian, Gentoo) for PPC and this new version of YDL will be based on Fedora.

I dual boot an iBook OS X and YDL 3.01. I can even run OS X on a separate console while YDL is running using MacOnLinux and toggle b/w the two. That's got to be faster than emulating an x86.

Yes, you're correct. It runs Yellow Dog Linux (or Debian or Gentoo or any other of the PowerPC variants of Linux) and there's no reason why you can't use Mac-On-Linux. I read a report from a guy doing just that. You may be able to run Mac OS X directly on the briQ but I've not heard of anyone doing that so I can't say so authoritatively. Regardless, it's a nifty device. Pity it costs as much as it does.

You CAN run Mac OS (X) in a virtual machine session under Linux - look into a project called MOL (Mac on Linux).

The only drawback is that it works only on PowerPC based hardware, but I wasn't sure if this was a possibility for you or not. Cheers

Cheesy marketing drivel, yes, but with a grain of truth. At the risk of being moded down to Hades by Mac lovers, let me very carefully point out that to some of us, OS X is not the operating system to end all operating systems. It has some problems (like a clumsy finder that dumps its bloody .DS_Store files all over every filesystem it can get its hands on), some severe limitations (like a Mail program that doesn't do TLS), and lacks important capabilities (no well-integrated office program except MS Office).

Don't get me wrong, OS X is probably the best operating system available for pure-consumer type users. When my co-worker complained to me a few days ago that he caught some sort of dialer virus thingy, I told him (politely) to get rid of the problem (Microsoft) and buy a Mac. Is Linux for him? No. He would be very happy with Apple's closed-world, choice-is-bad philosophy.

Some of us, however, like choice, and don't want to, say, pay extra for modern features like virtual desktops that Apple's engineers consider too confusing for us and are covered by shareware. I want a modern mailer (good grief, even the 0.5 BETA of Mozilla Thunderbird has TLS), I want Konqueror instead of the brain-damaged Finder, I want my right-click-lelf-click-done! mouse back. But I love the hardware: My iBook G4 is quiet under heavy loads, for example, and battery life is good.

Linux on a PowerPC gives you the best of both worlds -- even more so because you can use Mac-on-Linux to run your Mac OS X applications from inside Linux. Nobody is talking about wiping OS X off the computer (well, except maybe for this guy), because, remember, though Bill Gates and Steve Jobs are jealous computer gods, Linus is not. I did dual-boot for years with Windows before swiching completely. You can have your cake and eat it, too.

A lot of Mac people I have gotten to know after buying my iBook have no idea how good KDE and Gnome have become, they seem to think that Linux users still have to figure out the refresh parameters for X11 by hand. With more and more Linux people moving to PowerPC hardware, I think we'll see more discussions between OS X and Linux users. Linux can give OS X a good run for its mon-, er, can force Apple to try harder, a lot harder, in fact. And that is good for Mac fans, too.

Why is this important? Some of us really, really like Apple's hardware -- my iBook G4 was worth the money just because it is silent even under heavy loads, goes to sleep (and wakes) like a charm, and has a pretty impressive battery life compared to most x86 laptops. But OS X comes with a certain closed-system, choice-is-bad philosophy that just drives me nuts. Also, some of the programs included even in 10.3.3 are downright primitive -- Mail doesn't even have TLS in Panther -- and there is no cleanly integrated office package outside of MS Office.

This is where Linux (or dual-boot) comes in: Virtual screens, Kmail, OpenOffice 1.1 without having to boot a second window system, and if you still want to run OS X applications, well, you just do it from Linux with Mac-on-Linux. Hey, have your cake and eat it, too!

I can see lots of people moving to iBooks and PowerBooks and G5s -- heck, in that sense, I'm a switcher -- but keep in mind that just because there is a glowing Apple on the cover, it doesn't mean that there isn't a penguin on the inside. Mac OS X is good if you can stomach its closed-world, Steve-knows-best philosophy, but a lot of people will want the best of both worlds.

Sounds like a job for Mac on Linux!

Not yet! ;-)
It won't be long though... Just put the pieces (1, 2) together, hehe....

Here, if you have decent hardware.

This isn't entirely responsive to your question, but Mac on Linux has been around for a few years. Obviously, you need a copy of MacOS (9, X, whatever) to use it, but that comes with the machine, right? ;)

Perhaps because it uses a video card which nVidia can't be bothered to support on PPC?
Cf.

