Successful PearPC/Mac OS X Install Documented

rocketjam writes "OS News has an article by a user who successfully installed Mac OS X using the 0.1 version of PearPC, the PPC emulator for x86 machines. He said it took 5 hours to run the first install CD but he did get it up and running on an AMD Athlon XP 1600+ with 512MB of RAM. The article has several screenshots of the Mac OS X install and new user set up running on his machine." See our previous story.

Comments

PPC?

[hypermike]

Pears are better than apples...

Re:PPC?

[bprime]

Never mind your deprecated PPC. My Clan ER PPC 0wns you filthy steiners.

Re:PPC?

[JHromadka]

See? Macs are faster than PCs. PCs are too slow to run OS X! ;)

Re:PPC?

[DigiShaman]

Shouldn't they have called it Oranges?

Re:PPC?

[Anonymous Coward]

There was a company called Orange Micro (IIRC) that made PC compatibility cards for Macs (so-called "emulator" on a PCI card, complete with CPU and RAM and maybe even it's own NIC)... so Pear would be Mac-on-PC, and Orange'd be PC-on-Mac.

Nowadays the Macs are fast enough to handle software PC emulation with decent speed (and have been for a while), so the PC-on-a-PCI-card isn't that neccessary any more :P

Re:PPC?

[Lord Kano]

Nowadays the Macs are fast enough to handle software PC emulation with decent speed (and have been for a while), so the PC-on-a-PCI-card isn't that neccessary any more :P

Unless you want DirectX.

LK

Re:PPC?

[Atmchicago]

If this doesn't work too well it could turn out to be a real lemon!

Ba-ching! I'll be here all day, thank you.

Re:PPC?

[ragecgi]

C'mon, mod my direct parent up! that was dam funny after my long day:)

Re:PPC?

[Anonymous Coward]

Show me any non-game related application (rules out benchmarks like AquaMark, which only tests graphics) that uses Direct3D. For I see no problem in running applications that rely on DirectDraw (yeah, I know, that one's incorporatd into Direct3D since DirectX 8), DirectSound or DirectPlay (DX's network part, FYI)

Not that I have tried running VPC on a Mac (never had a PPC Mac, my latest was a Performa 475), but I suspect the emulated hardware is similar to the PC version in every aspect except the CPU, where the PC version uses (or at least reports) the native CPU directly (which can differ greatly... different makers, models and speeds. Now, the only DX related problems I've had with the emulated hardware in the PC version is with D3D, since the emulated graphics card is an old 2D card (IIRC a 4 MB S3 Trio32 or 64).

Re:PPC?

[Lord Kano]

Show me any non-game related application (rules out benchmarks like AquaMark, which only tests graphics) that uses Direct3D.

3D Modeling?

Re:PPC?

[civilizedINTENSITY]

Again, what about *non-game* 3D Modeling? Thats more likely to be OpenGL than Direct3D. I'm not aware of any Direct3D chem or physics visualization software.

Re:PPC?

[Anonymous Coward]

3D Studio Max uses either DirectX (Direct3D) or OpenGL. It's true.

Re:PPC?

[Anonymous Coward]

Hi!

But they do... MS only keeps Apple on life support to avoid charges of monopolism.

Cheers,
GNU/Wolfgang

Re:PPC?

[ocelotbob]

Of course, Apple users are just expressing sour grapes, seeing as the only 64 bit machine that can run both OS X and Windows has a nice AMD processor inside.

Re:PPC?

[javax]

hell, and I always thought that M$ keeps telling that Linux is a thread to them to avoid that...

Re:PPC?

[javax]

seems like this AMD processur isn't running OS-X, but rather crawling it...

But I'm sure you know that with Bochs the G5 was the first 64bit machine to run Windows & OS-X.

Re:PPC?

[Anonymous Coward]

Why have just one excuse?

Re:PPC?

[Anonymous Coward]

Well yes, but DirectX would be really useful - because nobody produces games for Mac. A lot of people are not content to have a computer that can't play games; they're supposed to be general purpose, not just multiple purpose.

Re:PPC?

[sadtrev]

All the 3D CAD packages I've seen (ProE, SolidEdge, CATIA and SolidWorks) use OpenGL.

As do both the main CFD Packages (CFX and Fluent) and Finite Element analysis

As do all serious image creation software systems that I have seen.

Some of these are OpenGL because they have migrated from Unix workstations, others have always been Wintel and yet they use OpenGL.

Re:PPC?

[JAgostoni]

And oh how fast THAT is... Bochs is slightly more mature than PearPC but let's hope they can learn from each other.

Re:PPC?

[bhtooefr]

x86 on PPC sounds like it's a lot better than PPC on x86.

Re:PPC?

[JAgostoni]

It does ... and that's because the PPC was designed around that idea. However, the grandparent's post was stating the the x86 running PPC was crawling (which it was) but fails to mention that Bochs on a PPC running x86 was probably pretty slow as well. However, VirtualPC seems to be pretty spiffy on a Mac.

Re:PPC?

[bhtooefr]

However, was Bochs using JIT? If not, and Bochs was doing 1/40 speed of a real x86, then with JIT, it'd be pretty damn good.

Re:PPC?

[Lord Kano]

Again, what about *non-game* 3D Modeling? Thats more likely to be OpenGL than Direct3D. I'm not aware of any Direct3D chem or physics visualization software.

Have you ever tried to run an OpenGL program under emulation in a Mac?

LK

Re:PPC?

[zeno_2]

You forgot Heidi

.

Re:PPC?

[DarkVader]

so nobody produces games for the Mac? That's a real surprise to me.

Please quit posting crap like that. It's just not true.

I can see myself using this

[magefile]

I like Mac OS X (Darwin + nice GUI + It Just Works(tm) for most stuff), but I hate the way the mice and keyboards feel. Plus, you can save on hardware by using x86 stuff ...

How efficiently does it run? I.e., how fast/expensive a box do I need to get a normal experience?

Re:I can see myself using this

[zgornz]

read the article

"Of course everything was not running very snappy; on their website they warn you: the emulated processor is about 40 times slower than the host processor. Still, I was amazed at what I saw: it worked!"

At 40 times slower than the host, you'd need one hell of a CPU to use this for as your primary environment.

Get a nice usb keyboard/mouse set, and a mac.

Re:I can see myself using this

[Twirlip of the Mists]

How efficiently does it run? I.e., how fast/expensive a box do I need to get a normal experience?

From the post: He said it took 5 hours to run the first install CD

Sounds like it's not physically possible to throw enough hardware at this thing to get a normal experience at this point.

Re:I can see myself using this

[Luguber123]

It Just Works
With one button - how can it break?

Re:I can see myself using this

[mshultz]

According to the article...

"Of course everything was not running very snappy; on their website they warn you: the emulated processor is about 40 times slower than the host processor."

Judging by that rough estimation, you would need a really fast/expensive box to get good speeds with this kind of emulation, so at that point, you're better off buying a real mac.

You don't have to use an Apple mouse on a Mac if you don't want to- OS X treats the right button of a two-button mouse as a control-click, which seems logical enough..

Re:I can see myself using this

[Bob Davis, Retired]

Oh SO FUNNY!

1992 called. They want their joke back.

Re:I can see myself using this

[Lord Crosis]

I don't think the software is far enough along for you to be able to get a "normal experience" out of it. It's slow even on the fastest hardware. That's not to say that this will always be the case, and this is a huge step forward to that end. First you emulate accurately, then you emulate efficiently.

This screenshot on the pearpc site might give you a bit of an idea of the performance you can expect:

http://pearpc.sourceforge.net/screenshots/kde.pn g

-=(Lord Crosis)=-
Andy Rooney of Borg: "Ya ever wonder WHY resistance is futile?"

Re:I can see myself using this

[TravisWatkins]

Nope, even on top of the line PC hardware its slow as dirt. But there are already people working on ways to speed it up. Expect massive speed increases in the near future.

Re:I can see myself using this

[Twirlip of the Mists]

OS X treats the right button of a two-button mouse as a control-click, which seems logical enough..

Elaboration follows:

On a Mac, control-click sends the target a mouse-button-2 event. If you plug in a two-button mouse, the Mac automatically understands the second button as mouse-button-2. It's not that the Mac is remapping the second mouse click to some other kind of event; just the opposite.

Furthermore, a third mouse button works as well. Clicking the third button sends a mouse-button-3 event. Same with scroll wheels, and so on and so on.

Basically you can plug in just about any USB input device and it'll Just Work.

Re:I can see myself using this

[Anonymous Coward]

Yeah, because we all know that you can only use the keyboard/mouse that you got with the computer. Besides, alot of people swear by the pro keyboard, but that's not the point.

Re:I can see myself using this

[Anonymous Coward]

Yeah, well-- 1999 called, and they want their witty retort back.

Re:I can see myself using this

[magefile]

How about scrolling? Or at least 3 button, with the middle button bringing up the scroller-thingy? Sorry for the stupidity, I've just recently been exposed to Mac OS X after not having used Mac OS-anything since LC IIs. Oh, and I used an LC I and a Mac Classic a few times (only one program on a 5.5 inch floppy, so more appliance-like than computer), but those experiences were 4-6 years ago.

Re:I can see myself using this

[BiggyP]

still, it's probably faster than running the thing on a G3 from what i've heard ;)

Re:I can see myself using this

[Anonymous Coward]

throw it on an 8-way opteron system.

Re:I can see myself using this

[topham]

I bought a logitech wireless mouse/keyboard and the mouse (optical wheel mouse) works just fine with OS/X. It works exactly as you would expect. (Ok, except maybe clicking the scroll wheel.. but then, I find that hard to do anyway!)

Re:I can see myself using this

[Billy the Mountain]

Yeah, well--

#!/usr/bin/perl
$year = 1999;
$retort = "";
while(1) {
$year++;
$retort .= "retort ";
print "$year called, and they want their witty retort $retort back\n\n";
}

Re:I can see myself using this

[BiggyP]

5.5"? Really? I knew apple liked to make things non standard, but "hey, let's add on quarter of an inch to our floppy disc format, that'll get 'em" is surely too much for even them.

Re:I can see myself using this

[crackshoe]

I've run OS X on a beige g3 (233 mHz) and i can gurantee that it runs better than an emulated PPC running at, oh, lets say hypothetically... 70 mHz (2800 mHz / 40 ). Most problems running OS X i've had have been to a dearth of memory, not lack of proc.

Re:I can see myself using this

[Celsius10]

Simple, just run it on a G5.

Re:I can see myself using this

[Anonymous Coward]

<? while(1) sprintf("%d called, and they want their %sback\n\n", 1999 + $c, str_repeat("retort ", ++$c)); ?>

Re:I can see myself using this

[nzkbuk]

So do what most *nix converts do get yourself a regular usb keyboard and a regular usb mouse (though I prefer an optical 5 button M$ mouse)

Just remember that the windows button on the keyboard is really the command/apple key

Re:I can see myself using this

[nocomment]

Well I'm installing it right now on a 2G barton cored athlon xp and the install says it's going to take 3 1/2 hours (that doesn't count the darwin install i had to do prior). Don't expect much out of it. It will install, but look at the version number; 0.1, that's pretty low. I think that's the megahurtz rating. When it get's to version .2 it will run at .2 megahurtz.

Re:I can see myself using this

[drinkypoo]

I have an apple pro keyboard on my athlon xp system and I love it to little pieces. Well, actually, I hope that all the little pieces stay put for the most part. With the slightly unusual key layout I'm going to have to take a digital photo if I want to get it properly reassembled.

Re:I can see myself using this

[HeghmoH]

Macs don't have that third-button "scroller thingy" like on Windows, so the third button can't make it appear. But real scroll wheels work, and you can make the third button do other things (mine activates Expose so I can switch between windows in the same app).

Re:I can see myself using this

[Acrimonious Coward]

I mapped the scroll wheel button to Expose "show all windows" function. Works really well for finding windows with a single button click.

Re:I can see myself using this

[jdray]

I wonder if PearPC will run in Virtual PC on a Mac. I mean, not that you'd want to, but it would be an interesting experiment: PPC running OSX --> Emulated x86 running Windows --> Emulated PPC running OSX.

Okay, enough caffeine for me today.

Re:I can see myself using this

[Anonymous Coward]

You do know that the mouse and keyboard on a Mac is USB, and thus you can swap them for any you like (assuming its USB, which all new ones are)?

Re:I can see myself using this

[fmorgan]

Save on hardware using x86 stuff??? not likely. First, most of the stuff inside a Mac and a PC are actually identical, except for the CPU. And then if you compare a Mac with something more than a machine with memory-to-boot-but-not-to-anything-else:

http://www.macdevcenter.com/pub/wlg/4895

Re:I can see myself using this

[Crizp]

...running VirtualPC again, with the PearPC running OSX with VirtualPC with.... hm. Wonder when it all says *poof* if you try this...

Re:I can see myself using this

[Anonymous Coward]

actually it is really easy to throw enough hardware at it, just type www.apple.com/store into your browser and press enter once you are there buy an emac and you will have twice the proccessor that I run OSX on everyday and it will be faster and look purd, then use zero conf and smb and share your filoe, sounds pretty easy to me and eMacs are like 800 dollars

Re:I can see myself using this

[fmorgan]

>"how fast/expensive a box do I need to get a normal experience"

Maybe when Intel or other release a CPU faster than the G5, so that it can compensate from the emulation.

Seriously, one of the major problems is the small number of registers in the x86 family. It was always easier to emulate x86 in RISC CPUs than the reverse.

Unfortunately, MS bought the company that made emulation soft for Macs (VirtualPC) and now they are taking more than 1 year to release a G5-supported version. OK, there is always bosch, but it's probably as slow as the PearPC.

Re:I can see myself using this

[mrklin]

"Basically you can plug in just about any USB input device and it'll Just Work." As a Mac user, I can tell you that this is not really true. Visit the Mac forums you will see many scanners, all-in-one print/scan/fax devices, etc do not work well on Macs. Many common and modern devices such as KB/Mouse, printers, cameras, etc do just work fine though.

Re:I can see myself using this

[Twirlip of the Mists]

Visit the Mac forums you will see many scanners, all-in-one print/scan/fax devices, etc do not work well on Macs.

Please read more carefully in the future: "Basically you can plug in just about any USB input device and it'll Just Work." A true statement.

Re:I can see myself using this

[Anonymous Coward]

milli-hertz? and here I thought CPUs of today were up to a couple of million hertz... no wonder it runs slow on your computer :P

Re:I can see myself using this

[Anonymous Coward]

and each layer having two virtual child machines... or three, or more... (somebody please build an über-powerful cray and do this :P)

Re:I can see myself using this

[Anonymous Coward]

Basically you can plug in just about any USB input device and it'll Just Work.

... unless you want to switch the buttons around and use it left-handed. Apple doesn't seem to supply software to do this, probably because there is no need for it with the (default) one-button mouse.

Re:I can see myself using this

[Psymunn]

just as long as i can run cygwin in it then i'm happy

Re:I can see myself using this

[Anonymous Coward]

He said it took 5 hours to run the first install CD

Strangely enough, this is how long it takes to run the windows XP install disk on the same system...

[I'm not anonymous, I just can't remember my password...]

Re:I can see myself using this

[Anonymous Coward]

I just want my baby back. Ribs.

Re:I can see myself using this

[AdamJ]

You can use virtually any USB mouse and keyboard with a Mac. I'm using a MS Intellimouse Optical mouse and a Logitech Internet Navigator Keyboard with mine right now - both worked out of the box, although they needed drivers to access some of the special features.

Re:I can see myself using this

[Anonymous Coward]

That's cool 'cause there's about 1,000,000 free apps and preference panes you can download that'll do it for you.

Re:I can see myself using this

[Arker]

Expect massive speed increases in the near future.

I'm not holding my breath. I'm sure it will improve, but not enough that this will be useful outside of special cases. The overhead involved in emulating something like a PPC chip within the limits of the x86 architecture is absolutely incredible, and clever programming can do a lot but it does have limits.

Re:I can see myself using this

[tepples]

At 40 times slower than the host

It's free software. You're free to (pay someone to) add a JIT recompiling engine.

Re:I can see myself using this

[Anonymous Coward]

Uh what's wrong with plugging in any USB keyboard and mouse you want?

Re:I can see myself using this

[Anonymous Coward]

Bosch?

I think you mean bochs, it's pronounced like box.

Re:I can see myself using this

[nuggetman]

Wonder when it all says *poof* if you try this...

When you try to install the Virtual PC inside virtual PC and get an error that reads something like

"No, you cannot install Virtual PC inside another Virtual PC. You just had to try, though, didn't you?"

Re:I can see myself using this

[Anonymous Coward]

Nope, even on top of the line PC hardware its slow as dirt

but I do believe with the proper mind-altering substance, it would be quite possible to have "a normal MAC user experience"

Re:I can see myself using this

[TravisWatkins]

Ask and ye shall see pain: OS X on WinXP on OS X

Re:I can see myself using this

[mroch]

I think alt becomes the command key and the Windows key becomes alt/option. At least that's the way my Logitech keyboard is labeled...

Re:I can see myself using this

[senatorpjt]

Bosch. He needs spark plugs for his gas-powered computer.

