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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?

2 of 103 comments (clear)

  1. 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)

  2. 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