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OS X licencing issues aside, how does this effort compare to the responsiveness and/or application performance vs. running OS X over Linux via Mac-on-Linux?

AFAIK there are at least 3 efforts to make a COTS PowerPC system that will run Linux, and therefore Mac-on-Linux:

- TerraSoft (which apparently was having production problems or something, but should be commercially available shortly)

- a next-gen Amiga work-alike, complete with OS, whose name escapes me at the moment

- the next-gen Amiga

Well, Mac-On-Linux allows you to run OS 9 or X under Linux.

Yep

There is.

[quote:]
Is there an equivalent of Wine for running Mac OS X applications on Linux/PowerPC?
[/quote]
Yes, it's called "Mac On Linux", available here.
Basically, it boots the MacOS on top of Linux, as opposed to emulation.

You can buy this PowerPC on a card.

Combine it with Mac-On-Linux, and you can run OS X Jaguar on your PC.

Or so I imagine - I certainly haven't tried it.

You can buy this PowerPC on a card.

Combine it with Mac-On-Linux, and you can run OS X Jaguar on your PC.

Or so I imagine - I certainly haven't tried it.

Actually, I've been running the Mac OS on my Sharp Zaurus for a while now. ;-)

What will be real interesting is the potential for a port of Mac-On-Linux on such a device, since the hardware is already natively running on a PowerPC chip.

At any rate, I plan to watch the progress of this device very closely.

Unless you're using Hurd or Windows 3.1, there's almost definately both Quickime and Windows Media for your platform. Stop whining.

It's definitely possible. It works pretty much like VMware, but it allows you to run OS X binaries on any PPC machine.

It does alredy exsist. It called Mac-On-Linux.

Mac-On-Linux

What Is Mac On Linux?

Mac-on-Linux lets you run MacOS under Linux/ppc. MOL runs natively on the processor, i.e. it is very fast. Unlike most mac emulators, MOL can run MacOS 8.6 and later WITHOUT A ROM IMAGE.

Feature List

- Supports MacOS 7.5.2 to 9.2.2, 10.1 and 10.2
- Linux can be booted inside MOL
- Full screen video
- MMU accelereaded X video
- Audio support
- Block device support (Ide, Scsi, Zip, Jaz)
- ADB & USB support for mouse and keyboard
- Ethernet
- Runs natively - good speed!
- Very compatible
- Idle sleep (8.6 or later)
- Session save and restore (temporary unavailable)
- AltiVec support
- Multi-session support

Q: Does it run on i386 hardware?
A: No, MOL can only run on PowerPC hardware since no emulation is performed. However, adding a PowerPC emulator for x86 is under consideration.

This will be one of those things where it's cool because you can do it, but is there really any reason to do it? Kinda like Mac on Linux.

Boy, do I disagree.

If, for example, you've got a laptop, and have needs for both Windows and Linux, a perfect virtual machine environment is absolutely desireable. You can take your laptop anywhere, and simultaneously run apps of different varieties.

I've got an iBook. I'd never have considered switching to Linux without MacOnLinux. With proper virtual machine design, and a native processor, there's no crippling speed penalty either. Even if I had $1200 for another iBook. I've got both right here.

Even with desktop machines, if you've spend $1500 on your primary system, WindowsXP on a virtual machine is going to be a hell of a lot faster than a new $250 machine.

Oh. Wait. You said emulation. In that case, I couldn't agree more strongly. I just don't know of any $250 processor emulation packages. VMWare is just a virtual machine, right?

I wouldn't recommend Windows on any platform if you can get away with it, but Yellow Dog Linux is a perfectly decent linux operating system for the Mac. If you don't want to sacrafice your Apple-branded OS, Mac On Linux allows you to run Mac OS X inside Linux. For added variety, VirtualPC will allow you to run Windows under Mac OS X under Linux.

I think the succes of emulators like Snes9X overshadowed the software meaning.

Maconlinux.org could use a refresher too.

This is great news! Since the Pegasos creators have previously reported getting both Linux and Mac-on-Linux to run, this means that finally people can have a less expensive Mac OS-running system! Granted, technically it's a violation of the OS X EULA to run it on anything but Apple hardware, but it's still a pretty cool idea.

OS X is just whoring the letter X as the X-box is. X was first used in a computer project in X10 and later X11(unrelated, but much more fun).

If OS X is gonna whore the name around, they should do so with style rather than beauty.

To the original author, just do what I did and install Linux on your iBook. If necessary you can run MoL on your dual processing G4 and run it remotely on your iBook. I use MoL for programs such as Bryce and Flash MX with no trouble to speak of. Configuring networking will be a bitch, I warn you.