Re:I can see myself using this

[Ianoo]

I'm pretty sure a scanner is an input device ;)

Re:I can see myself using this

[flimflam]

What? Why the hell isn't VirtualPC running on the PearPC?

Re:I can see myself using this

[Twirlip of the Mists]

THEY STILL REFUSE TO JOIN US IN THE 21st CENTURY AND MAKE A MULTI-BUTTON MOUSE.

Because God knows, nobody else's mice work on Apple computers.

Look, let me see if I can explain this to you using small words so you don't get confused.

1. Apple sells computers. (We've gotta start somewhere.)

2. With each Apple computer come a keyboard and a mouse. When you go to the Apple store, you don't have to tell them that you want a mouse. One comes right there in the box.

3. Apple believes, rightly, that the zero-button mouse is the right choice for the majority of their customers. So dropping the zero-button mouse in favor of something else is not an option.

4. If Apple designs and manufactures a three-button mouse and offers it as an option, customers who want to buy it will complain about the mouse that comes in the box with the Mac. They're complain that they're being asked to pay for two mice when they only want one. There will be strongly worded posts to Slashdot about the Apple "mouse tax."

5. If Apple removes the mouse from the Mac box entirely, then all customers will have to buy a mouse separately, which will annoy everybody equally. Annoying a very small number of your customers is fine. Annoying all of your customers is bad business.

6. In any case, building a different mouse would pose all sorts of logistical problems. (Oops. "Logistical" isn't a very small word, is it? Well, that's okay. Just skip ahead if you get scared.) There are questions of packaging, bills of materials, additional part numbers, separate warranty processing... it'd be a mess. An unnecessary mess.

7. So what's the best option for Apple? To manufacture a three-button mouse, stock it, and offer it for sale to customers who want one, I guess. That way the majority of Apple customers, who are quite happy with the zero-button mouse, won't notice a change, and the other customers will have a choice.

8. But wait. Some customers will want a two-button mouse, some will want two buttons and a scroll wheel, and some will want three buttons. Crap. Now Apple has to manufacture four different kinds of mice.

9. Okay, so we have our optimum scenario. Apple customers all get zero-button mice, and those who want one have the option of buying one of several different kinds of other mice.

10. Which is, you'll notice, exactly like the status quo, except Apple has to spend a lot of money designing, building, packaging, stocking, and distributing mice.

Why doesn't Apple make a three-button mouse? That's why.

And also because Steve doesn't like you.

Re:I can see myself using this

[Martin Blank]

OK, now that's just sick. /me goes looking for a Mac and a couple of gigs of RAM... :)

Re:I can see myself using this

[Kazymyr]

Here's an idea: why not put a PowerPC chip on a PCI card and use that to run the instructions natively, with the emulator front-end being a wrapper for the hardware (and possibly provide the rest of the emulated system)?

Like older macs used to have a PC compatibility card.

Re:I can see myself using this

[MidnightBrewer]

I use "x86 stuff" with my Mac in order to save on hardware, too - ATI card, Seagate SATA drives, Kensington mouse, etc. I didn't like the default keyboard and mouse that came with the Dell I had a few years ago, either, but that's not why I don't have a PC now.

Re:I can see myself using this

[Twirlip of the Mists]

I'm pretty sure a scanner is an input device

You're wrong. A mouse or keyboard or similar input device complies with the HID (human interface device) device class specification. A scanner belongs to the Image class. Totally different drivers.

A scanner is not an input device.

Re:I can see myself using this

[gl4ss]

no you can't.

you can only see yourself whoring for some karma.

two things that are wrong: a) it's too slow for using and it should be obvious from the writeup. and b) you can use just about any keyboard and mouse with a mac anyways.

.

Re:I can see myself using this

[Jaysyn]

I bet one of these might be able to run it at a semi-usable speed.

Jaysyn

Re:I can see myself using this

[Warhaven]

If quantum computing becomes a reality for consumers, it would be interesting to see how this (and emulation in general) fairs. With no clock, the processor(s) will run as fast as is needed. So emulation shouldn't take any hit at all.

Wow...that would seriously change things in the OS market, being able to run your favorite operating system, then emulate whatever you can't run natively just as effectively as your primary OS.

Re:I can see myself using this

[Anonymous Coward]

I'll be impressed when it is Linux on WinXP on OS X on WinXP on Linux on OSX on BeOS

Re:I can see myself using this

[sean1121]

Sure, but install VMWare inside of VirtualPC inside of VMWare...

Re:I can see myself using this

[p4ul13]

It's turtles all the way down....

Re:I can see myself using this

[iMacGuy]

1/40 speed is with the x86 JIT. The generic core is 1/500 speed.

Re:I can see myself using this

[user no. 590291]

So how does that make a scanner not an input device? You've stated it's not an HID device, and I agree, but it's still an input device.

Re:I can see myself using this

[TheLink]

I heard it probably won't work because x86 CPUs don't provide so good support for virtualization and VMWare relies on virtualization.

Apparently there's no way to 100% hide the fact that stuff is being virtualized on x86s.

Whereas it's possible on PowerPCs. IBM has been doing virtualization for decades ( and likely holds tons of patents on it).

Of course you can resort to emulation, but that's really really slow.

Re:I can see myself using this

[nzkbuk]

I could be wrong, but then again each keyboard could be different.

I have a small usb keyboard with a built in hub on my TiBook (which I'm using to write this) and the windows key is certainly acting like the command key.

Re:I can see myself using this

[Leeji]

Wow, that's actually pretty snappy! With two levels of emulation, I was expecting it to take a few more minutes to load!

Re:I can see myself using this

[Newtonian_p]

It has already been done:
maconwinonmac.jpg

Re:I can see myself using this

[1000101]

I was right there with you until #3: 3. Apple believes, rightly, that the zero-button mouse is the right choice for the majority of their customers. So dropping the zero-button mouse in favor of something else is not an option.

Let me just call bullshit. Not one of my friends who use Macs (about ten of us) use the mouse that came with the Mac. ALL of us have bitched that we had to go out and buy a 3-button scroll mouse. ALL. I find it extremely hard to believe that the majority of Mac users prefer the zero-button mouse. No way.

Re:I can see myself using this

[mroch]

Heh, I use this keyboard on my Linux box and I've actually never tried an external keyboard on my Mac, so you win. :)

Re:I can see myself using this

[dgatwood]

I joked about the exact same thing a few months ago. You can buy them from Newer Technologies. The hard part is figuring out how to get them running OS X with virtual hardware drivers that talk thorugh a PCI DMA window to Linux drivers. After that, you have a fairly snappy 500 MHz G3 inside your Athlon for about $200.

Re:I can see myself using this

[Kazymyr]

Hmm, yeah, the Crescendo 7200 G3 (the only card I see there that actually installs in a PCI slot). Uses on-board memory... Interesting. All that's left is writing the software.

Re:I can see myself using this

[Enahs]

I could see this being viable if, and only if, they do some sort of JIT compilation, or something similar to what ARDI did years ago with Executor. IIRC Executor could keep track of what code had run repeatedly, and convert any oft-run code to native machine code. I just remember that it ran the MacOS apps that actually would run at acceptable speeds.

I doubt Apple will be happy if PearPC ever grows any intelligent compilation features like this, because it would mean that their OS would run on generic hardware. I predict that if it ever happens, the price of the OS will go up (thanks, guys) and the license will become more Draconian (thanks again.)

Re:I can see myself using this

[lucaschan.com]

I'm using a MS 5 button mouse, and I'm getting this keyboard soon.

http://halfkeyboard.com/tactilepro/index.php

Re:I can see myself using this

[Anonymous Coward]

Then again, Steve Jobs has millions in the bank a hot wife and two cool companies... you still live with your parents. So yeah, I am sure you can teach good ol' steve a couple of things about marketing.

Talking about pot calling kettle back...

Re:I can see myself using this

[Anonymous Coward]

They also have G4 processor on PCI card

Re:I can see myself using this

[Anonymous Coward]

You have got to be kidding yourself. Too much paperwork and redtape to build a new mouse? LOL.

Apple comes out with hundreds of new products every year, but a new mouse would bring their entire operation to a grinding halt. Can you hear yourself?

I just love the part about part numbers... that's friggin' classic! Well, at least it should become a new Slashdot classic.

Why hasn't Duke Nukem Forever been released yet? They're still working on the part number.

Why was Half Life 2 really delayed? They're still working on the part number.

Re:I can see myself using this

[BiggyP]

I seem to recall an awful lot of G3 mac users being extremely unimpressed by the performance of the Aqua GUI on their hardware, i'm not making any kind of attack on your G3 system.

did you fail to notice the wink?

Re:I can see myself using this

[Stonent1]

It says that no matter what the speed of the underlying system. I did some OpenSSL benchmarks on a few different systems and they all came up the same scores. (Exactly the same) I think this will change as the emulator matures.

Re:I can see myself using this

[Kazymyr]

Actually I don't see any. What they call "Crescendo/PCI" cards are made for the PCI PowerMacs, but install in a PDS slot, not PCI. The Crescendo/7200 is special - because the PowerMac 7200 doesn't have a PDS slot, they had to make it for the PCI. It appears to be unique, and comes only in G3 flavor.

Re:I can see myself using this

[kitzilla]

THEY STILL REFUSE TO JOIN US IN THE 21st CENTURY AND MAKE A MULTI-BUTTON MOUSE.

Idiots! What could they be thinking?

Most (though not all) Mac users have two hands, and are sufficiently coordinated to find the Control button on their keyboards. Most Mac users are accustomed to operating this manner, much as you are accustomed to typing in all caps when you think your opinion is more valid than someone else's.

If you can afford a Mac, you can probably afford a three-button mouse -- if you want one. That's not saying much, though, since a decent IR USB mousie can be had at any Wal-Mart for twenty bucks.

I decided to give Apple's mouse a try when I bought my last Mac. I really like the way it feels, and have gotten used to control-clicking when necessary. The big payoff is that I have FAR less trouble with carpal tunnel syndrome than before. It's not just that I'm performing a new clicking motion -- it's a simpler movement that doesn't place stress all along one set of ligaments. Cool.

So I have a spare three-button mouse for any impoverished Mac user sufficently outraged by Apple's stock unit. If it will make your Macintosh experience a bit less harrowing, drop me a note and I'll send it along. It's the least I can do.

Re:I can see myself using this

[bhtooefr]

RTFA, and realize that PowerPC is a BITCH to work with on top of x86 (that's also why x86 emus work so well on PPC when they're JIT). This 1/40 performance IS with JIT.

Re:I can see myself using this

[Twirlip of the Mists]

Sigh.

The USB specification defines different device classes. The class called "input devices" is made up of keyboards, mice, and similar things. Scanners aren't in the "input devices" class. They're in the "image devices" classes.

It's really not that hard, you know. You should be able to grasp this.

Re:I can see myself using this

[mclaincausey]

Hey dipshit, Apple is about usability and efficiency. Having to use two hands to do what can easily be done with one is antithetical to Apple's modus. Not to mention the scroll wheel and all the time it saves. Not to mention the THIRD button. CTRL-click is a ridiculous model to use. Once you have used a programmable three button, scrolling mouse, particularly with Expose, you can't go back to a one button mouse. As for the caps, that denoted SHOUTING, because I was yelling at Apple, who keeps shooting themselves in the foot, forcing Mac users to buy products from Apple's #1 competitor Microsoft, by their pigheaded adherence to the one button handicap. I WANT to buy an Apple mouse because Apple makes excellent products. No one who has to right click often, like a programmer and graphic designer like myself, or people in audio/video/effects (you know, Apple's key professional markets) uses Apple mice. That could easily change, and millions of dollars could be made, with one reasonable decision. Who's going to buy the Apple bluetooth mouse? Almost no one. They keyboard, sure... not the useless mouse. I went Logitech instead.

Re:I can see myself using this

[redJag]

My Logitech is labeled the same way, but if you just use the default drivers it is the other way around. Logitech's drivers switch them (or uControl, in my case).

Re:I can see myself using this

[Twirlip of the Mists]

Hey dipshit, Apple is about usability and efficiency.

No. Apple's core philosophy is to make great products. Sometimes great products have an element of efficiency or ease of use, but more often they're great for other reasons. A great product can be highly baroque, for instance, because baroque things can be beautiful.

Having to use two hands to do what can easily be done with one is antithetical to Apple's modus.

That's why nothing in Mac OS X requires the use of either a control-click or a second-mouse-button click. Some highly specialized applications like Shake and Maya do, but they're hardly common.

Once you have used a programmable three button, scrolling mouse, particularly with Expose, you can't go back to a one button mouse.

I use a zero-button mouse because I have repetitive-stress injuries in my hands from years of typing. Clicking with just one finger is a little painful for me.

My niece uses a zero-button mouse on her mom's Mac because she's too young to have good manual dexterity. So not having to worry about any buttons is easier for her. Just mash.

My mom uses a zero-button mouse for the same reason.

See, the whole "programmable three button, scrolling mouse" thing is unique to you. It's how you like to work. And that's great, because for just a few bucks you can buy a mouse and do what you want.

The rest of us like things just the way they are, thanks.

As for the caps, that denoted SHOUTING, because I was yelling at Apple, who keeps shooting themselves in the foot

Apple has been consistently profitable since 1998. That's something like 24 consecutive quarters of profitability, which is virtually unprecedented in their industry.

What are they shooting themselves in again?

I WANT to buy an Apple mouse because Apple makes excellent products.

Apple doesn't want to sell you one because there's no good business case for it. Railing about it won't help.

That could easily change, and millions of dollars could be made, with one reasonable decision.

Millions of dollars? Just how much do you expect Apple to sell these mice for, exactly? Say they sell them for a reasonable price: $20. They'd have to sell 50,000 of them just to make a million dollars in revenue. The profit on a $20 mouse would be, at the very most, about five dollars. Now we're talking about 200,000 units sold to generate a measly million bucks in gross profit.

Just how many of these suckers do you think Apple will sell? One for every ten Macs? One for every 20?

Oh, that's right. You think every Mac owner will buy one. Riiiight.

Don't quit your day-job, okay? It's clear that you've got no head for business.

Re:I can see myself using this

[batzo]

Scroll wheels work fine in OSX, as does middle-mouse-button pasting (within the same terminal, only on 10.3+)

Re:I can see myself using this

[Jimithing DMB]

And I bought a used Mac and used it with an MS trackball for the longest time then it died so I bought the zero-button mouse like I use with my Mac at work.

I typically get some wrist pain from using a traditional 2 or 3 button mouse which is why I started using trackballs over 10 years ago. Now that I know how a mouse is supposed to work I haven't looked back.

There is something very nice about the zero-button mouse. It fits nicely in my hand, which is amazing because I have very large hands with long fingers. The oblong shape seems to promote good mousing technique. I notice my wrist is always straight when I'm using it. Because I do have such long fingers they actually hang off the front of the mouse quite a bit so to click I am actually pressing down with my three middle fingers (index, middle, and ring) using the entire length of my fingers to push down rather than just pressing buttons located at the tips of my fingers.

Do I miss the three button mice that I'd become accustomed to? Maybe a little but not really. Whenever I am prone to right click I just use my left thumb to hold down the control key for a bit and that is that. I usually rest my left hand just to the left of the keyboard which is why control is often under my thumb. When I'm really using my computer I have both my hands on the keyboard anyway and just move my hand onto the mouse for brief moments to move the pointer and click.

I am a software developer and I do my text editing with gvim (no mouse involved there) and compiling using the command-line. I find that the mouse is best used for the very limited purpose of moving the pointer around and clicking. There is no need to clutter it up with extraneous functionality when the keyboard can provide everything. Why do I need a scroll wheel when there are plenty of movement keys on the keyboard?

Still, I will also admit that I'd find it impossible to use Windows or any of the popular Linux desktops with a Mac mouse. None of them are designed with 1 button in mind. For instance, Macs inherently have "gestures" which make 1-button mousing easier because you can always quickly hit the menubar and select a command.

For me, the hinged mouse is quite ideal. I'm sick of people bitching about how multi-button mice are somehow superior to the hinged mouse. To me, a multi-button mouse is like training wheels for the keyboard. If you are in fact using a Mac full-time I urge you to try out the oblong hinged mouse that comes with recent Macs. Force yourself to use it with your OS X machine for a month and then tell me how much you like your bulky 3-button mouse compared to the lightweight and easy to click hinged mouse.

Re:I can see myself using this

[1u3hr]

you would need a really fast/expensive box to get good speeds with this kind of emulation, so at that point, you're better off buying a real mac.

I picked up a G3 Mac for nothing (had to buy some RAM and hard disks though). With a KVM I can switch to Mac OS instantly. If I needed to, could put both machines on a LAN to exchange files (haven't needed to do that much so far). Funnily enough I have vMac on the Mac to emulate older Mac OSs (7 and earlier).

Re:I can see myself using this

[MayonakaHa]

Why not make the mouse type an option at time of purchase? Instead of either forcing everyone to use the same stupid "zero"(actually one, the entire mouse is really a big button) button mouse or taking the mouse out and making everyone buy it, give them the one they want included in the cost.

Those who want the traditional Mac single button mouse gets it and those who request a multiple or scroll version gets one.

