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Run Mac OS X Under Linux
A user writes, "Just saw at penguinppc that
Mac-On-Linux can now run Mac OS X. Nothing like having Mac OS X running on a VT to switch to and from." Cool, but ... why?
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Maybe one reason is that say a developer is writing a program (be it command-line or X11 based) and wants to see if it will compile and run properly on Mac OS X without having to reboot into Mac OS X or deal with another machine to mess with.
It's use may be a bit limited for the LinuxPPC users, but it kind of fills a niche that Virtual PC and VMware fills (maybe not perfectly, but it's still usable, no?).
Another reason might be someone is required to access an Exchange server for calendar, mail, etc... and Outlook Web Access does cut it (OWA in 5.5 sucks, but OWA in 2000 is cleaner but still has dependencies on IE for some key features)... running Outlook 2001 or Entourage under Mac OS X could fill that part (though Entourage wouldn't provide access to public folders and other things).
Just my thoughts.
As for the questions asking why, I suppose it's the same reason you might want to run VMware on an Intel machine: develop/test for multiple platforms without rebooting; or get capabilities only available in one or the other without a reboot. What would be much more interesting to me is MOL (or equivalent) for OS X. Just like running Linux or FreeBSD under VMware for Windows, it would allow me to run LinuxPPC or maybe even NetBSD under OS X (Classic already takes care of OS 9, and probably better than this program could). And unlike the VMware on Windows case, my host operating system would be enjoyable to use. ;-)
Say hello to zMac.
Uh... Why not?
Granted this screenshot isn't OS X, it should work there as well.
Sorry, nesthigh, I think you missed it. The OP was talking about running OS X inside a MOL instance, and in order to run MOL you have to be on PowerPC hardware. VirtualPC emulates Intel hardware, not PowerPC hardware. So you couldn't do it.
Your screen shot was obviously taken on a Mac running Linux, which was running MOL, which was running VirtualPC, but the chain ends there.
But I have to chime in with others on this one. Given that Mac OS X is superior in every stinkin' way to Linux (flame on!), why-- other than the mountain climber answer-- would you do this?
At this point Linux is the Unix with the most broad support and widest range of Unix apps. If you are running Unix apps Linux makes sense.
/usr/libexec/gcc/darwin/ppc/3.1/specs
What do you want to run under Linux that you can't run under OS X? I mean, we're talking about stuff you'd want to compile from scratch, here, because this is PowerPC rather than IA-32. If it doesn't talk directly to the hardware, you should be able to compile it on OS X with only, at most, minor trouble.
Hell, it's even the same compiler:
Reading specs from
Thread model: posix
Apple Computer, Inc. GCC version 1161, based on gcc version 3.1 20020420 (prerelease)
The underlying systems are really really different. Porting to OSX can be highly non trivial. Think about all the work that went into getting XDarwin to work. A few examples of the problems:
/proc filesystem; which not a small number of apps.
1) anything that uses the
2) Any program that uses an assembly subroutine anywhere
3) Any program that uses elf specific routines
4) Any program that uses a library which can't be ported