• (lack of) linux support
• requests to nVidia
• (lack of) response from nVidia

You notice there aren't any projects to run Mac OS apps under Linux.

Au contraire.

It is a fact of a turing machine that any one can emulate any other

It is a fact that they can. However that does not mean that it will be easy.

It'd be slow, but it'd work just fine.

This is exactly the problem: it would be slow. And up until a certain point, it's slow enough you might as well not do it at all. No, there's no commercial demand for PPC emulation on x86; there
doesn't really need to be. People write emulators just because they can. Do you think there is any "demand" for an emulator for the Amstrad CPC? In the meantime, there's some hobbyist demand from people who are "curious" about OS X; there's the guarantee of instant infamy for anyone who succeeds. People have really tried, put a lot of effort into trying to, emulate the PPC on an x86. I've never seen anyone succeed. As it turns out, though, writing a PPC emulator that runs on the x86 just happens to be unbelievably difficult to do with anything even remotely approaching an acceptable speed of emulation due to the neatly mismatching design philosophies of the two instruction sets. Yeah, if there was a real commercial *NEED* for someone to emulate, an acceptable emulator could probably be created. But the issue is a little more complicated than "oh, no one wants it".

If it's Mac emulation you are looking at, well that's a problem. The Mac ROMs are not available outside of Mac hardware, nor is the OS, and without those, it is useless. So to run the emulator, someone would need a legit copy of the ROMs and OS, meaning they'd need to own a Mac. Well if you own the hardware an emulator is worthless.

Not only is this not the hard part, this is the part that has already been solved. Modern macintoshes no longer have anything significant in ROM. The ROM is just a tiny kickstart thing and the OS is booted entirely using the openly documented Open Firmware protocol. This part is a non-issue.

Since the internals of an apple machine aren't that public, virtualizing the hardware might be a little bit difficult.. but, well, not that difficult, as practically all of the work has already been done for you in the form of the mac-on-linux project, a VMWare-like virtual machine for macintosh hardware that will let you boot OS X within a virtual machine on top of Linux. I am uncertain how much extra work needs to be done on top of that when emulating on the PC platform since I don't know what the internals of mac-on-linux look like. However, at the very least, the hardest and most voodoo-y part, actually getting it to boot, has already been done.

As far as the OS goes, you can buy a copy of the Mac OS without buying an actual mac. As in, you can go to a store and buy a copy of Mac OS X 10.3 in a box. This is not unrealistic; just because someone is emulating doesn't mean they aren't willing to actually buy the OS. Case in point, everyone who emulates Windows on the Mac does in fact actually have to buy a copy of Windows.

BTW, just out of curiousity, where are these PPC systems which you say are "available from IBM for reasonable prices"? I may just be going about it wrong, but I'm looking at IBM's website and the cheapest POWER-based system I can find is nearly $6000.

Well maybe, if you consider Mac OS X a game ;-)

Seriously, I think you're way off. On ATI-equipped Macs, Mac-on-Linux is a great way to have both OS X and Linux available, so you can run those not so few applications that haven't yet been compiled natively -- without rebooting, and not so incidentally, get good access to HFS+ from ext2 and vice versa. But no dice on the 12" Powerbook, thanks to nVidia not compiling their drivers for the PowerPC.

Why?

Until they do, or until the tables are turned with Linux-on-Mac, we can't do this because essential laptop functions like sleep, video acceleration and dual display are poorly supported... I encourage people to bring up the issue at every opportunity with Apple, with nVidia, and maybe here.

Well maybe, if you consider Mac OS X a game ;-)

Seriously, I think you're way off. On ATI-equipped Macs, Mac-on-Linux is a great way to have both OS X and Linux available, so you can run those not so few applications that haven't yet been compiled natively -- without rebooting, and not so incidentally, get good access to HFS+ from ext2 and vice versa. But no dice on the 12" Powerbook, thanks to nVidia not compiling their drivers for the PowerPC.

Why?

Until they do, or until the tables are turned with Linux-on-Mac, we can't do this because essential laptop functions like sleep, video acceleration and dual display are poorly supported... I encourage people to bring up the issue at every opportunity with Apple, with nVidia, and maybe here.

Have you tried Mac-on-Linux?

Mac on Linux can do that, and it's free.

As for PPC Linux users who want to use Mac OS X, they can run it at a near-native speed with Mac-On-Linux

VMWare gets its speed over Bochs by emulating as little as possible. Mac On Linux uses the same technique to run Mac OS 9 or X on my iBook inside of Linux.