Re:I can see myself using this

[chasingporsches]

i don't feel like searching through the million comments on this topic, but people like you fail to understand that Mac OS X does not *need* "right-clicking". I know, its a foreign concept to you. But on windows, say you want to change your wallpaper. you can either right-click the desktop and go to properties, or you can go start/settings/control panel/desktop, which is more of a PITA. but on mac os x, control-clicking the desktop and choosing "change wallpaper" is about as fast as clicking system preferences in the dock and clicking "Desktop". you aren't saving yourself time, you aren't gaining anything from control-clicking. only on a few instances (i.e. saving images from web pages) do you need to control-click, and that doesnt justify a multibutton mouse (and saving images can be done by dragging the image from the website into a folder, not requiring a control-click at all). if you're running linux on your mac, yes, you might find a multibutton mouse useful. and games? yes. but 99% of apple consumers do not *need* a multibutton mouse like you would think. get past your train of thought that multibutton mice are the norm -- in fact, they are a cheap cop out for good user-interface ease-of-use design.

Re:I can see myself using this

[kitzilla]

Ah, glad you bought your own mouse. Wasn't that easy? But I had your back ...

Re:I can see myself using this

[Anonymous Coward]

Although I agree with your post in that apple should continue shipping a 1 button mouse, I disagree that apple couldn't offer a mouse themselves.

Notice that apple sells a wireless mouse and keyboard. There's no reason why they wouldn't be able to sell a multi-button mouse. They wouldn't have to necessarily make more than one.

In reality I think if they did sell a multi-button mouse, it would be very interesting. Maybe it would have a scroll-wheel like the ipod, maybe it would be something completely new (and even as a 'new' thing, it would completely make sense). You can be assured that they'd try to push it in interesting ways.

That's why I want to see a multi-button mouse from apple. They can perfectly well sell it as an additional item, like a wireless mouse, iPod or AirPort.

forgottenPassword

Re:I can see myself using this

[jimmydevice]

I once wrote a bell labs cardiac cardboard computer emulator running on a fortran emulator running on a HP 2000-F basic system. It ran at an almost human computing speed of one instruction / sec.
Let's see you boot "anything"(1) on top of that.

(1)In your lifetime, with no "defined" storage and 100 cells / memory elements

Re:I can see myself using this

[kitzilla]

That's why nothing in Mac OS X requires the use of either a control-click or a second-mouse-button click. Some highly specialized applications like Shake and Maya do, but they're hardly common.

Exactly. You *can* right (or control) click to save an image, for instance. But you can also just drag it right off the document.

This three button/no button mouse argument is such a worn-out troll. OS X supports whatever you want: plug and play. Most Mac users are used to a single-button mouse, and that's all you need. But if Windows mouse behavior is what you prefer, just plug in your favorite Logitec or Kensington. Works fine. Sons of Redmond, rejoice!

About This Particular Mac had a review not long ago of MacMice's The Mouse, which seems like the sort of thing a Mac partisan might go for if he or she wants a traditional-looking mouse that also had two buttons and a scroll wheel. Looks like it just rolled off a Cupertino production line.

Re:I can see myself using this

[beeblebrox87]

There used to be a G4 version of the Crescendo 7200 (info here ) but I'm not sure it's available anymore.

Re:I can see myself using this

[beeblebrox87]

How about?:
MacOS 6 running on vMac running on
DOS 5 running on MacBochs running on
MacOS 8.1 running on BasiliskII running on
Windows 98 running on SoftWindows running on
MacOS 9.2 running on PearPC running on
Windows XP running on VirtualPC running on
MacOSX 10.3 running on MacOnLinux running on
Linux 2.6 running on a G5.

Re:I can see myself using this

[boesOne]

Doesnt look too convincing. Check both clocks: OSX clock is 11:09 PM Emulated winXP clock is 10:48 AM.. Pretty slow emulation..

Re:I can see myself using this

[user no. 590291]

The classification by the USB folks is irrelevant--they input data into the computer, and thus are input devices. Nice attempt to bait me with the "you should be able to grasp this, though." That's why you have such a following :).

Re:I can see myself using this

[Twirlip of the Mists]

Why not make the mouse type an option at time of purchase?

Because Apple's customers don't want to have to deal with it. Remember what I said about how annoying all of your customers is no good?

Those who want the traditional Mac single button mouse gets it and those who request a multiple or scroll version gets one.

That's exactly how it is now. Except the people who want the eleven-button HOTAS mouse with the joystick and the two tiny wheels also get a free zero-button mouse for their trouble.

Re:I can see myself using this

[phlapjack77]

"see the turtle of enormous girth
upon his back he holds the earth"

Re:I can see myself using this

[Anonymous Coward]

Well, he did say "USB input device" so technically he is right (assuming that everything he has said so far is factually true).

Re:I can see myself using this

[chrwei]

you can even plug a single button mac usb mouse into a PC and it will work, though with no right click options... and the short cord on the apple pro mouse makes it REALLY hard to use

Re:I can see myself using this

[Anonymous Coward]

He didn't say "USB HID."

Re:I can see myself using this

[Twirlip of the Mists]

and the short cord on the apple pro mouse makes it REALLY hard to use

Why? Doesn't it just plug into the keyboard?

Re:I can see myself using this

[Vaccinated by MacOS]

Most likely it would make Windows run more stably...

Re:I can see myself using this

[Wiwi Jumbo]

"but on mac os x, control-clicking the desktop and choosing "change wallpaper"

...is a dirty hack for right-clicking.

:-)

Re:I can see myself using this

[longbottle]

More like not monetarily possible...

Re:I can see myself using this

[drsmithy]

If Apple designs and manufactures a three-button mouse and offers it as an option, customers who want to buy it will complain about the mouse that comes in the box with the Mac. They're complain that they're being asked to pay for two mice when they only want one. There will be strongly worded posts to Slashdot about the Apple "mouse tax."

I have a revolutionary idea. How about the 3 button mouse "option" *replacing* the default mouse, just like "options" from every other manufacturer do ?

I realise Apple may want to take a softly-softly approach to such devestatingly advanced innovation, but Apple really needs this sort of outside-the-square thinking if they want to expand their market.

Who knows, in a few years we might even see Apple selling an affordable, sans-monitor machine !

As an aside, since it would appear in the Apple world "options" actually come *as well as* standard equipment and not *instead of*, could you shed any light as to why my G5's only has a single hard disk, despite me choosing the larger-sized "option" ?

Re:I can see myself using this

[Twirlip of the Mists]

How about the 3 button mouse "option" *replacing* the default mouse

Then every Mac becomes a build-to-order. Manufacturing costs go up, and delivery times go up, and that doesn't address the retail angle.

Who knows, in a few years we might even see Apple selling an affordable, sans-monitor machine !

Why?

Re:I can see myself using this

[drsmithy]

Then every Mac becomes a build-to-order.

No, it doesn't. The single button mouse is standard, the multibutton mouse is an option.

Having numerous hard disk and memory "options' doesn't appear to have made all Macs BTO, why should mouse options be any different ?

Manufacturing costs go up, and delivery times go up, and that doesn't address the retail angle.

Your assumption is flawed, hence so are your conclusions.

Who knows, in a few years we might even see Apple selling an affordable, sans-monitor machine !

Why?

Because it is the only real gap in their product lineup. Heck, if they were clever, they could do it for practically nothing by making the iMac screens modular and using the screen modules to replace the existing LCD range.

Re:I can see myself using this

[mclaincausey]

No. Apple's core philosophy is to make great products. Sometimes great products have an element of efficiency or ease of use, but more often they're great for other reasons. A great product can be highly baroque, for instance, because baroque things can be beautiful.

Ridiculous argument. Apple ISN'T baroque, and never has been. Apple has always been simple, usable and efficient. That's been one of the key selling points for years. They haven't made great products that just happen to be usable, the products' greatness is derived in great part from their usability.

For instance, the iPod is the easiest and most efficient mp3 player. It also supports more formats, has great integration, but the main selling point is the UI engineering of both the iPod and iTunes.

That's why nothing in Mac OS X requires the use of either a control-click or a second-mouse-button click. Some highly specialized applications like Shake and Maya do, but they're hardly common.

That simply isn't true. There are plenty of unaliased commands in many situations in OS X that require a secondary click. Examples include customizing toolbars, assigning labels, configuring/enabling folder actions. Or in a commonplace app like Safari, Google searching selected text. Apple engineers its consumer and professional software to use secondary, and even tertiar, clicks.

Some of the UI engineers who worked on the original Macs have admitted it was a mistake not to make the original mice 2 button. The fact that Apple has cultured some of its user base to be happy with the inneficiency of a one button mouse doesn't mean it's an efficient model.

Apple has been consistently profitable since 1998. That's something like 24 consecutive quarters of profitability, which is virtually unprecedented in their industry. What are they shooting themselves in again?

The foot. Have you looked at market share lately? Are you aware that Apple never pays dividends to shareholders and like most Silicon Valley corporations doesn't include paid stock options in the annual expenses? This is millions of dollars of business they're pissing away. Sure, include the "Pro" (my ass) mouse.... but offer a good one too. G5 sales are sluggish, everything is behind schedule... They're missing our on millions of dollars in sales due to supply chain problems... The iPod wave may have crested, or might soon... That extra cash could really help, because hardware sales are down and they have just announced a retarded schedule of major upgrades to OS X.

Apple doesn't want to sell you one because there's no good business case for it

That's simply not true. Almost EVERY single professional Mac user would buy a nice multibutton mouse from Apple. That's plenty of money considering the low cost of engineering and manufacturing such a product.

Just how many of these suckers do you think Apple will sell? One for every ten Macs? One for every 20?

I imagine the numbers would be around one in every 5 Macs sold, and possibly more if it were included as an upgrade option, because people who would never have bought a third-party mouse would buy a well-designed Apple mouse just because it was an Apple mouse, particularly if it shipped with good features, like a wire/wireless (BT) option.

Don't quit your day-job, okay? It's clear that you've got no head for business.

I guess that's why I've successfully brokered $multimillion deals with Target, Westinghouse, Menard's, Lowe's, and Wal-Mart a few times each.

Enjoy your trailer, putz.

Re:I can see myself using this

[Twirlip of the Mists]

The single button mouse is standard, the multibutton mouse is an option.

I covered that already. This is exactly the same as the status quo, only it involves Apple spending a lot of money building a product that very few people will buy.

Having numerous hard disk and memory "options' doesn't appear to have made all Macs BTO

Apple doesn't spend any money building hard drives or DIMMs, last time I checked.

Because it is the only real gap in their product lineup.

There's no market for it.

Re:I can see myself using this

[drsmithy]

I covered that already. This is exactly the same as the status quo, only it involves Apple spending a lot of money building a product that very few people will buy.

Very few ? I'd be willing to bet a significant proportion of Apple buyers - possibly even a majority - would *love* a mouse matched to the rest of their system (how many Mac users do you know of that buy aftermarket mice ?). After all, one of the big attractions of Macs is their aesthetics.

An Apple branded, designed and supplied mouse that comes with the system is *not* the same as buying one from a third party.

Apple doesn't spend any money building hard drives or DIMMs, last time I checked.

Well, based on their prices you'd think they did. They certainly charge ferociously for them.

Apple spends money developing other optional extras like Airport, Bluetooth, their wireless keyboard and the like. What's the difference between them and a mouse ?

There's no market for it.

Yes, there is. The enthusiast market for one, all the people who already have a perfectly good screen but want a new Mac for another. Not to mention business and educational markets would also love them.

Re:I can see myself using this

[Iron Chef Unix]

I have a revolutionary idea. How about the 3 button mouse "option" *replacing* the default mouse, just like "options" from every other manufacturer do ?

..Don't get sucked in, don't get sucked in, don't... aarrrrghh.

1) Go to the Apple store (store.apple.com).

2) Type "mouse" in the search box.

3) Voila! Apple mouse, apple mouse, 3-button trackpad, 3-button mouse, 3-button mouse, 3-button trackpad.

I don't think Apple's goal is to obliterate the 3-button mouse off of the earth. They just would rather spend their money elsewhere. They provide 3rd party mice in their store.

I doubt that most computer manufacturer's mice are their own. They are mostly rebranded mice from other companies.

So, why should Apple put money into developing a mouse when you can buy one from another company that works just fine? Plus, you can find exactly the one YOU want, instead of moaning that "Apple doesn't make a mouse with the bell/whistle I demand".

Basically, all anyone is moaning about is that Apple includes a 1-button mouse in the box. Why?

Apple starts you off with the basics, and if you need more, go get it.

Re:I can see myself using this

[gryphokk]

I never get that "40 times slower" reference.

What unit of 'Slowness" do they multiply by 40? is it a negative number?

Or do they must mean it runs 1/40 the speed of the host?

Re:I can see myself using this

[drsmithy]

So, why should Apple put money into developing a mouse when you can buy one from another company that works just fine? Plus, you can find exactly the one YOU want, instead of moaning that "Apple doesn't make a mouse with the bell/whistle I demand".

Because Apple expend a great deal of effort telling me how their platform is a one-stop, integrated, "complete solution". Having to go out and purchase a third party mouse that doesn't match the rest of the system does not match this image.

Not to mention the whole laptop thing - you *cant* replace the mouse in a laptop.

Basically, all anyone is moaning about is that Apple includes a 1-button mouse in the box. Why?

Because Macs are expensive computers. Generally, when I purchase something expensive, I expect it to be a better match for my needs than something cheaper.

People aren't moeaning about Apple including a one button mouse in the box, they're complaining that a company marketing its products as "all you'll ever need" and emphasising the aesthetics of the package (while charging a premium price) *don't* cater to a very simple and very basic option.

One of the big marketing and selling points of Apple equipment is how cool is looks. Plonking your third party mouse down next to your iPod, Apple keyboard and iMac (or G5 tower) is just ugly.

Re:I can see myself using this

[Anonymous Coward]

Because Apple's customers don't want to have to deal with it. Remember what I said about how annoying all of your customers is no good?

Why don't you just say that all Apple ecustomers are idiots who can't handle more than one button right out. It's the same as always, only zelots lying to eachother at apple.slashdot.org.

Re:I can see myself using this

[netsharc]

Strangely, a friend of mine here in Germany wanted to get an iBook, and he got to choose which keyboard layout he wanted -- english or german. I assume there are other layouts for other countries. So they do offer choice for that part, unlike other laptop manufacturers who usually just offer the local keyboard layout.

OS X Panther Here

[TravisWatkins]

I've gotten OS X Panther to install as well, you can see it here. Took about 7 hours on a Duron 1.6Ghz with 512MB SDRAM.

Re:OS X Panther Here

[Anonymous Coward]

Question: Did you actually go out and buy a retail version of OS X just for this project, or did you download a warezed version?

Re:OS X Panther Here

[chaos421]

anyone know how long the install would take on a comparable macintosh?

has anyone run any speed tests yet?
are the pearpc people doing this all with reverse engineering? i suppose that would make it legal... i can't imagine apple is happy with this. although, to be honest, who has the need for macos at around 1/100th the speed? it won't be an alternative for those doing image manipulation... sounds like an exercise simply for fun.

Re:OS X Panther Here

[TravisWatkins]

Borrowed a CD. Not as bad as downloading, not as good as buying. But it isn't usable, so I don't think it really matters. I plan to buy a real copy if this gets usable.

Re:OS X Panther Here

[Anonymous Coward]

The point is, most poeple won't bother to go out and buy this,so PearPC will bring absolutely no profit for Apple. And this is why Apple should never bother to port OS X, because most people would end up pirating it. Apple makes their money off the hardware, and if they let that go then they are "teh doomed" as the kids say.

Re:OS X Panther Here

[TravisWatkins]

It should take 3 hours according to the installer. I suppose on a good Mac that would be a lot less. The specs on the processor are available, so I wouldn't call it reverse engineering.

Re:OS X Panther Here

[Twirlip of the Mists]

anyone know how long the install would take on a comparable macintosh?

Less than 10 minutes.

has anyone run any speed tests yet?

Yes. It took seven hours to complete a task that a Mac would have done in under 10 minutes. ;-)

Re:OS X Panther Here

[MikeXpop]

I did a fresh install of OS X.3 on a 600 MHz iBook awhile back. Took about 45 minutes.

Not sure if that info will help or anything, but should give you some idea.

Re:OS X Panther Here

[Crizp]

Not _quite_ sure but a puff in the right direction; when I had a PowerBook 15" (667 MHz G4, 512 MB ram) it took about an hour. For all CD's.

With the newer faster DVD+R drives on a new G5 I guess it goes quite lickety-split according to a Mac zealot friend of mine.

Damn, I want a PowerBook again :(

Re:OS X Panther Here

[Anonymous Coward]

Total CPU emulation is slow...

Re:OS X Panther Here

[crackshoe]

I've found the OS X installer always lies. on average, i'd say my OS X install time on various machines is around an hour and a half.

Re:OS X Panther Here

[MikeXpop]

10 minutes? Are you talking about a preinstall (IE what the machine's loaded with when you buy it) or are you really talking about a full install? Or are you just a zealot?

Re:OS X Panther Here

[TravisWatkins]

Not always. I believe some older emulators (m68k) have gotten about 70% native speed. Then again, they didn't emulate an OS that relied so heavily on graphics.

Re:OS X Panther Here

[HTH NE1]

Does it matter?

