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Run Mac OS X Under Linux

Posted by pudge on from the there-must-be-a-good-reason dept.

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?

5 of 103 comments (clear)

  1. Sounds like VMware for PPC by Van+Halen · · Score: 3, Insightful
    And it even says so in the FAQ, except that the author hasn't ever used VMware, so he can't be 100% sure. The first couple of screenshots look particularly similar to any PC running multiple instances of VMware...

    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.

  2. Re:Wow by foobar104 · · Score: 3, Insightful

    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?

  3. Why? by eswierk · · Score: 3, Insightful
    Providing tech support for Mom is a lot easier when you have MacOS and apps running on your own box at home, even if it is slower than on Apple hardware.

  4. Re:Wow by foobar104 · · Score: 4, Insightful

    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.

    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 /usr/libexec/gcc/darwin/ppc/3.1/specs
    Thread model: posix
    Apple Computer, Inc. GCC version 1161, based on gcc version 3.1 20020420 (prerelease)

  5. Re:Wow by jbolden · · Score: 4, Insightful

    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:

    1) anything that uses the /proc filesystem; which not a small number of apps.

    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