It's designed to give you a remote virtual desktop for an instance of the OS. It is more like LTSP for Mac than it is like VNC.

Of course, it is not simply another Mac app, and would involve wiping the machine and starting over, so it's not for the faint-of-heart...

Since my iBook2 (600MHz) can't handle the new Quartz rendering in Jaguar, I'm left with a functional - but still slowish - interface under OS X.

In general, though, I get the best of both worlds by running Mac-on-linux, which runs OS X beautifully (all except sound....) with a simple Ctrl-Alt-F8...

Scott

Just looked through the mol docs and didn't see anything about Apple's EULA. What I did see is this: "MOL can run on non-Apple hardware. APUS hardware (Amiga PowerUp System) is currently unsupported, but work is in progress." So apparently it doesn't run out of the box on Amigas, though who knows about the new G4s.

Another interesting tidbit from the front page -- "Linux can be booted inside MOL" ... is that really necessary? Can you run mol-on-mol like this, and keep going until your computer explodes?

What would be really cool is if the MOL guys figure out how to install AmigaOS 4 on Apple PPCs using mol.

until my insurance covers the resoldering of my ibook that's needed for multi-display rather than displaying the same image on two monitors in Jaguar.

Theoretically at least, Linux could run at a higher resolution than the internal LCD. Does anyone know if this would cause permanent damage? Could I develop epilepsy and have my eyes melt out of my head anyways from the flickering on an lcd at a resolution not intended for it?

btw, kudos to the Mac On Linux team; they did one hell of a job. (better documentation for networking support would be appreciated)

(Allows you to tun your Mac OS 9 on top of Linux PPC -- similar to OS X's Classic environment. IIUC, Plex86 would do the same for Wintel... right? Given the potential audience, I never quite understood why there isn't a Win-on-Linux. Is it that much harder?)

Which leaves the question, is there anything like knoppix for the PowerPC?

Office X is written in Carbon, which is a compatability layer to allow Mac OS applications to work seamlessly with Mac OS X with minimal code tweaking. Sadly, Carbon applications cannot easily be ported to other platforms. According to this article, Microsoft's MacBU unit chose Carbon because it allowed them to port their code to Mac OS X in a year.

Even if Carbon allowed for easy cross-platform compatibility, it would be at the source code level and not the binary level. The best hope we would have to run Office X on Linux would be to couple Mac-on-Linux with a fast PPC system emulator for x86. Unfortunately the latter does not exist (to my knowledge).

Is there any emulator that can run OSX? Anything?

The only thing I know of is MOL. Mac On Linux is actually not an emulator but a Virtual Machine like VMWare.

"So, where's mol for Mac OS X?" --Pudge
http://www.maconlinux.org

That's where it is. Seems pretty obvious to me. From the NEWS Page:

Sep 5 Boot MacOS X in MOL 0.9.65!

It is now possible to run MacOS X within MOL. Both
MacOS 10.1 and 10.2 are supported. The new MOL
version also contains support for little endian
(remote) X displays. A couple of performance
improvements have also gone into this release.

"So, where's mol for Mac OS X?" --Pudge
http://www.maconlinux.org

That's where it is. Seems pretty obvious to me. From the NEWS Page:

Sep 5 Boot MacOS X in MOL 0.9.65!

It is now possible to run MacOS X within MOL. Both
MacOS 10.1 and 10.2 are supported. The new MOL
version also contains support for little endian
(remote) X displays. A couple of performance
improvements have also gone into this release.

If you're tied to ix86 or other hardware your best and cheapest way has got to be sf.net and the compile farm that was suggested in one of the other comments.

If you're porting a lot of GUI apps and want to make use of the better parts of OS X (Quartz, etc...) you'll be better off with a real box with you logged in on the console. Search google for "kCGErrorIllegalArgument: initCGDisplayState: cannot map display interlocks" for a glimpse of the frustration you'll be putting yourself through trying to port large apps with only shell access to the build environment.

Shot in the dark if you have a non-NuBus PPC box...
I remember the Mac-on-Linux team was rumored to be working on OS X support over a year ago. Mac-on-Linux is a Linux/ppc application that will run Mac OS 8.6/9.x without a ROM image. Not much use if you're on x86/sparc/etc...

You could run them with Mac in Linux if you have a partition with OS 9 installed. Then you can have Quicktime, iTunes, iPhoto, etc.

Of course the article is talking about some rack servers so why would you really want that?

It already exists... :)

http://www.maconlinux.org/

Not sure if this was directed my comment or the parent, but we agree on the point that both are inferior.