Mac OS X is licensed only for "Apple-labeled computers"(*). So even with a retail version, installing it on a PC emulator would still be a violation of its license agreement.

(*) This is stronger than earlier agreements which licensed the software for computers bearing the Apple logo. This updated term implies that the label must be applied by Apple and not be simply an Apple sticker applied by the consumer. IANAL.

Re:OS X Panther Here

[Anonymous Coward]

This updated term implies that the label must be applied by Apple and not be simply an Apple sticker applied by the consumer.

Damn.

I got some Apple stickers with my iBook, and I stuck one to the back of the screen of an old 640kB, dual floppy, 8086-based laptop. Does this mean I won't be able to run Mac OS X on it?

There's also an Apple label stuck to the lavatory...

Re:OS X Panther Here

[Jeremy Erwin]

A. This license allows you to install and use one copy of the Apple Software, on up to a maximum of five (5) Apple labeled computers at a time as long as those computers are located in the same household and used by persons who occupy the same household.

The single use license similarly restricts use and installation to one "Apple labeled" computer.

Re:OS X Panther Here

[Fred IV]

The single use license similarly restricts use and installation to one "Apple labeled" computer.

Masking tape, marker, problem solved.

Re:OS X Panther Here

[andreMA]

Fresh Panther install on a 400MHz G3 PowerBook was in the neighborhood of an hour... perhaps a tad less... just another data point that seems consistent with yours.

About the same time, I installed it on a dual 500MHz G4, but I wasn't hovering over it so can't say how long it took.

Re:OS X Panther Here

[Twirlip of the Mists]

Well, given that in the time since I last posted, I went downstairs and blew the dust off of my old iMac (400 MHz G3) and installed Panther on it, I'd say I know whereof I speak.

I didn't stopwatch it or anything, but it was less than 10 minutes.

Re:OS X Panther Here

[bluekanoodle]

While I have yet to hit the 10 minute mark, if you don't choose all the extra fonts, and printer drivers, the OS X install is surprising zippy. On both my 12 inch powerbook and 15 inch i can do a nuke and pave in about 15 to 20 minutes. That sure as hell beats my XP box's 45 minute install times. My Suse Box is sitting here reinstalling now and its pushing an hour, but then that's with almost everything.

Re:OS X Panther Here

[Autumnmist]

7 hours?!?!?!

Doing a minimal install of 10.3 on a 2.4Ghz Pentium 4-M took me four, including the setup.

Re:OS X Panther Here

[eclectic4]

Hour and a half? Dude.

What are you installing them on, Beige G3's? Original iMacs? I install 10.3 all day and an Archive and Install takes max 25-30 minutes on two year old Dual 866's. Turning off printer descriptions and localization brings that number down even further.

Just curious.

Re:OS X Panther Here

[mr_zorg]

Masking tape, marker, problem solved.

But now you're in violation of copyright and trademark law...

Re:OS X Panther Here

[crackshoe]

Moslty beige g3 and the blues. My g5 takes about 25 minutes. but that was an average.

Re:OS X Panther Here

[Otter]

Yup, on a TiBook with a not very fast drive a clean install is certainly under 15 minutes, probably closer to 10. Desktops run about 10 minutes.

What on earth are you running that you think a preinstall could possibly take 10 minutes?

Re:OS X Panther Here

[severed]

Heck, all that's blazingly fast compared to my last gentoo install.

$> emerge system

2 Days! :-)

(But it was worth it, probably the coolest linux install I've ever done)

Re:OS X Panther Here

[Have Blue]

Powerbooks always have slower disks than the desktop models, and installations are very disk-intensive. A recent desktop could easily hit 10 minutes.

Re:OS X Panther Here

[ReadParse]

That's a good point. If there was a story today about a fantastic new computer that does in 10 minutes what previously took 7 hours, and it only costs a couple of thousand dollars, we would all be waiting in line to get it.

Don't get me wrong... I'm a cheap bastard also. But it's funny that people would actually go through this process. Emulation of x86 on a PPC makes more sense than the other way around, because if you were running both a Mac and Windows, you would certainly want to run the Mac as the HOST and the Windows as the DOG. The main reason emulation is needed is because there are hoards of Windows-only programs that Mac and Unix users have to use. Not so in reverse.

I appreciate the whole "because it's there" thing, but I don't think I'll be rushing to install OS X on an x86 machine when I have a perfectly good PowerBook (mine) and dual G5 (my employer's).

RP

Re:OS X Panther Here

[klui]

I've done a clean install of OS X 10.3 and I've included everything except HP/Canon printer drivers and it did it in around 25 minutes on a G4@800MHz and 896MB of RAM. I added X11 and Far East Asian fonts, which is not included in the default. Source drive was a Yamaha 16X CD-RW.

Re:OS X Panther Here

[Geoffreyerffoeg]

Apple can be seen as a generic term - in fact, I would be completely legal if I ripped off a brand sticker from an apple (the fruit) and stuck it on my PC. Then it would be "apple-labeled". Does capitalization have any weight in court?

Re:OS X Panther Here

[heydonms]

yes one "Apple labeled" computer, I assume this computer wasn't apple labeled and so you can do the install on as many of these machines as you like.

Re:OS X Panther Here

[arekusu]

It's worth pointing out that 10 minutes is for installing from optical drive, which is terribly slow.

If you run a lab, you install over gigabit ethernet via netboot, and your complete nuke&install happens in about THREE MINUTES, no joke.

Re:OS X Panther Here

[Tim C]

Does capitalization have any weight in court?

Intent does, and I don't think you'd get very far at all playing semantic games like that, were it to come to a court. The intent of the licence, that you can only run OS X on Apple hardware, is clear.

(Insert disclaimer about such licences not having been tested fully in court, yadda yadda)

Re:OS X Panther Here

[babbage]

I recently upgraded eight Macs to 10.3, and they generally took 35-50 minutes to upgrade from OSX 10.2 to OSX 10.3. All of these computers are 1.0-1.25 ghz G4s with 0.75-1.0 GB of ram; a couple of them have dual processors. These were full upgrade installs of most system components, including BSD & X11, but not including the full package of printer drivers (only HP support was needed) and not including any of the localization packages. I took notes and would be happy to get into detail if anyone is curious, but to give an overview:

• On a dual 1.25 ghz G4 with 768mb of ram took 20 minutes to finish disc 1 of the Panther install, and the full install took about 35 minutes. A twin of this machine came in at about the same time.
• A single 1.0 ghz G4 with 768mb of ram took about 45 minutes.
• Two single 1.0 ghz G4s with 1 gb of ram each took about 30 minutes.
• Another single 1.0 ghz G4 with 1gb of ram took about 50 minutes, but for that one I forgot to deselect the localization files so it had to spend time installing half a gigabyte or so of localized interface data.
• Another single 1.0 ghz G4 with 1 gb of ram took about 70 minutes, but I'm not sure what the bottleneck was. This was the first one I upgraded and I wasn't taking as many notes of the process. Going from start to install disc 2 alone took 60 minutes, but it may be that I was away from the desk and simply gave it more time than necessary to finish.

These times are from booting the machine from the first Panther install disc through to the initial login screen. These times don't include installation of XCode, the 10.3.3 upgrade, or other system patches that Apple has released since Panther came out; if you include that stuff, then the average installation time goes over an hour for these computers.

You say you got a 400mhz G3 iMac to install Panther in 10 minutes? I say baloney. Either you're only counting the time for a partial install, you're not really paying attention to how long it's taking, or you're pulling some kind of trick to make things run faster.

If you have such a trick for speeding up the process, I'd love to know what it is. I was taking such careful notes because I was looking for ways to speed things up, or at least figure out where I could get things going in parallel. The only promising looking ways I found to speed things up seemed to be either a command line or single user console mode installs (but I wasn't able to get anywhere with that) or by setting up OSX Server and doing netboot (which I'd like to try, but that's a bigger project).

I just didn't see any way to get a normal, graphical install of OSX to take any less than half an hour or so on reasonably current (no more than a year old) hardware. Ten minutes for an old iMac? Sorry, but I don't believe you.

Re:OS X Panther Here

[Twirlip of the Mists]

I recently upgraded eight Macs to 10.3, and they generally took 35-50 minutes to upgrade

Upgrades take considerably longer. They're also generally a dumb idea. Clean installs work much better. At the very least, do an archive-and-install.

You say you got a 400mhz G3 iMac to install Panther in 10 minutes? I say baloney.

Come to my house. I'll show you. And we'll have pie.

I was taking such careful notes because I was looking for ways to speed things up

1. Don't upgrade.

2. If you're doing that many machines, use a freakin' iPod for chrissakes.

Sorry, but I don't believe you.

No need to apologize to me. You're the one who, by my count, spent 4 1/2 hours installing--oh, excuse me, upgrading--Mac OS X. Sheesh.

Re:OS X Panther Here

[babbage]

Okay, so reading over this subthread, it seems that everyone but me is getting 10 minute installs, where I'm getting a third of that at best. My only explanation is that I'm doing an upgrade install, partly because that seems the easiest way to preserve existing NFS and NIS settings that we have for everything on our network, and apparently that Just Takes Longer.

That said, someone mentioned being able to do network installs in three minutes. Is this playing off OSX Server capabilities, or are people actually putting the standard OSX Client software on the network and installing that somehow? I'd be happy to give that a try if someone could offer a URL or two explaining what's involved...

Re:OS X Panther Here

[babbage]

Sorry, I'm not trying to be argumentative, I'm just surprised that the clean installs are so much faster -- I had no idea that it made that much difference.

But please, humor me for a minute: will a clean install preserve things like user accounts, network settings, install applications, application settings under /Library, etc?

If a clean install wipes all this stuff out, then the 20 minutes saved isn't worth it if I have to go around and reconfigure every machine manually. Of the machines I was setting up, for example, each has one or two local user accounts with local home directories, and gets dozens of network user accounts with network home directories via NIS and NFS. That all has to be reconstructed after a clean install, right? Even if that can be scripted, it can still be a pain in the ass to do that many times.

In any case, I think net-booting or net-installing systems is going to be easier in the long run. We're doing that now with all the Debian machines we've got, and while setting up the infrastructure to support it is a pain in the ass, it does make management of individual machines much easier in the long run. We were using FAI to install Debian over the network in 3-5 minutes, but even that doesn't compare to the benefits of network booting. Now we (I) just have to set up the same thing on the Mac side...

Re:OS X Panther Here

[Twirlip of the Mists]

But please, humor me for a minute: will a clean install preserve things like user accounts, network settings, install applications, application settings under /Library, etc?

Okay, let me get this straight. You're allegedly responsible for all these Macs, and yet you don't know the difference between an install, an archive-and-install, and an upgrade?

And the thing about NIS... I call bullshit. Nobody, but nobody, bothers to use NIS on Mac OS X any more. Open Directory is so superior, it's not worth the trouble.

I think you're either making stuff up to get attention, or especially and unusually clueless.

Re:OS X Panther Here

[babbage]

...and to think I'd almost forgotten how hard it is to have a level-headed conversation with you... :-)

The office I work in has dozens of computers, of which around 70% run Debian, 15% are Macs, and 15% are Windows. NIS may be old and flaky, yes, but it works fine on the Debian side, and hooking the Macs into it seemed easier than starting over from scratch. Yes, something like LDAP &/or Kerberos would be nicer in the long run, but for now we're stuck with NIS, so please accept integration with NIS as a necessary constraint at this point.

And yes, I realize how the upgrade options differ, and based on what we're trying to do, upgrade installs seem to make the most sense. I don't get why the groupthink is so set against them -- I've never had any problems in using them, and the time saved in not reconfiguring machines seems worthwhile. I realize I'm out of step in thinking that upgrade installs aren't a problem, but I'm willing to be convinced that there are real problems in doing it this way -- it's just that you're not going to win me over by berating me here... :-). For lack of a calm, clear explanation of how clean installs really are better, I think I'll stick with this for now...

Re:OS X Panther Here

[Twirlip of the Mists]

Yes, something like LDAP &/or Kerberos would be nicer in the long run

Wow. 1992 called. They want their cutting-edge technology back.

based on what we're trying to do, upgrade installs seem to make the most sense

Then you deserve what you get. Quitcher bitchin.

Re:OS X Panther Here

[babbage]

Oh nevermind. Thanks for the "help" and "suggestions"...

Re:OS X Panther Here

[Anonymous Coward]

Man. A guy comes along, explains what you're doing wrong, explains that you're using the wrong tools for the job, explains that both of them are the reason for your headaches, and after all that, you still refuse to admit that you are the source of your own misery.

You aren't an MSCE by any chance? I've never met a MSCE whose head consists more of brain matter than bone.

Re:OS X Panther Here

[snp-7-3]

Hmm... 45 minute XP install. I recently built 2 systems for a friend and his dad. Both were AMD64 3400+ w/ serial ATA drives and 512MB of RAM... average install time for the two: 16 minutes - from initial CD-boot to the wonderful XP welcome screen (including reading the the SATA drivers from a floppy). My point, not ALL XP installs take 45 minutes... depends on the hardware. Hell, my 2400+ will install Windoze in 25-30 minutes.

I always wanted OSX on PC

[stealth.c]

But does this thing perform similarly to a similarly powered PPC?

Sigh. If only Apple would port the thing themselves. Add a windows compatibility layer and you've got one hell of a competitor to Microsoft.

Re:I always wanted OSX on PC

[Anonymous Coward]

"If only Apple would port the thing themselves. Add a windows compatibility layer and you've got one hell of a competitor to Microsoft."

And just like BeOS, that would probably kill Apple within two years or so.

Re:I always wanted OSX on PC

[Patik]

If only Apple would port the thing themselves. Add a windows compatibility layer and you've got one hell of a competitor to Microsoft.

...and one hell of a nosedive in Apple hardware sales.

Re:I always wanted OSX on PC

[Twirlip of the Mists]

Apple would have to sell it for $3,500 a seat to recoup the costs of doing and maintaining the port, and they'd be eaten alive by piracy unless they spent even more money building some kind of kick-ass licensing system which would just get cracked by the script kiddies anyway.

And by the way, they'd then have to spend even more money creating a Microsoft Office 2004-compatible office suite, because you know MS would kill Office for Mac in a heartbeat.

All in all, sounds like a losing proposition to me.

Re:I always wanted OSX on PC

[stuffman64]

RTFA:

the emulated processor is about 40 times slower than the host processor.

No, not even close.

Re:I always wanted OSX on PC

[jsebrech]

If only Apple would port the thing themselves. Add a windows compatibility layer and you've got one hell of a competitor to Microsoft.

...and one hell of a nosedive in Apple hardware sales.

And here you go assuming apple would exist long enough to see its sales influenced after such a direct challenge to microsoft to buy them out in order to shut them up.

Re:I always wanted OSX on PC

[MBCook]

No. The number tossed around is at least 40x slower, and there are many reasons.

First is the obvious that if you can never emulate something the same speed that it would be if it was native. It will always be at least a hair slower.

In actuality, this is MUCH slower. There are a few reasons:

1. Registers - A PPC chip has something like DOUBLE the number of registers (on CPU memory that's used to hold variables while being worked on) as an Opteron chip. And Opteron has many more registers than a standard x86 chip. To make matters worse, while with PPCs and Opterons most registers are general purpose (can be used for anything), many operations in the x86 world require you to use a specific register, so they are less flexable. All this means lots of register swapping and other such trickery to make things work, and it costs speed. A version compiled/written for an Opteron should be faster, but it is still not the same. All these registers is one of the reasons why it's so easy to emulate a x86 on PPC but not vice-versa.
2. The second big reason is Alitvec. This is basically MMX/3DNow!/SSE, but I've heard it described as those things on steroids. It allows things to be done VERY fast that would take much longer without them. Matrix transforms, running the same instruction on a large table of data, etc. PearPC doesn't emulate Altivec right now. While OS X will run without it (G3s don't have it, IIRC), things would run much faster if Altivec operations could be mapped to SSE/MMX/etc. whenever possible. They are working on this.
3. Graphics - The graphics engine is all software (I think). If the graphics calls could be "pushed through" to the graphics card so that OS X's use of OpenGL in Quartz (to draw windows and do effects on them) could be done in hardware (instead of in software like on Macs that don't have good enough graphics cards) that would speed things up too.

Those are the main reasons. I think we'd all KILL for OS X on PCs, but I think we all know that realistically it's never going to happen.

Still, remember the software is only v0.1 so when they add things like Altivec and just do general optimisations, things should get faster.

Re:I always wanted OSX on PC

[jest3r]

No its not really usable .. lots of crashes and anything that requires the CPU takes a REALLY LONG time .. however all things considered this is quite an accomplishment .. maybe down the road when x86 processors are faster .. The Pear PC documentation states that the client runs about 40 times slower than the host .. hence the 5 - 10 hour install times ..

My guess is Apple will shut PearPC down the day it actually becomes usable ..

Re:I always wanted OSX on PC

[drinkypoo]

Where on earth do you get $3,500 a seat? Darwin runs on x86. Aqua runs on Darwin. Apple is frequently reputed to be maintaining an x86 port of Aqua in order to A> improve darwin's portability and B> have the option to go x86 (or more likely x86-64) at any time. It is somewhat unlikely that they would do the latter, granted, but it remains an option.