Boch runs in OS X, but it's rather slow without the plex86 extensions that are X86-specific.

Yes it does.

I mean, MOL runs MacOS 9 or X at the same time as running Linux. Why can't PCs do something similar?

"Question: Is it possible to run OS X on these?"

Yes, through Mac-on-Linux

There is; it runs MacOS 9/X without the need for an actual Mac ROM. The site can be found here.

I have a solution to the Apple question....
Mac-on-Linux

About time someone brought that up. From MoL's FAQ:

Does MOL run on non-Apple hardware?
It does. MOL runs for instance on the Pegasos board, the Teron board and on AmigaOne hardware. In short, MOL should run on any PowerPC hardware (with the except of 601-based systems). However, the EULA of MacOS prohibits its usage on non-Apple hardware (it is of course perfectly legal to use MOL to boot a second Linux though).

They could probably be made to run OSX without too much work. There are existing non Apple PPC boards which are reputed to run OSX either stand alone or through MacOnLinx.

The problem is licensing. The EULA for OSX stipulates that OSX may only be run on Apple hardware.

Or like this ? MacOnlinux
BTW, wasn't there some kind of competition about running as many emulators as possible on top of each other?

/peder

Mac's already come with the best desktop *nix on the market. If you really want to, you can boot Darwin into console mode, into x, or into x over aqua in rootless mode, so there are various levels of geekiness you can choose from. If there's some linux app that you really have to have, well then there are versions of linux that will run on an mac, and macs that you can buy preinstalled with linux. You can even run OSX over Linux. I think in a year or two, there will be more porting to OSX and therefore less motivation to bother with this.

OSX does support two and three botton mice so you can punt what ever it comes with as soon as you get home. Theoretically, carbon can handle as many as 65,535 buttons. With one button, it's option-click or ctrl-click to get that functionality.

You mean virtualized environment.

Mac-On-Linux uses your existing OS9/OS X partition so whatever is installed on that install will be in MOL. If you have mozilla in OS X then you will have it with MOL. It's up to you if you want to use it. Maybe you want to download something directly in your OS X evironment. It's nice to have the option

From the MacOnLinux homepage - "Mac-on-Linux makes it possible to run Mac OS (including OS X) under Linux/ppc .

Bob

Why does Slashdot insist on posting anything "PPC" under the Apple category?

Well, to be annoyingly picky, it's in the Hardware Topic Category. It is in the apple Section, but there doesn't seem to be a PPC section or RS/6000 section or anything closer to appropriate than the Apple section.

Besides, a lot of geeks seem, like me, to be looking for a commodity PPC platform on which to play with LinuxPPC and OS X via MOL. (Yeah, yeah, licensing...tell me you never have anything unlicensed on your systems even temporarily. And some would willingly buy OS X for MOL for 'permanent' use and call it fair use.)

I guess they could've put it in the BSD section, but Books, Ask Slashdot, Developers, Features, Games, Interviews, Radio, Science and YRO seem less appropriate than Apple.

Why does Slashdot insist on posting anything "PPC" under the Apple category?

Well, to be annoyingly picky, it's in the Hardware Topic Category. It is in the apple Section, but there doesn't seem to be a PPC section or RS/6000 section or anything closer to appropriate than the Apple section.

Besides, a lot of geeks seem, like me, to be looking for a commodity PPC platform on which to play with LinuxPPC and OS X via MOL. (Yeah, yeah, licensing...tell me you never have anything unlicensed on your systems even temporarily. And some would willingly buy OS X for MOL for 'permanent' use and call it fair use.)

I guess they could've put it in the BSD section, but Books, Ask Slashdot, Developers, Features, Games, Interviews, Radio, Science and YRO seem less appropriate than Apple.

check out the MacOnLinux homepage, I couldn't find any specific info, but it says right there on the main page, "No ROM needed".

From the Mac-on-Linux FAQ:

Q: Does MOL run on the AmigaOne hardware (or in general, on non-Apple hardware)?
A: It does. MOL runs on any PowerPC hardware (except 601-based systems). However, the EULA of MacOS prohibits its usage on non-Apple hardware (it is of course perfectly legal to use MOL to boot a second Linux thoiugh).

It seems to me as if codecs would be the easiest portion of quicktime to port. One of these days I might get around to setting up sound in MoL.