I will comment however, that it seems a PPC processer handles x86 emulation smoother than the reverse. My old G3-500 iMac ran Windows 2000 well--not great--but well. On the other hand, using Mac-On-Linux hardly performed the same on my old Athlon 700.

Granted this could be because infinite reasons (better emulation code, etc.) but it seems that PPC--having the more effecient design of the two would do this better, unsurprisingly.

Stupid thing is, I run Apple hardware, but not their OS.

My only solution for playing Quicktime movies is MacOnLinux, which is cool and everything, but the reason why I run Linux is so that I don't have to run MacOS.

Apple should learn from www.joelonsoftware.com's recent article, and comoditize the player (or a free 'non-pro' version of it) to increase revenues on the encoders.

Heck, I would even *pay* for Quicktime Pro for Linux PPC.

• Yellow Dog
• Linux PPC
• Mac On Linux
• 68k Linux
• MkLinux -the original Mac distro

• OpenBSD
• MacOnLinux which lets you run Mac OS on top of Linux
• Darwin which lets you run the X server and related programs
• Windows if you have to via emulation (which is also very fast.

If installing Linux, I suggest Debian GNU/Linux. I've had better luck with their distro on PPC Macs than other distributions. (Maybe I'm just more used to apt than RPM.)

You might also want to check out MacOnLinux, which lets you run MacOS on top of Linux.

Finally, there's always Darwin and X Windows!

in theory you could install linux on the bebox and then install MacOS using Mac-on-Linux but I have no idea whether it would work. It would also probably violate the MacOS EULA, if you care.

We'd have had it eventually anyway.

Sooner or later Apple will tire of shipping and supporting two OSes, and they'll have to write code for OSX supporting all their technologies.

Once they do, it won't be hard to wrap an emulation layer or two around it for Linux.

http://www.maconlinux.org/sshots/pic10.jpg Yeah, baby. That's how I play games that only have windows versions, and how I run NES emulators.

This gets somewhat close to what you described.

As for the Mac being emulated under MOL, well nothing is really emulated. It uses the native PPC processor. It provides the InterfaceLib library that PPC mac applications use to do their stuff. This is a gross simplification, it also has to do hardware mapping, screen in window stuff, etc but the speed is pretty much equivalent to running the apps on a mac. The MOL team call it a "virtual machine with custom device drivers" rather than emulation. They've done an excellent job.

See the FAQ for a bit more detail, not much though.

I am interested in having a remote MacOS application server on Linux, especially if they integrate VNC service into MOL because the native MacOS VNC server has not been the greatest quality. Before, I was considering doing it with Basilisk II which is a 68k Mac emulator which requires an individually licensed MacOS ROM. Thanks!

If you look at the MOL site, the front page says it doesn't need a Mac ROM. And the User Guide says "MOL can run on non-Apple hardware."

You mean like this?

Running Linux to run MacOS to run Windows 98 to run a Dos VM?

http://www.maconlinux.org/sshots/pic10.gif

Okay... so they are emulating DOS emulated from Windows emulated from Mac and emulated on Linux?


*head explodes*

i think this is cool. more info can be found at maconlinux.org

Great, now I can run Linux, MacOS and Linux all at the same time. Is there anything greater?

I'm curious to know if anyone has tried to operate Mac-on-Linux on one of these boxes, and if they have, what kind of speeds they're getting.

Let's see. Out of the box you get a pretty laptop that comes preloaded with OS X, which is an open source BSD variant down low,

Yeah, except for the patch that's needed to make the Darwin source even be useful (from what I understand - I believe I saw an article that mentioned this on K5). Besides, they're basically giving us source we already had access to (NetBSD, FreeBSD... hmm. both BSD licensed - already had those available to me), so what's so special about that?

with a lot of polished sophisticated commercial goodies up top like display PDF, the most seamless GUI/command-line config synchronization ever done on a Unix, and, well, the elegance that is the Mac UI.

That's not the "Classic" Mac UI anymore, and the reviews are still mixed on OS X's new UI look (aka Aqua).

And you can run any legacy Mac software at near full-speed simultaneously.

Wow, really? I can do that on Linux, too! (/me does [right-click]->Apps->Mac-on-Linux)...

ing us source we already had access to (NetBSD, FreeBSD... hmm. both BSD licensed - already had those available to me), so what's so special about that?

with a lot of polished sophisticated commercial goodies up top like display PDF, the most seamless GUI/command-line config synchronization ever done on a Unix, and, well, the elegance that is the Mac UI.