Also, as much as Apple's hardware costs, clearly it is of generally higher quality than most PC hardware (there was a time when that was certainly not true, but since the blue and white G3 the overall build quality has been pretty high.) Certainly the G4 and later systems were pricy to produce. So I doubt apple is making $3,500 individually on any but the largest system sales.

Re:I always wanted OSX on PC

[Lord Crosis]

...and only Steve can decide if it's worth the trade off. Personally I think Apple stands to profit more from software sales than they stand to lose from hardware sales. Apple's hardware (especially their laptops) is innovative, and that will continue to a large portion of their sales.

Even if MacOSXIntel is in the works I think Apple needs to do some things before they can consider going toe-to-toe with MS. If MS sees Apple as a threat they would logically pull support of all their products from Mac OS X. This means that Apple at the very least needs a viable alternative to MS's biggest non-OS products: IE and Office. Apple already tackled IE, and Safari is great. They don't have anything that can compete with Office, though Keynote could be taken as an indication that this is the direction they are heading.

There is a slightly dated, but never-the-less relevant opinion column by a friend of mine, Joshua Thorpe, on my website at http://www.macopz.com/columns/jt/thinkswitch.html

-=(Lord Crosis)=-
Andy Rooney of Borg: "Ya ever wonder WHY resistance is futile?"

Re:I always wanted OSX on PC

[pjt33]

And tech support becomes a lot harder, because everyone expects you to support all the peripherals they could plug into the box if it were running Windows.

Re:I always wanted OSX on PC

[Anonymous Coward]

And just like BeOS, that would probably kill Apple within two years or so.

Be made the mistake of assuming Apple was going to purchase it, and use it, for the next MacOS release. If they would have stuck to competing instead who knows how things would have turned out.

Re:I always wanted OSX on PC

[Anonymous Coward]

$3500 a seat to make up for loss of hardware sales and additional loses due to mass piracy.

Re:I always wanted OSX on PC

[Nasarius]

Apple would have to sell it for $3,500 a seat to recoup the costs of doing and maintaining the port

Not to mention lost hardware sales, but.. and they'd be eaten alive by piracy unless they spent even more money building some kind of kick-ass licensing system which would just get cracked by the script kiddies anyway.

I disagree completely. Just like early Microsoft, piracy for Apple could be a a very Good Thing. If they get a bigger chunk of the OS market, that's more potential sales of other Apple hardware and software.

Re:I always wanted OSX on PC

[Anonymous Coward]

To me, this scenario has already been done. The Apple clone fiasco almost wrecked Apple and them allowing their system to run on x86 would definitely do damage to their bottom line in regards to hardware profits. The only way I could see them doing that is if the company was in a tail-spin and it was a last ditch effort to save the company.

Re:I always wanted OSX on PC

[Anonymous Coward]

And how is that a bad thing? It makes tech support people actually need to know a few things, instead of just repeating the old phrases over and over.

Re:I always wanted OSX on PC

[pavera]

You are up in the night...
I know sooooo many people that would buy OS X for x86 its not even funny. The port is at least 90% done, and as another poster stated, there are very many rumors that apple has a complete port of OS X that they already actively maintain.

They wouldn't care about piracy, and they don't make that much on their hardware (yes it is their main source of revenue, but margins even on their hardware are crap) There are so many reasons to do OS X for x86 is insane, they have a very nice office suite (called apple works) that does a good job of opening and saving office formats. They sell it for 40 bucks and it comes included with the ibooks.

Anyway, for home use, where you are mainly talking about internet browsing, hooking up digital cameras, printers, and the like, and maybe the occasional document/spreadsheet OS X is far superior to WinXP and I think they could sell 10-15 million copies at around $100 thats 1-1.5 billion in sales for work that is already at least 90% done. (see I can make up completely irrelevant numbers too like your 3500/seat, I'm sure you did alot of market research to come up with that)

Re:I always wanted OSX on PC

[Anonymous Coward]

I think we'd all KILL for OS X on PCs

No, I'm pretty fucking happy with it on Macs.

Re:I always wanted OSX on PC

[Twirlip of the Mists]

Where on earth do you get $3,500 a seat?

How much does Apple charge for a license of Mac OS X? Nominally $129, but in point of fact, you have to include the cost of the hardware Apple sells as well. A middle-of-the-road Mac costs about $1,500, OS X included. And that's for an operating system that actually, you know, exists. One that's already been developed. The price of licenses of a new operating system that would require a great deal of development would naturally be higher.

Beyond that, I made it up.

Darwin runs on x86.

Which has about as much to do with Mac OS X as a spinning wheel does to Nike's corporate bottom line.

Apple is frequently reputed to be maintaining an x86 port of Aqua

No, they're not. I don't know where you get these silly rumors, but that one is just completely untrue.

Stop believing stuff you read last year on MacWhispers.com, for starters. :-)

Re:I always wanted OSX on PC

[Refrag]

Don't you know that Microsoft makes Office 2004 for Macintosh?

Re:I always wanted OSX on PC

[adamfranco]

but I think we all know that realistically it's never going to happen.

But can't we dream?!?! :-)

Seriously though, if by 1.0 they can do some of the stuff you mention and get the performance up to 10-20x slower than the host, then you might be able to get a decently usable system.

On the other hand, by that time you will be able to run KDE 6.0 that will blow OS X's UI out of the water. Maybe. I guess we just have to wait and see.

Re:I always wanted OSX on PC

[Lord Crosis]

Apple never let go of the hardware, and that's why clones were a very bad thing. The motherboards for the clones still had to be bought from Apple, with Apple's proprietary ROMs. This stifled innovation and real competition as a clone could only be just that: a clone. If Apple had created an open PPC platform things might have turned out different, but Apple still wanted to control the Mac OS by requiring that it run on their own proprietary hardware, even if it had another company's label slapped on the box.

MacOSXIntel would not need to be inhibited in this way, and would not require an existing x86 user to make the investment of new hardware or software. I work in a retail computer establishment and every day I hear people say "I'd switch to the Mac, as I think it is the better platform, but it would require such a significant investment in new hardware and rebuilding my software library from scratch." These people would shell out $129 to run Mac OS X either side by side with Windows, or with a Windows compatibility layer in a heartbeat.

-=(Lord Crosis)=-
Andy Rooney of Borg: "Ya ever wonder WHY resistance is futile?"

Re:I always wanted OSX on PC

[bcs_metacon.ca]

...but since the blue and white G3 the overall build quality has been pretty high...

Build quality my eye... http://www.thinksecret.com/news/g5noise.html .

The only reason I don't own a Mac is because I know where every single thing inside my PC came from and when trouble occurs I can pin-point what to fix pretty quickly.

PS: I tried PearPC on an Athlon XP 1800+ with 1GB of RAM and OS X didn't so much run as crawl. It might be usable... if you take a bottle of Quaaludes first.

Re:I always wanted OSX on PC

[Yoda's Mum]

How is the "built quality" of an Apple machine any better than the average white box PC? As long as the PCs not built with an utter crap motherboard, chances are the PCs going to last every bit as long as any Apple machine. Here's a breakdown of the components, and the difference they'd make....

Case: Apple's cases are generally "stylish", but that doesn't mean they're any more durable or well built than your average PC case. If the case doesn't fall apart or crack, it's good enough. Anything else (looks, etc) just don't matter as far as "quality" goes.

Motherboard: PC and Mac motherboards all come out of the same factories - the quality of them is the same. As for the components on the motherboards, any Intel chipset every bit as stable and reliable as an Apple chipset. There have in the past been issues with VIA/SiS/NVidia chipsets, however they've matured a lot lately, and they're starting to reach the quality of the Intels. Either way, the quality of Apple and PC boards are the same.

CPU: There haven't been any build problems with PC or Mac CPU's for a long time. The failure rates are all pretty similar. There are arguments as far as performance goes, but most real-world non-apple-biased/cheating benchmarks from the release of Apple's last series of chips put the PCs slightly ahead of comparable Apple CPUs.

Memory: It's exactly the same stuff used on PCs and Macs. No point to be made.

HDD: Once again, they're exactly the same.

CD/DVD: And again, exactly the same hardware.

Mouse/Keyboard: The mouse/keyboards sold with Macs are of arguably better quality than your average PC white-box gear, but compared to equivalent MS Mice and Keyboards, the MS stuff is every bit as good (though the mice are quite arguably better on PCs, having an extra button and a scroll wheel).

Monitor: PCs at least give the option of a cheap CRT - I've got plenty of desk space, there is zero advantage to me for an LCD. And as far as LCDs go, the garden-variety PC LCDs are generally cheaper. As far as quality goes, the LCDs are all made in the same factories for both PCs and Macs.

Graphics Cards: Again, they're all made in the same factories, using the same graphics chipsets.

Basically, the argument that Apple gear is of higher quality than PC gear is a load of crap. The case itself is generally more "stylish" and better built than the average PC case, however to many this doesn't matter (as their cheap ugly cases do the job every bit as well). I for one am perfectly happy with my ultra-cheap full tower steel case. It may not be light, but its survived many moves and LAN parties over the years without breaking, and it'll survive plenty more. As far as the rest of the hardware goes, its exactly the same gear, made in the same factories. Putting a "stylish" non-beige exterior on computer gear does not make the gear better, it makes the gear LOOK "better".

Re:I always wanted OSX on PC

[Twirlip of the Mists]

I know sooooo many people that would buy OS X for x86 its not even funny.

Oh, well, that's it then. Let's scribble that little statement down, put it in a manilla folder marked "business plan," and get to work!

The port is at least 90% done

That's a lie and you know it.

They wouldn't care about piracy

Bull. Apple doesn't really care very much about Mac OS X piracy because you already paid for your Mac OS X license when you bought your Mac. So what's the point in enforcing copy protection and licensing when you've already been paid?

But in a "put Mac OS X on your Diamond Shamrock-brand PC that you got for $19.95 after filling up your gas tank ten times" world, the situation would be very different.

margins even on their hardware are crap

Apple has the best margins in the industry. Go read a 10-K sometime. Apple maintains average margins of 30%. Average! That's incredible.

they have a very nice office suite (called apple works) that does a good job of opening and saving office formats

False. I mean, it's true that they have AppleWorks, but it's false that it can interoperate with Office.

I think they could sell 10-15 million copies at around $100

You made that number up. Come back when you've used your brain instead of your imagination.

see I can make up completely irrelevant numbers too like your 3500/seat

Hey, man, at least I had a thought process. I made an educated guess. You just pulled something out of your ass. They're two different things.

Re:I always wanted OSX on PC

[Patik]

Personally I think Apple stands to profit more from software sales than they stand to lose from hardware sales.

I don't see it that way. OSX is the reason that I will buy a Mac. If it is ported to x86, I will buy it in a second and happily continue to build nice x86 machines for a third of the cost of an Apple. What good is overpriced hardware when you can already get the software that runs on it?

Re:I always wanted OSX on PC

[Twirlip of the Mists]

...because you know MS would kill Office for Mac in a heartbeat.

I know it's too much to ask you to fucking read, but one can dream, can't one?

Re:I always wanted OSX on PC

[Arker]

Those are the main reasons. I think we'd all KILL for OS X on PCs, but I think we all know that realistically it's never going to happen.

Well first off Macs are P(ersonal)C(omputer)s too. Obviously you meant on x86 CPUs.

And frankly, I disagree. I'd much rather see the x86 just die. It's a horribly outdated design, covered in layer after layer of cruft and super-powered by massive silicon and monetary investment.

One of the main advantages of Free Software is that you don't have to get tied down to architectures that have outlived their usefulness. You can put GNU/Linux on PPC today, and when a better architecture comes up in the future, you can jump right on to it, while both Windows and OSX (probably to a lesser, but still substantial, degree) will be hampered in adopting it by the prevalence of binary-only programs.

OSX is great on PPC. So's Linux. The only edge the x86 architecture has is that so many people are tied to binary-only "software" that they're forced to buy it, propping the margins up and making sure it gets the economy of scale to be cheap, and manufactured with the best processes. A G5 manufactured with the same technology and at the same volume would blow everything x86 out of the water at half the price. Porting OSX to x86 would just boost x86 volume to the detriment of PPC, and I can't see how that would be anything other than a net loss to computing as a whole.

Re:I always wanted OSX on PC

[magefile]

because you know MS would kill Office for Mac in a heartbeat.

Maybe, maybe not. There are few benefits for MS making Office for Mac other than as a loss leader to get 'em to use it on Windows.

And by the way, they'd then have to spend even more money creating a Microsoft Office 2004-compatible office suite,

Really? Why not do for OpenOffice.org what they did for Darwin? It's under GPL/LGPL, or they could use SISSL (although I'm not familiar enough with SISSL to know if they'd benefit from that or not). I mean, they already released the source code to Darwin, and I don't think the BSD license required them to do that. So it's not like they've shown themselves to be anti-open-source

Re:I always wanted OSX on PC

[Twirlip of the Mists]

Why not do for OpenOffice.org what they did for Darwin? It's under GPL/LGPL

You just answered your own question. Apple wouldn't be able to touch Open Office without giving it all away.

Besides, it's my humble opinion that a Cocoa-based word processor and spreadsheet, written from scratch using advanced Mac OS X technologies, would be a far better choice. Just look at how much better Keynote is than anything else in its class.

Re:I always wanted OSX on PC

[Lord Crosis]

The question is: How many people out there are unwilling to buy overpriced hardware regardless of their admiration for Mac OS X? How many of those people would have their wallets out gleefully paying $129 because they just found out they can run OS X natively on their current hardware?

I admit I don't have the market research data to give an accurate answer to this question, but I do work in retail computer sales, and my impression is that this describes a tremendous number of people. Remember that Apple's hardware margins hang between 20-25%, whereas, once development costs have been recouped, software is almost 100% profit. So if Apple makes $600-$750 on every $3000 G5 (and less on all of their other consumer hardware), is it really that hard to believe that the number of people who would buy Mac OS X but would not buy Mac hardware wouldn't rapidly make up for the reduction in Mac hardware sales? On top of this there is the viability of OEM deals and people purchasing upgrades to future versions of Mac OS X.

-=(Lord Crosis)=-
Andy Rooney of Borg: "Ya ever wonder WHY resistance is futile?"

Re:I always wanted OSX on PC

[Anonymous Coward]

Add a windows compatibility layer and you've got one hell of a competitor to Microsoft.

Yeah, for six months to a year-- then Apple goes out of business because they make their money from hardware sales, and because you cheap bastards who want to run OS X on your homebuilt-from-the-cheapest-parts-available shitboxes* will just pirate OS X instead of buying it.

* Keep dreaming, because even if Apple does move to x86-based machines you won't be able to do this.

Re:I always wanted OSX on PC

[mclaincausey]

Once Carbon was ported over to x86, porting Office would not take much work at all...

Re:I always wanted OSX on PC

[dubiousmike]

So how does every other software manufacturer make money without proprietary hardware?

Re:I always wanted OSX on PC

[steeviant]

"The motherboards for the clones still had to be bought from Apple, with Apple's proprietary ROMs."

Bullshit. The proprietary ROMs had to be bought from Apple, but the manufacturers made their own boards, this lead to the situation where Power Computing were handing Apple their arse in hardware innovation. The exact opposite of the situation you talk about. Search google for information on the PowerTower Pro if you don't believe me.

Apple's problem at the time was that they spend so much time and money trying to do things "properly" with a stylish case and all the bells and whistles, that their competitors would have a machine out featuring the latest generation of CPU months before Apple. It's not like a real Mac, but it gets the job done.

The situation continues now with the G5. If Apple faced real competition, someone would have already slapped a G5 in a crappy laptop with 30 mins battery life and a fan that sounds like a 747 engine. That exact situation is what has happened with Intel and AMD processors long before a suitable mobile version has come along.

As for the idea of OS X for Intel goes, I think it will probably happen one day, when the time is right. At the moment Apple's developer community still has too much invested in the Carbon API layer which (as a general rule) lacks the bundle structure of Cocoa applications that would make it easily possible to distribute binaries that run on multiple architectures.

Also, they would likely face the removal of Microsoft's support for their platform, so Apple would need to have a reasonable alternative in order to be able to retain their current user base, let alone expand into Microsoft's traditional stronghold.

People seem to forget the possibility that Apple could just open up the underlying OpenStep architecture for other OS vendors to license from them. Apple has management and engineers experienced in running a business that uses this model from the NeXT acquisition, so it would probably be a fairly painless transition for them.

Licensing the Cocoa framework to other OS vendors would obviously not open Apple up to the same amount of liability should the company selling an OpenStep/X variant for X86 go belly-up.

Re:I always wanted OSX on PC

[Anonymous Coward]

Your sister and mother are pretty fucking happy with my big fat cock in their pussies.

Re:I always wanted OSX on PC

[Anonymous Coward]

You obviously know absolutely nothing about CPU architecture other than the tripe that you've read on this board and are now parroting.

Re:I always wanted OSX on PC

[steeviant]

Monitor: PCs at least give the option of a cheap CRT - I've got plenty of desk space, there is zero advantage to me for an LCD. And as far as LCDs go, the garden-variety PC LCDs are generally cheaper. As far as quality goes, the LCDs are all made in the same factories for both PCs and Macs."

You seem to be implying that you can't just plug a normal monitor into a Mac.

You're aware that all desktop machines ship with a DVI and VGA port, and that the monitors come with adaptors to turn DVI into ADP right?

Re:I always wanted OSX on PC

[Twirlip of the Mists]

Most don't. Most go out of business. Those that succeed, like Oracle, say, do it buy building a product that has a strong market and selling the heck out of it.

Apple's hardware isn't the least bit proprietary, by the way. The only part of it they build themselves is the system controller. Everything else, from the CPUs to the graphics to the hard drives to the fans, is available on the open market.

Re:I always wanted OSX on PC

[iMacGuy]

AltiVec emulation would barely speed it up at all. It would give exactly NO speed increase in the generic core, since interpreting the vector instructions in the scalar units is just about the same as interpreting the scalar instructions. In the x86 JIT, it would have to emulate the permute unit (which is used very heavily in a lot of Altivec code) as well as some other features missing from x86 SIMD.

Re:I always wanted OSX on PC

[amorsen]

First is the obvious that if you can never emulate something the same speed that it would be if it was native. It will always be at least a hair slower.

This is not necessarily true. HP has a dynamic HPPA interpreter which runs about 20% faster than native on most programs tested. Of course it has the advantage of being able to cheaply fall back to native code when the JIT isn't having much luck. The technology is now being used to move programs made for HPPA to Itanium, ideally running them at the same or better speed compared to recompiled programs.

Re:I always wanted OSX on PC

[MoneyT]

They don't directly compete with microsoft. Know of any good office replacements that are rolling in the dough? How about a good OS?

Re:I always wanted OSX on PC

[Anonymous Coward]

Registers - A PPC chip has something like DOUBLE the number of registers

Well, not quite as dramatic as that. Modern x86 cpus have something like 128 registers, which are assigned to the most frequently used memory and stack locations. There is minimal performance difference to having "real" registers. That's why the extra registers of the opteron have such little effect.

Re:I always wanted OSX on PC

[Twirlip of the Mists]

You've got that a little backwards.

All Power Macs come with graphics cards in them that have two outputs: one ADC and one DVI. (ADC is a connector type that carries DVI, USB, and power all on one cable.)

The Mac comes with a little 6" adapter that plugs into the DVI port and comes out VGA.

So yeah, on any given Power Mac, you can plug in an Apple monitor with ADC, any digital or analog DVI display, or any VGA display.

Re:I always wanted OSX on PC

[steeviant]

You're absolutely right, I had it backwards.

The only Macs I have ever owned have been G4 PowerBooks, the old one had only VGA, the current one has only DVI.

Re:I always wanted OSX on PC

[neurocutie]

If only Apple would port the thing themselves.

There is no doubt that Apple already has OS X ported to the x86 architecture. What there is of OS X that isn't Darwin or FreeBSD (both run on x86) is largely based on the NextStep and NextStep was ported to the x86. So there is no doubt that OS X is around internally on x86. If ever Apple decides to give up on PPCs (not inconceivable (insert all old arguments about the difficulties of competing with x86/Intel/$10B chip foundries/etc)), then it must be ready with an OS X for the x86, so you know that Apple has x86 OS X internally just as a smart business precaution, to hedge its bets. But Apple is going to be extremely cautious about deciding to actually market and release x86 OS X... I think you can see why...

Re:I always wanted OSX on PC

[CTho9305]

Regarding point 1, read this. Register starvation is not a major problem. The biggest slowdown is that memory addresses have to be translated (this is the case no matter what virtual memory/paging system you use), which adds a large penalty to EVERY memory access.

Re:I always wanted OSX on PC

[Phroggy]

On the other hand, by that time you will be able to run KDE 6.0 that will blow OS X's UI out of the water. Maybe. I guess we just have to wait and see.

On the other hand, by that time you will be able to run Mac OS XII, and that will blow KDE 6.0's UI out of the water. ;-)

Re:I always wanted OSX on PC

[drinkypoo]

Assuming Apple doesn't totally have their heads up their asses, though, they won't be making their code excessively non-portable. All the hard compatibility stuff is already done by darwin. I'm assuming that Aqua is written in a portable language, which I think is pretty safe to do. I bet I could even find out which one pretty trivially if I only looked :) But I am quite serious when I say that if it would be difficult for Apple to move to x86, then they are doing something very wrong. All current desktop systems have the same basic components and they are laid out more or less in the same ways. The whole point of having a separate kernel and applications is that you have abstraction. I fully believe that apple could implement an x86 port of OSX with very little lead time, supporting at first a relatively short list of hardware. Still, if people are willing to buy macs at exorbitant prices in order to run OSX, surely they are willing to build moderately priced PCs to run it as well. However, apple wants to sell hardware, and until they get tired of that, we won't see it happen. At least, as long as they can get their hands on PowerPC chips. They lost a lot of their market share during the time when cheap PCs kicked expensive mac ass. Right now their systems are fairly competitive dollar for dollar (at least in the high end) and as I said previously, they have an operating system with a great deal of appeal.

Oh well, maybe I'll get a real job or something and have money to throw at expensive toys again.

Re:I always wanted OSX on PC

[zhenlin]

Having the register readily available is almost certainly much faster than renaming registers and then using them.

With 32 32-bit registers all available for _general_ use, in addition to 32 64-bit floating point registers, in addition to 32 128-bit vector registers, I seriously doubt that one can achieve reasonable emulation of a full G4 on a x86.

Concluding: Having a large file of registers: humbug. Having a large window of registers is much more useful. (Sun SPARCs have about 512 registers in their file with a 24 register window, plus 8 static registers)

Re:I always wanted OSX on PC

[zhenlin]

With RISC, you are supposed to reduce memory access by shoving your workset into registers as much as possible. Obviously, 32 x 128-bit (vector) registers is not enough to do some Photoshopping...

But, having to do (hardware) memory address translation to "physical" addresses in software is a pain. Maybe another strategy could be used? That is to say, reorganise the memory upon context switch, rather than translate each time? Then again, that sounds a lot slower too...

Re:I always wanted OSX on PC

[Anonymous Coward]

Sparc is just about the only architecture with register windows these days. Ever wondered why?

Re:I always wanted OSX on PC

[Anonymous Coward]

The difference is more than just minimal.

While PPC can do reg17 = reg18+reg19 in one instruction, an x86 typically needs to go through reg1 = mem1; reg1 += reg2; This is two ops and a fetch from L1.

So the most obvious problem is the instruction count. x86 processors have certainly enough execution resources to do actual meaningful operations in place of useless data moving. Thus, it could be twice as fast from that respect. This is often a bottleneck.
The second is that L1 loads aren't free. Mere 2 cycles of latency equals six instructions. Hope the reordering system can exploit enough parallelism to hide that. Moving the fetch further up isn't an option if reg1 is used to do something different there.

Re:I always wanted OSX on PC

[magefile]

If you'd read the rest of my post, you'd've seen that Darwin's source has been given away.

Neither the BSD nor the GPL prevents them from selling it; only from keeping the source code from those they sell it to. And source code is not all that much better than binary as a method of distribution (from Joe Random's perspective, maybe worse), so they're not afraid of pirating.

And they could make it Cocoa or Aqua based. In fact, the Mac-using OO.org community has been clamoring for that, and OO.org has said that they can't justify a fork like that - but Apple could.

Re:I always wanted OSX on PC

[Anonymous Coward]

Nevertheless, it should be quite achievable to emulate an X MHz PPC on a 3X MHz x86 provessor. Even better performance is possible -- considering that a 2 GHZ G5 is comparable to a 2GHz modern x86 in real-world performance, it is clear that sufficient compiler optimization makes the difference in register count a relatively small effect. Of course, a dynamically recompiling emulator has to start with less semantical information and cannot spend as much time in optimization, but there's been plenty of demonstrations of very successful optimization in dynamical recompilation.

Re:I always wanted OSX on PC

[Twirlip of the Mists]

If you'd read the rest of my post, you'd've seen that Darwin's source has been given away.

Heh. I don't really need to read your post to know that. I have a copy of the source tree right here.

There's really not much to Darwin. It's not an operating system. It's just a kernel. Apple loses nothing by giving it away, and gains the assistance of every developer in the world who wants to chip in.

The Darwin license, incidentally, is totally incompatible with the GPL... thank heavens.

Neither the BSD nor the GPL prevents them from selling it; only from keeping the source code from those they sell it to.

Blah blah blah. The GPL is not an option, period, end of paragraph. Apple's not going to sign up for anything that requires them to give away their intellectual property. They might choose to, but then again they might not. It's going to be a choice, not a requirement that they have to live up to.

Re:I always wanted OSX on PC

[jhesse]

Actually, they have DVI-I which is DVI and VGA on the same connector.

Not to be confused with DVI-D, which is digital only, or DVI-A which is VGA only (Gah! Good thing that isn't official spec.)

You can go from a DVI-I output to an ADC display with a $30, and that can work on Wintel machines.

Re:I always wanted OSX on PC

[PantsWearer]

This would only be true after a (near perfect) static "recompile" from PPC machine code to x86 machine code. It's all well and good that the translated instructions would only take three times as long as the native instructions per clock, but it's the actually parsing of the instruction, switching endianness, etc. that take up the time.

The largest overhead is in the actual translation, not the execution.

Re:I always wanted OSX on PC

[steeviant]

Heh, how many times can I be wrong in one thread? :D

Re:I always wanted OSX on PC

[pavera]

I suppose,
why do you think Apple needs to charge $3500/seat for a license when no other OS company in the business gets even close to that??? How is that educated... Hmmmm MS sells their os for 300, so I guess we'll multiply that by 10 and thats how much apple would charge... nice thought process...

Re:I always wanted OSX on PC

[Twirlip of the Mists]

why do you think Apple needs to charge $3500/seat for a license when no other OS company in the business gets even close to that???

Who else is selling operating systems to run on third-party hardware?

I can think of Microsoft... and that's it.

Hmmmm MS sells their os for 300, so I guess we'll multiply that by 10 and thats how much apple would charge...

Microsoft will sell ten times as many licenses, or more, than Apple. Windows isn't ten times bigger or more complex than Mac OS X. The costs have to be recovered somehow.

nice thought process...

Rather than mocking and hopping up and down on the period key (do you even know what an ellipsis is for?) why don't you either say something constructive or butt out?

Re:I always wanted OSX on PC

[stealth.c]

I resent that! I endure Win98 when I must use Windows, and enjoy using Linux whenever I can. I do this because 1) yes, I live cheaply and 2) I'm no pirate.

Active software project; continuing improvement

[Raindance]

This installation was done with PearPC 1.0. A newer version (1.1 I believe) is already out.

Things should get interesting as this active OSS project develops. I'd imagine they could improve speed by at least 20x on the CPU emulation, for instance.

Re:Active software project; continuing improvement

[Lord Crosis]

You are missing a leading decimal. This was installed with version .1, as in 1 tenth of 1.0.

This is still pretty early in the development cycle and if they only consider this to be 1 tenth of the way to a release version there is reason for immense optimism.

-=(Lord Crosis)=-
Andy Rooney of Borg: "Ya ever wonder WHY resistance is futile?"

Re:Active software project; continuing improvement

[TravisWatkins]

In software development 0.1 doesn't mean one tenth of 1.0. ;)

Re:Active software project; continuing improvement

[rsmith-mac]

With no offense to the PearPC dev team, I think you're being a little optimistic there in the speed department. There's a fundamental register bottleneck when running PPC code on the x86(the PPC has 32, 32bit x86 has 8), so you're always going to take a sizable speed hit due to a lack of registers. There is a fair amount of speed to be gained by doing some assembly optimizations, and trying to work around the register problem, but as far as I can tell, PearPC is always going to be slow, there's just no way around it without finding a way to make 32 functional GPRs on an x86 chip.

hmm

[Anonymous Coward]

Isn't one of the biggest pluses of a Macintosh system the flawless integration with the hardware? That's always been something I've admired, and something that's been a pain in the butt for both Linux and Windows. I wonder how stable this runs?

Re:hmm

[Geek_3.3]

Probably not quite so... 'integrated' :-P Well, it's a work in progress, so maybe in a few versions or so...

"Well, just when I was ready to start "Enjoying my Apple Computer", a weird bug appeared: I was dropped into an infinite Finder crash-loop. Well, not really infinite, 15 minutes or so later, the loop ended."

"The only glitch left was the Dock. It also encountered a crash loop, but this one was indeed infinite"

Still though... pretty neat stuff!

Re:hmm

[shaitand]

Not anymore, thanks to pci support and third party hardware Macs and hardware aren't QUITE as bad as the pc yet overall. But the only thing saving is them is the amount of work.

For the hardware which does work, it's as bad as windows and you have to load driver disks for everything. Since they have a Unix underpinning though, they may someday achieve the "95% of the time you don't need to manually load or ever be aware of the loading of drivers" linux has out of the box.

Someday maybe linux will achieve the other 5%.

Call me a Zealot if you will, but I fail to see any reason why with such perfect hardware detection and installation of the hardware which is supported under linux, there is any technical failing on that OS's hardware detection. Simply a lack of marketshare to get drivers developed.

Re:hmm

[drinkypoo]

Flawless my ass. Ever owned a blue and white G3 and decided to upgrade it? If it's revision 1, then you cannot use UDMA transfer modes on most hard drives, and have to resort to PIO. You can use slower UDMA methods on some drives, and some will do the whole shebang, up to whatever UDMA mode it supports most. Unfortunately mine was not a drive which you could use and if there was any significant CPU use whatsoever it would write invalid data. I verified that this was the cause of my woes with an OS9 app that tests disk writing and yes indeed, I had this problem.

There is a workaround which was considered acceptable given that these are some slow-ass macs, which is to use the PIO modes. However, you need a third party disk driver to do this. The cheapest software I could find to work around the problem was $80.

And of course, there's no firewire booting on those models, so I couldn't get around the problem that way, either.

Apple has since suppressed information about this by removing the applicable documents from the techinfo library when it was folded into their current support system. I have only excerpts from the document.

Now, I can forgive apple for having a bug and for not replacing motherboards. Well, almost on the second count, but certainly I will forgive an error, even though Sun managed to use the same chip in several Ultra systems quite successfully. But what's stupid is that the OS was not designed to address this issue in the hardware.

Apple's support of their own hardware is selective and short-lived at best, as evinced by the lack of support for several macs with G3 processors in OS X. The fact that you can make it run on them with third party software that tricks the installer into going ahead and doing its job is particularly pathetic.

The biggest plus of a macintosh is that it is friendly and generally consistent in behavior. Macs are workhorse machines which will not always be the fastest horse but will usually run for a long time. My mother used her Mac IIci with System 7.1 or something for absolutely ages, until just a couple of years ago in fact. She paid five grand for it when it was new (and worth eight, or at least, it sold for eight grand with a two page mono and an 8*24 display card) and she definitely got her money out of it. I bumped up the hard drive (to 2*200MB!) and the ram (to 40MB) while she had it, never even did a cache card (by the time they were cheap, she was more or less done with it) and she used pagemaker, illustrator, and photoshop throughout the system's life, and her work has won several awards in the process. Current macintoshes are basically the same; somewhat quirky, mostly reliable, and quite consistent. And, still very pricy. But, if you get more work done on a mac, it's worth more money, and some people certainly don't seem to get as much done on windows as they do on a macintosh.

Re:hmm

[gabebear]

actually, Macintosh's expansion slots look like they are splitting with PC's again.

G5s are using PCI-X, but it looks like PCs are going to standardize on PCI-Express. PCI-X is faster and more expensive and incompatable with PCI-Express.

Both PCI-X and PCI-Express are both backwards compatable with new regular PCI cards, so you can't expect PCI to be abandoned soon. In a few years we may be back to the good old days of Nubus compatablity, maybe a lot sooner for video cards.

Re:hmm

[merdark]

Integration does not mean upgrading hardware beyond what Apple themselves will do. I just got my first Mac, and it's far far more integrated than any PC laptop I've ever used. I don't expect to be able to upgrade it much though, but that is a separate topic.

What you are complaining about is the Mac's life cycle and lack of upgrades. Both are valid concerns, but neither has anything to do with Macs having good software/hardware integration.

Re:hmm

[Tezkah]

Apple's support of their own hardware is selective and short-lived at best, as evinced by the lack of support for several macs with G3 processors in OS X. The fact that you can make it run on them with third party software that tricks the installer into going ahead and doing its job is particularly pathetic.

This was fixed with 10.3 (Panther) released last fall. They also sent out rebates to G3 owners who purchased it but didn't get it to run.

It might not be flawless, but it is leaps and bounds ahead of other operating systems (Linux especially) for people who aren't super advanced. (ex: "Oh! That Linux install was easy enough, thanks SuSE! What? I dont have a modem? WHEN DID THIS HAPPEN?")

Re:hmm

[scottj]

The cheapest software I could find to work around the problem was $80.

I bought a PCI ATA-133 card for around $75 that solved this problem quite well. You might want to look into that option if you still have the B&W. (Mine's been upgraded to a G4 now)

Re:hmm

[Anonymous Coward]

not quite. This was only for Apple G3 computers. People with Apple-clones (remember them?) with G3s were still left high & dry.

Re:hmm

[WinterSolstice]

I know what you mean!!!