That's not the "Classic" Mac UI anymore, and the reviews are still mixed on OS X's new UI look (aka Aqua).

And you can run any legacy Mac software at near full-speed simultaneously.

Wow, really? I can do that on Linux, too! (/me does [right-click]->Apps->Mac-on-Linux)...

But then you load up Linux and drop the sound support,

which is being worked on...

the decent video playback,

Really? You must mean DVD playing, right? No? Shrug.

the easy CD burning

Other than being able to burn tracks through iTunes, exactly what CD burning would you be doing in OS X?

and video editing,

What if you aren't doing video editing anyway?

the Mac application support,

Really? I think not. Mac-on-Linux is getting better and better. It's very stable, and lets you run MacOS 9 apps easily, and you can share files and printers easily between the Linux and Mac sides.

the decent web browsers,

Like Mozilla? Konqueror? Even Netscape, if you must?

any hope of running a usable office suite any time this year or next (since you're not on an x86)..

So KOffice, OpenOffice and the developing Gnome apps don't qualify at all?

and the only UI that works well with the one-button trackpad you've got.

And we all know how impossible USB pointing devices are to get. Right?
_____

Sam: "That was needlessly cryptic."
Max: "I'd be peeing my pants if I wore any!"

Let's see. Out of the box you get a pretty laptop that comes preloaded with OS X, which is an open source BSD variant down low,

Yeah, except for the patch that's needed to make the Darwin source even be useful (from what I understand - I believe I saw an article that mentioned this on K5). Besides, they're basically giving us source we already had access to (NetBSD, FreeBSD... hmm. both BSD licensed - already had those available to me), so what's so special about that?

with a lot of polished sophisticated commercial goodies up top like display PDF, the most seamless GUI/command-line config synchronization ever done on a Unix, and, well, the elegance that is the Mac UI.

That's not the "Classic" Mac UI anymore, and the reviews are still mixed on OS X's new UI look (aka Aqua).

And you can run any legacy Mac software at near full-speed simultaneously.

Wow, really? I can do that on Linux, too! (/me does [right-click]->Apps->Mac-on-Linux)...

ing us source we already had access to (NetBSD, FreeBSD... hmm. both BSD licensed - already had those available to me), so what's so special about that?

with a lot of polished sophisticated commercial goodies up top like display PDF, the most seamless GUI/command-line config synchronization ever done on a Unix, and, well, the elegance that is the Mac UI.

That's not the "Classic" Mac UI anymore, and the reviews are still mixed on OS X's new UI look (aka Aqua).

And you can run any legacy Mac software at near full-speed simultaneously.

Wow, really? I can do that on Linux, too! (/me does [right-click]->Apps->Mac-on-Linux)...

But then you load up Linux and drop the sound support,

which is being worked on...

the decent video playback,

Really? You must mean DVD playing, right? No? Shrug.

the easy CD burning

Other than being able to burn tracks through iTunes, exactly what CD burning would you be doing in OS X?

and video editing,

What if you aren't doing video editing anyway?

the Mac application support,

Really? I think not. Mac-on-Linux is getting better and better. It's very stable, and lets you run MacOS 9 apps easily, and you can share files and printers easily between the Linux and Mac sides.

the decent web browsers,

Like Mozilla? Konqueror? Even Netscape, if you must?

any hope of running a usable office suite any time this year or next (since you're not on an x86)..

So KOffice, OpenOffice and the developing Gnome apps don't qualify at all?

and the only UI that works well with the one-button trackpad you've got.

And we all know how impossible USB pointing devices are to get. Right?
_____

Sam: "That was needlessly cryptic."
Max: "I'd be peeing my pants if I wore any!"

So now, we have virtual machines for pretty much all mainstream consumer platforms on Linux.

So, I say again, "Bear in mind that other than pretty windows with shadows, fading menus, and stretchy...uhm, things... what can MacOS X do that Linux can't?"

OS X and LinuxPPC have a great deal of functionality in common but there I don't think that the kind of people who use LinuxPPC are likely to abandon LinuxPPC entirely for OS X. One issue is hardware support; I expect that to be better for consumer-type hardware under OS X but that remains to be seen. Printer support, for example, is currently very weak under the Public Beta but hopefully that will change soon. Some of the big scientific programs that I have compiled took a while to configure under LinuxPPC; there doesn't seem to be any real point to going through the configuration issues again just to get them working under OS X instead of LinuxPPC. Instead, I see myself continuing to switch back and forth for various tasks. I expect there will be more effort to port scientific computing projects to OS X, which will be great, but again, I don't see it as a question of total immediate replacement.