I had the worst time putting AIX 5.1 on these old RS/6000s we had laying around. Sure, they were about 4 years old, but that's ok, right? It's still a RS/6000!

Sheesh. When you get stiff vertical integration, you get *stiff vertical integration*. We have systems here that literally must run the same OS they shipped with. And they were millions of dollars. I understand that you want to have the new OS on the old hardware (which is typical in the PC world) but that's why there are minimum requirements. In the case of Apple, they rebated a lot of software for this sort of problem. They didn't really have to. It was just to try and make customers happier. Heck, IBM would have simply laughed at you if you bought ZOS for a machine that wouldn't run it. Then offered you a new lease :)

PS - I'm not apologizing for Apple, I just think that people whine too much about this. Ever tried to upgrade a Commodore? How about an OS/390? Macs are purpose built machines, not like x86 boxes. If you buy one, deal with it.

-WS

Re:hmm

[Anonymous Coward]

PS - I'm not apologizing for Apple

Yes you are.

Re:hmm

[aussersterne]

Um, except that when you were buying OS X for your Beige or Blue-and-White hardware, Apple would tell you it was "Supported. Absolutely!"

Would IBM do that? If so, then they're both in the wrong. Supported is supported. If your new OS isn't going to support onboard SCSI, onboard video, onboard floppy, or the hard drive and/or CD-ROM drive that shipped with the unit (as was the case with my Beige G3 and OS X), then you should tell the user that that's the case, rather than selling them a useless piece of software.

Re:hmm

[RdsArts]

In the case of Apple, they rebated a lot of software for this sort of problem. They didn't really have to.

(emphasis added)

They didn't refund the money out of the kindness of their hearts, they were taken to court. They grudgingly refunded money.

Not to start a flame war or anything, but they didn't just refund the cash out of the blue.

Re:hmm

[drinkypoo]

To be fair, there is hardware you can buy for your linux systems which will be reliably detected and work on all distributions. This is similar to buying a mac, except there's a broader range of options for your PC parts, and your system will in general be less expensive.

Re:hmm

[drinkypoo]

What I'm saying is that the integration is not all it is claimed to be and the life cycle and lack of upgrades also stink. Lately some third parties have gotten into competition over who can produce the best/cheapest processor upgrades for G3s and such, which is nice, but I frown on an architecture which does not have an expandable low end system. I understand why, but I don't like it. (So, I don't buy it, whee.)

Re:hmm

[rasilon]

I know what you mean!!!
I had the worst time putting AIX 5.1 on these old RS/6000s we had laying around. Sure, they were about 4 years old, but that's ok, right? It's still a RS/6000!

On the other hand, Solaris 9 installs just fine on 4 year old UltraSPARCs, indeed it works just fine on my 10 year old SS10. It doesn't support the 3/80 I used to have, but when you get to that sort of museum piece hardware it's usually more fun to run either the original OS, or one you've written yourself.

Re:hmm

[torpor]

What I'm saying is that the integration is not all it is claimed to be and the life cycle and lack of upgrades also stink.

Good integration means not having to upgrade.

Re:hmm

[merdark]

The life cycle I agree with for desktop systems. Laptops are never really upgradable so I don't think it matters for those.

I'm not sure what you don't like about the integration, but I can tell you that of all the different PC's I've used (white boxes, dells, laptops, etc etc), my Powerbook is the more integrated than anything else I've seen.

But yeah, it would be nice to see low end upgradeble desktops from Apple as well as low end computers with fast processors .For some reason all the low end Apple computers don't come with the option of having a fast processor. Many people can do without airports and firewire and fast graphics boards, but still need a fast processor with lots of memory.

Re:hmm

[drinkypoo]

$75 is more than I paid for the system and definitely more than the cost of the hard drive. I traded the G3 to someone and made him aware of the problem. The machine had an Adaptec 2930-MAC in it, so I assume he's using SCSI now.

Re:hmm

[WinterSolstice]

Agreed. Absolutely.

Of course, as I pointed out, there were rebates to the users who were unable to install it.

-WS

Re:hmm

[Anonymous Coward]

Hmm... Ever own a 6 year old computer and decided to upgrade it. Well, yeah. But I didn't complain when there were limitations. You really should do research on upgrades -- particularly explicitly unsupported ones -- before attempting them lest you run into trouble. I wouldn't want you to complain for nothing.... But then what use would you be?

I saw the previous story..

[Anonymous Coward]

See the previous story

Yeah. I saw it. And the new news is what exactly? OS X had already been installed the last time this was posted.

This is the weirdest kind of dupe, one that unabashedly proclaims its dupeness.

Sweet!

[Anonymous Coward]

So now I can finally run Photoshop on my Windows machine! What's that you say?

Re:Sweet!

[pyr0]

Uhh...Informative? I think not. There is and has been a windows version of Photoshop for a long time.

Re:Sweet!

[Anonymous Coward]

Not to mention all those other Mac-only apps!

Re:Sweet!

[Anonymous Coward]

Like Breakout . . . Super Breakout . . .

Re:Sweet!

[Anonymous Coward]

Uh...how is this redundant if it is the first reply to the parent post? Fucking moron moderators.

Re:Sweet!

[OmniVector]

mac on most occasions has the same software as windows, and it's almost always higher quality. in some cases there are even some unique programs that don't exist for windows like subethaedit. we had itunes for the longest time (which greatly rivaled WMP) though windows users are fortunate now to have it.

Yikes

[NilObject]

Ok Steve, Hell realy *has* frozen over now.

Bye Bye Mac Hardware

[superpulpsicle]

If the performance lives up to the hype on PC hardware, then this has to be the end of Mac hardware... which are $$$$$.

Of course there's no such thing as perfect emulators though vmware comes pretty damn close.

Re:Bye Bye Mac Hardware

[crackshoe]

I'd say running 40 times slower than host proc isn't really living up to the hype - my pentium IV 1.4 gHz would still be running slower than my oldest running mac (which can't run OS X, but still), but would still have all the irritating flaws of windows running over it. Why bother?

Re:Bye Bye Mac Hardware

[TravisWatkins]

VMWare Workstation isn't an emulator, its a virtualization. It only runs on x86 machines because it doesn't actually emulate the processor.

Re:Bye Bye Mac Hardware

[Anonymous Coward]

No such thing? Sure there is.
Depending on who you ask, vmware isn't an emulator.

Re:Bye Bye Mac Hardware

[Anonymous Coward]

If the performance lives up to the hype on PC hardware, then this has to be the end of Mac hardware... which are $$$$$.

Right, for people like you who don't want to shell out the money for a Mac. Apple doesn't care about that market. The market they serve will continue to buy Mac hardware no matter what. They have loyalty in their brand...and for a good reason. Apple makes quality hardware. End of story. The OS is the frosting on the cake. Even if you ran OS X on X86 you wouldn't really get all the benefits of a complete package.

Re:Bye Bye Mac Hardware

[HeghmoH]

What hype? Nobody's said it's fast.

Macs aren't that expensive compared to PCs. Even a really really super-duper unbelievable emulator is going to be at least twice as slow as the host. Even the biggest Apple detractor will have to admit that you simply can't get a PC that's more than twice as fast as a top-of-the-line G5, and I bet that a PC that's twice as fast as a given Mac will cost more, no matter how cheap you build it.

Also, VMware isn't an emulator, it's a virtual machine. That's why it's so fast.

Re:Bye Bye Mac Hardware

[Anonymous Coward]

Indeed. Apple make quality hardware, I buy apples expressly to put Linux/PPC on them (MacOSX's prettiness is irrelevant to me and I actually find KDE more usable anyway).

Years ago, apple sold horrible closed hardware, but nowadays, it's beautifully standards-compliant.

Re:Bye Bye Mac Hardware

[neflite]

VMware isn't an emulator. It is a virtual machine environment. PearPC is an emulator because it runs on x86 and is emulating a PowerPC. VMware runs on x86 and runs x86 OS's.

Re:Bye Bye Mac Hardware

[shaitand]

"Macs aren't that expensive compared to PCs"

While I agree with the rest of your post, this statement is a bit far fetched (unless you mean specifically in terms of purchasing a pc to emulate a mac).

A technically literate individual can walk out with a decent Beigebox Mac for something to the tune of $2500-$3000. A decent beigebox pc will run you under $800.

You don't define the cost difference by the bottom of the barrel piece of junk joe idiot buys, nor even by the top of the line spare no expense systems.

You define it by the systems someone who has a both a budget and true technical expertise would buy for themselves.

And yes, I do consider it fair to build the pc yourself for the comparison. You still can't piece together a mac cheaper than their sold by the manufacturer and that is due to intentionally inflated prices.

Re:Bye Bye Mac Hardware

[wvitXpert]

I don't see where Apple hardware is really that much more epensive, especially when you consider the higher quality and better design of Apple's computers. Add the OS and iLife and I don't think there's any comparison. Maybe you haven't looked at Apple's hardware lately, thats the only reason I can see for your statement.
This is a comparison after a quick search on Dell.com and Apple.com...

eMac - $799 Dell Dimension 4600 - $746
1.25 GHz G4* 2.8GHz P4*
256MB RAM 256MB RAM
40GB HD 40GB HD
Combo Drive DVD-ROM Drive

12" PowerBook - $1599 Dell Inspiron 600m - $1368
1.33GHz G4 1.4 GHz Pentium M
256MB RAM 256MB RAM
60GB HD 40GB HD
64MB Graphics 32MB Graphics
Combo Drive Combo Drive

*note - regarding the eMac vs. the 4600 processor. I am writing this on a 2.66MHz Sony Vaio that seems for most things no faster than my 1GHz G4 PowerBook, so I don't think that comparing the two processors is too far off.

Re:Bye Bye Mac Hardware

[pantherace]

Incorrect, overall. An individual run might have had a less than half speed, but an emulator called fx!32 on alphas (can you guess what it emulated? (x86)) was faster than that after running it more than once.

FX!32 was an optimizing emulator, with native system calls somewhat supported (in windows & linux both). It is much like what transmeta later came up with and called "code morphing". It would load a program, and run it like a normal emulator, and cache it in native form, but as a section was accessed more, it would attempt to optimize that section more and more, which meant inner loops might be as efficient as native code, while the startup section was as fast as another emulator. Really cool technology, and meant that they were quite good at running x86, and combined with the native system calls, were often faster at one point than x86-native execution. Unfortunately, for Alphas, and Microsoft (because alphas got buried at compaq in favor of Itanic, and microsoft, because NT 4 on Alphas was more stable than any other Windows OS to date (2000, server2003, XP) on any other hardware (x86 and ia64, as all the others died pre-2000).) they didn't keep it going, otherwise hacks like x86-64 would not have been needed at all. It would have been like the Mac's 68k->PPC transition, another case where emulated code was faster than native.

Emultion doesn't have to be slow, it just is hard to find examples of where it isn't, because for computers I can only find 2 examples that aren't really old systems where everything has many times over the power: C64-era and like.

Re:Bye Bye Mac Hardware

[HeghmoH]

I think you misunderstood the emphasis of my post. I try to avoid italics, but I'll put them in:

"Macs aren't that expensive compared to PCs."

In other words, Macs are more expensive, but they aren't so much more expensive that it will be cheaper to buy a PC and emulate a Mac than it will be to simply buy a Mac.

Anyway, you say that you shouldn't judge by a top-of-the-line system, but that's what you did. $3000 gets you an unbelievably kick-ass Mac. Since Apple doesn't actually sell bottom of the barrel pieces of junk, I think it's fair to consider something like the eMac, which starts out at only $800, and it's a very nice Mac. The Mac midrange is the iMac, which starts out at $1300. I have a budget and "true technical expertise" and would happily buy either one, if not for the fact that computers that weigh over ten pounds don't agree with my lifestyle. Of course, if I could afford it, I'd get a G5, but I'd also get a better PC than your decent $800 example if I wanted a PC and had the money.

Re:Bye Bye Mac Hardware

[AnyoneEB]

It's v0.1, so I assume it's meant more as proof of concept rather than something they expect anyone to use. Emulation is going to have pretty big slowdown, but 40x seems extraordinarily slow. I assume that it will be optmised to run at a more reasonable speed, although you'll probably always need a rather fast (by today's standards) computer for it to be any where near usable.

Re:Bye Bye Mac Hardware

[mrklin]

Higher quality and btter design? Yes.

Better OS and included productivity suites like iLife? Yes.

Comparable in price? I do not think so.

Most Mac lovers are used to paying the MSRP as set by Apple - no discounts, no sales. As a result, when they need a price comparison, they go to Dell.com and price out a system. However, what they fail to realize is that most PC consumers price-shop!

To use more lame automotive analogies, Mac users are like Saturn car buyers who have always paid the no haggle price and are happy with it. However, they also expect PC buyers who buy Yugo (cheap white box), Toyota/Honda/Ford/GM/VW (Dell, HP, etc), or Lexus/Audi/Mercedes/BMW (Alienware, VAIO, IBM Thinkpads), to not price shop i.e. negotiate at the dealership!

Case in point: The Inspiron 600m was recently advertised to be $1050 after discount and rebate, 2/3 the price of a 12" PB.*

The price comparison with 4600 is even more ridiculous. At $770 and with free shipping, you could get a 2.8 gHz 4600 with a 17" LCD! Many web sites advertise such sales. Personally, I have recommanded http://www.techbargains.com/query.cfm to friends and family members.

So in summary, Macs maybe better in many, if not most, aspects compared to an x86 running Windows but one thing it is not is cheaper!

*NOTE* - I would still buy the PB anyway and recommand Macs to friends and families. I am just a (disgruntled) Mac user who had to pay $280 to fix my iBook's logic board that was not covered by the recall!

*NOTE 2* - Sure there is little difference when doing everyday tasks but when it comes times to encode AAC/DivX/render etc, I find a higher clocked P4 or similarly clocked Pentium-M to be superior to G4.

Re:Bye Bye Mac Hardware

[HeghmoH]

How are you measuring speed? FLOPS, MHz, wall clock time to run a bunch of operations on a big Photoshop document? The Alpha was seriously powerful, both in terms of clock speed and in speed per clock. I could believe that it got better than 50% speed when comparing MHz. I have a harder time believing that it got better than 50% when measuring FLOPS or wall clock time doing real-world operations.

Emulated 68k code on the PPC was only "faster than native" if you compare a fast PPC with a fastish 68k. If you magically came up with a 68k with equal performance to a PPC, it would totally smoke the PPC when running 68k code. All you have to do is look at how much faster PPCs got with new operating systems, as Apple rewrote more and more of the OS to be native PPC code. The 68k emulator was beautiful and reasonably quick, but I doubt if it was close to 50%, much less over.

Then again, emulating a register-poor architecture on a register-rich architecture is easy; emulating a register-rich architecture on a register-poor architecture quickly is very hard. PPCs have 64 general-purpose registers, and then you have the altivec registers, and Macs really rely a lot on altivec for speed. A G3 and G4 with the same clock speed, which should be pretty close for scalar performance, will not provide anywhere near the same user experience because Macs use altivec all over the place when they can.

I wish PearPC the best of luck. I don't doubt that they'll be able to produce a usable experience eventually, but I doubt that they'll ever be able to make it cheaper to buy a PC and emulate a Mac than to buy a Mac of equivalent performance to the emulation.

Re:Bye Bye Mac Hardware

[Anonymous Coward]

Back when the Tibook was out, I picked one up new at a $600 discount in addition to free apple care. Although I admit sales are few and a far between.

Re:Bye Bye Mac Hardware

[pantherace]

I wish PearPC the best of luck. I don't doubt that they'll be able to produce a usable experience eventually, but I doubt that they'll ever be able to make it cheaper to buy a PC and emulate a Mac than to buy a Mac of equivalent performance to the emulation.

Only if IBM & Motorola stop developing Power & PowerPC based chips, and even then given the relative parity in computing power between an Opteron & a 970, it will be a while. The reason was that both of those archs were significantly less powerful than others (68k->PPC, x86->alpha) which allowed them to be faster than native x86 or m68k.

The other point was that so far as I know no emulator other than fx!32 & transmeta's that does on-the-fly optimizations (hp might have one on it's PA-RISC chips, but I am not familiar enough, and it isn't emulating another chip.) Unless you have a foo-assembly to blah-assembly (really machine code...) compiler, that somehow knows both very well, you can't get near the efficiency, and not over time, as the way both do it is similar to optimizing based on profiling. Native vs emulated on the same program I think they were more than half as fast, but I can't be sure, part of the reason that not much alpha-native stuff was released, the other being that it has minimal market share (macs & linux people know about this :)).

Re:Bye Bye Mac Hardware

[bwy]

Ah, but if you wait for the yearly update to OS X, and stay up late to go to the Mac store, chances are very good (based on the last two years) that you'll be getting a cool 10 percent off. Yeah, dawg.

Re:Bye Bye Mac Hardware

[Anonymous Coward]

"on a 2.66MHz Sony Vaio that seems [...] no faster than my 1GHz G4 PowerBook"

That doesn't really support your argument that well...

Re:Bye Bye Mac Hardware

[Anonymous Coward]

Woah that amount is doubled. You are posting this like you want to convince us Mac is about the same price. Obviously the numbers don't match up with what you are proposing.

Re:Bye Bye Mac Hardware

[mrchaotica]

I bought my bottom-of-the-line* 12" iBook G4 because it was cheaper than an equivalent PC (Specifically, Gateway 200x)!

*well, it would have been, until I couldn't resist the upgrades on the special-order page...

Re:Bye Bye Mac Hardware

[Anonymous Coward]

What's this "higher quality"? Didn't you see the huge logic-board failure problem that nearly had Apple in a lawsuit? Nor the repeating issues with hinges, and overheating, and paint chipping, etc.?

Remember, Apple laptops are made in Taiwan by AlphaTop, a company than also makes systems for many other companies to re-brand. CPU aside, they use the exact same components used in x86 machines.

Keep telling yourself that Apple hardware is somehow magically "better quality", but the recent problems have proved that it's not the case. No, give me Sun or IBM any day, thanks...

Re:Bye Bye Mac Hardware

[fr0dicus]

But then we just bring in the old productivity argument.

I've really never been as productive on Linux because of the constant updates associated with the bleeding edge stuff. Even if it was stable it's still not quite as good, subtract the extra admin it takes to keep it going.

I've never been as productive on Windows because I have to use so much 3rd party software to get it functioning the way I like it Windows itself goes loopy.

I'm more than happy to pay the premium for Apple hardware to get the superior build quality and wonderful OS. YMMV, but to address the source of the thread, signalling the death of Mac hardware due to some lame emulator is kind of missing the point.

Re:Bye Bye Mac Hardware

[wvitXpert]

I was actually refering mainly to the case of the computer, not the internal components. I don't think that there can be much defference in the quality of the internal components, at least after you reach a certain (normal) level of quality. I just can't stand the toy like look and feel of practicly all other computers. I would like to know who decided that all PCs had to be made flimsy and cheap. As to the logic board failures, I'll still take my chances with Apple. I'd rather take the (slight) chance of getting a lemon Apple than being guaranteed of getting a crappy PC.

saw a segment on this

[jobberslayer]

The guy from thebroken on screensavers on tech tv had a segment about this. Looked really cool, but was very very slow. Still this is the 0.1 version and anybody who can do cool stuff like this disserves their props

Awesome...

[stuffman64]

the emulated processor is about 40 times slower than the host processor.

Great, if you were to do this with a 2GHz Pentium, you would get the performance equivalent of around 50MHz. There is no way in hell that OSX would run decently at that speed, what with all the transparancy and animation of the UI. But hey, at least it works.

Re:Awesome...

[Random Web Developer]

I knew i read that somewhere, do you have a link for that, i couldn't find it.

Re:Awesome...

[timdorr]

Actually, the graphic elements are done by the video card, which means if they can get a properly done graphics system, then there shouldn't be any slow down at all. Quartz Extreme is good stuff :)

Re:Awesome...

[Refrag]

PearPC doesn't even support OpenGL acceleration via the video card.

Re:Awesome...

[bladernr]

There is no way in hell that OSX would run decently at that speed, what with all the transparancy and animation of the UI.

Its worse than you think. Mac (on Apple hardware) does that stuff with hardware acceleration (Quartz). This high level of software-hardware integration results in tremendous performance and the nice OS X interface, but makes supporting other hardware even harder.

I doubt PearPC does the pass-through to hardware acceleration on supported hardware (nVidia and ATI). That would make it even slower than the simple "slow down the processor" math, because of lack of hardware acceleration that Apple is so good at using.

Re:Awesome...

[scottj]

I can't even get Quartz Extreme to work on my G4. Well, I hacked it to run, but it was slower than without QE running. It has PCI video as a limitation. Now if you're running this on an emulated processor, there's no way you're going to come close to getting the full 64-bit PCI throughput that I'm getting on my G4. QE is a waste of time in this arena.

Re:Awesome...

[Anonymous Coward]

It's really not terribly bad on PearPC though. This has all been documented at Emaculation for about 3 days now.

The Jitc version of PearPC runs approximately 1/10-1/15 slower than a real mac. I successfully installed 10.2 on an Athlon64 3200+ and I can honestly say it's only a little slower than when I hacked 10.2 to run on a Powermac with a 603e procesor. The installation took about an hour and a half for a base install, and with the refresh set to around 40, it's quite usable. Were there a network bridge avaliable for Windows, I wouldn't mind doing basic functions on it.

Even the animation is bearable- again- only slightly slower than that 603e mac, which didn't have hardware acceleration either.

Also remember this is only the first release, 0.1. It's bound to increase in speed with subsequent releases. Just the fact that it works now is incredible in itself, given the architectural differences from x86 to ppc.

Re:Awesome...

[RzUpAnmsCwrds]

"Its worse than you think."

No, it's better than you think.

It's nowhere near as fast as a real Mac, but it's quite usable. Windows drag smoothly, menus are pretty smooth, etc.

Remember that practically everything but the CPU runs at a fast speed (remember, a typical PC has more memory bandwidth than every Mac except the G5).

It's not bad at all. My panther install is going well right now.

Athlon XP 2600+ (256K L2, 2.1GHz), 1GB PC3200 DDR (NForce2) / 333FSB, MSI GeForce FX 5900XT.

Re:Awesome...

[mblase]

The Jitc version of PearPC runs approximately 1/10-1/15 slower than a real mac.

That's mighty impressive, unless you actually meant "runs approximately 1/10 - 1/15 as fast as a real Mac".

Sorry to niggle, but it's a big difference in meaning.

Re:Awesome...

[Anonymous Coward]

Actually, you don't need a network bridge. I am currently running a later version of PearPC that is networkable on Windows (when teamed with another freeware application, OpenVPN). All you have to do (on the Windows side) is turn on Internet Connection Sharing and have OpenVPN connect via the Windows Internet connection. On the OS X side, you set the gateway to the IP OpenVPN uses in Windows, and your IP to any other address in the same subnet. I'm *posting* this reply from OS X 10.3.4 running on PearPC, which is hosted by a 2.6 GHz P4 with HT running XP with SP2 RC2.

Debugging aid

[Latent Heat]

Since the UI is running in slow motion, it may be a useful debugging aid, in addition to the logging you can do with an emulated system.

Sweet

[Supp0rtLinux]

So now, I can really confuse my friends, family, and co-workers by running MacOS X inside of Pear onto of my WinXP install with the MacOS X theme. It'll appear as two Macs on one wintel box.

Re:Sweet

[CrankyFool]

No, wait, here's what you need to do:

Get a Sun system that supports those wacki SunPC SBUS cards Sun used to make -- you know, with an actual Intel desktop processor on them.

Install Linux. This gives you 'Linux inside Solaris.'

Install VMWare on that Linux.

Install Windows XP through VMWare. You now have XP Inside Linux Inside Solaris.

*NOW* use Pear and install MacOS X, giving you OSX Inside XP Inside Linux Inside Solaris.

Way 1337er.

Re:Sweet

[jelloburn]

Make sure you run bochs or VirtualPC inside Pear too. Hmmm, a PC inside a Mac inside a PC...

Re:Sweet

[kidgenius]

Wanna make it even more confusing? Run PearPC from Linux, running Gnome w/ the Gno-SX Mac Theme. Then, you run Linux from within Windows, which as you said has a Mac theme. Voila! 3 OS X's at once! ;)

I'd hate to see that slowdown.

Re:Sweet

[kidgenius]

Hmm....we could get quite the loop going here.
Windows -> Cygwin (?) -> Linux
Linux -> PearPC -> OS X
OS X -> VirtualPC -> Windows
repeat ad infinitum.

Yes folks, we just have discovered the new way to stress test your new computer. The more loops you can get going, the better.

Re:Sweet

[Supp0rtLinux]

Too bad MOL only runs on PPC... then again... if I just did Linux on my system with VMware inside of that running XP... with PEAR on XP... and perhaps MOL within PEAR since its emulating a PPC env... then I'd have MAC on XP on Linux *AND* MAC on Linux on MAC on WinXP on Linux... ;)

Re:Sweet

[crapnutassneck]

wash->rinse->repeat->

Re:Sweet

[damiam]

VMWare doesn't run on non-x86 systems. You'd need a full-fledged emulator like Bochs, which is much slower than VMWare and other virtualizers.

Re:Sweet

[Pikhq]

And run X in each, with 2 different X sessions running per OS....

Re:Sweet

[Anonymous Coward]

if you read the orginal post, it was using an hardware x86 card which acutally contains a real processor, and a fully compatible chipset (bit like the old 386 card for amigas... mmmm) so vmware probably would work.

Re:Sweet

[Canberra Bob]

Or the other way

Linux (on PPC) -> Mac on Linux -> OS X
OS X -> Virtual PC -> Win XP
Win XP -> VMWare -> Solaris x86

And bingo - Solaris on PPC

Re:Sweet

[Anonymous Coward]

Just what I need to run MAME on !

Re:Sweet

[Anonymous Coward]

With the small losses in VMWare, on top of the 40 times slower processing loss on pearpc... you would effectively have a pretty looking paperweight....

I'd hate to see you run a generic pearpc setup , it wouldn't even be a.....pretty.... paperweight.

Re:Sweet

[Anonymous Coward]

But if you run MAME and load an Atari 2600 ROM, you'd never notice the lag...

Re:Sweet

[wersh]

Actually, you just provided the answer for how to use PearPC without breaking Apple's EULA (which dictates that OS X can only be installed on Apple's hardware, or something to that effect).

• Get an Apple and install OS X.
• Install Windows through Virtual PC under OS X.
• Install OS X through PearPC under Windows.

Or if you prefer to use Linux as the primary operating system on your Mac...

• Get an Apple and install <insert your favorite distro of Linux here>.
• Install Windows through Bochs under Linux.
• Install OS X through PearPC under Windows.

Or perhaps...

• Get an Apple and install <insert your favorite distro of Linux here>.
• Install OS X through Mac-on-Linux under Linux.
• Install Windows through Virtual PC under OS X.
• Install OS X through PearPC under Windows.

Granted, it seems pretty pointless to emulate the PPC under an emulated x86 on a PPC, but at least Apple can't say that there's no legal way of using the software to install OS X. :)

Re:Sweet

[Captain DaFt]

WOW! And it STILL runs faster than my 1 bit/1 hz Turing machine! Truly awesome!

Apple needs to port :)

[Crizp]

Yes, Apple _must_ port OSX to AMD64 or something... but that would maybe screw with the sales of their (somewhat overpriced, but you really get what you pay for) hardware.

Re:Apple needs to port :)

[Bob Davis, Retired]

Apple isn't going to port to x86. Wake the fuck up and smell the coffee.

Re:Apple needs to port :)

[WhiteWolf666]

They might now.

If there is a slew of people running OS X on the emulator, I could see them porting it.

Of course, that is dependent upon the emulator picking up quite a bit of speed.

1/2, 1/4, maybe even 1/10 speed would be bearble.

1/50? Too slow.

Re:Apple needs to port :)

[shaitand]

I see them as more likely to try to shutdown the emulator and if that fails to start revoking licenses (since the OSX license while it may not be truely legal, along with the rest of licenses of this type, says you can't run it on anything but Apple hardware).

Re:Apple needs to port :)

[Bull999999]

I'm willing to bet on your theory since Apply did kill off the Apple clone business.

Re:Apple needs to port :)

[Anonymous Coward]

No, why would they. It wouldn't sell because it sucks, and apple would go down the drain.

Re:Apple needs to port :)

[WhiteWolf666]

Hmm.....

They may try this at first.

I would not be surprised, however, if some major company took up this effort.

I would also not be surprised if they were willing to go to the table against Apple. The 'you must own Apple hardware' requirement is almost certainly not legal.

Re:Apple needs to port :)

[Crizp]

I thought the smiley in the heading would be enough, but no. Well, there should be another one after the post. Just to mark it 'not serious', you know?

Re:Apple needs to port :)

[Anonymous Coward]

I'm sure I read somewhere that Apple are continuing to maintain Darwin/OSX for x86 "just in case" x86 completely outpaces PPC. They can then switch over to x86 in their hardware in just a month or two, with the software just needing a few touches. If this was this case, sure it still wouldn't "just install" on x86 PC hardware, but a MaconLin-type dealie will soon sort that. Mac OS X, on PC hardware, native. I'd gladly pay 200+ for that

What they fail to mention...

[kennedy]

...is that the emulated ppc chip is 40 to 500 times SLOWER than the host.

here see for yourself

Re:What they fail to mention...

[Ieshan]

Huh? He says so right in the article.

Re:What they fail to mention...

[Keruo]

well, gotta use that beowulf cluster for something, so why not emulate ppc with it

Re:What they fail to mention...

[aardvarkjoe]

Huh? He says so right in the article.

That's no better than if he had not mentioned it at all. What, do you think that anybody actually reads these things?

Re:What they fail to mention...

[Anonymous Coward]

Well hell, it's a 0.1 version... lets see what happens when he gets around to the 0.8-1.0 realm.

I love the last image

[Anonymous Coward]

Processor: 0 MHz PowerPC G3

Free OS X

[kidgenius]

Well, I've been waiting for a way to finally use my free copy of OS X I received through my mom (she was a teacher) and now I may have a way. w00t

And this is ever so much better...

[Nom du Keyboard]

And this is ever so much better than actually buying Mac hardware because...?

Re:And this is ever so much better...

[RAMMS EIN]

Because you can be a lot cheaper off by buying x86 hardware. Never mind that it will run a hundred times slower than a Mac of the same price.

Re:And this is ever so much better...

[Surlyboi]

Because some people are so emotionally set against using one mouse button that working at 40% efficiency is a decent tradeoff? =)

Re:And this is ever so much better...

[FauxPasIII]

> And this is ever so much better than actually buying Mac hardware because...?

It runs on affordable hardware.

Re:And this is ever so much better...

[k_187]

Yes, but its not 40% efficiency, its more like 0.4% efficiency. It seems to me that in the time it would take this to do anything you'd earn the money to buy a mac.

Re:And this is ever so much better...

[Anonymous Coward]

Same goes for running x86 emulators on the Mac. What's your point? When running native applications, PCs run rings around Macs of the same price, and soon, as this emulator improves, people will be able to run OSX on inexpensive hardware, as well.

Re:And this is ever so much better...

[mlk]

Cost?

Cheap Mac - 550 UKP
Using current h/w, and a friends MacOS X CDs - Free.

Great news for OSS developers, we can actually test apps on MacOS X! O/c I'd love to go the eMac (or even better 17" TiBook) route. But I don't have 550UKP.

Re:And this is ever so much better...

[Anonymous Coward]

How is $799 not affordable?

Re:And this is ever so much better...

[shaitand]

Because there are people like me who would like to take a peek at this OSX thing people have been talking about?

However they cannot afford to shell out $3k+ for a decent mac and certainly cannot afford to shell out $800 for a piece of shit Mac?

I don't know where you are, but here you see linux, you see windows, but you really just don't see macs anymore.

Re:And this is ever so much better...

[damiam]

1/40 = 2.5%, not 40%. And Macs work fine with two or more buttons.

Re:And this is ever so much better...

[13Echo]

Because it's truly upgradable. In 10 years, you'll be able to use the software at full G3 speed!

Wait a second.

Re:And this is ever so much better...

[EvilFrog]

No it doesn't. It's practically unusable on affordable hardware. Even on top of the line x86 hardware it still runs at a fraction of the speed of a Mac that's a fraction of the cost.

$200 gets you a refurbished G3 that runs several times faster than PearPC on a $5000 setup. The truth is PearPC doesn't really serve any actual use other than proving it can be done, and appealing to people with Aqua-Envy.

Re:And this is ever so much better...

[FauxPasIII]

Well, it doesn't run -well- on affordable hardware. ;)

Things will, of course, improve with time. It'll probably never let me run MacOS X on a PC as fast as it would run on a comparably priced mac. But it'll let me test my code / run applications from / generally admire OS X right here from the comfort of my happy Debian/IBM/GNU/Windowmaker/Linux laptop.

On a slight tangent, it would be nice to see Apple embrace this, maybe even help the project out with specs/docs. After I try out the copy of Jaguar I already own (I have a refurbished G3 that cost me $200, now that you mention it ;) if (when) it works even usably well, you can rest assured I'll be buying a copy of Panther.

Wow, that post ran long.

Re:And this is ever so much better...

[dmaxwell]

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.

Re:And this is ever so much better...

[Surlyboi]

Notice the smiley.

Jeez, that's what I get for rushing for the off-the-cuff joke...

Macusers are sooo touchy. =)

For the irony impaired, I've been using Macs since the SE and I'm typing this on my brand new 15" Albook

Re:And this is ever so much better...

[N1KO]

You're assuming the emulation will always be slow. It will never run at 100% efficiencey but it eventually will be useable.

Re:And this is ever so much better...

[damiam]

/offtopic I'm not a Mac user. But your joke wasn't funny, just stupid.

Re:And this is ever so much better...

[Anonymous Coward]

> Things will, of course, improve with time.

PowerPC has been around 10 years. If people thought it was possible to produce a *usable* emulator, it would have been done by now. In fact there were several commercial 68K Mac emulators that tried, failed, and folded.

So, while it might double in speed (3ghz Pentium = 100Mhz Mac), don't get your hopes up.

Re:And this is ever so much better...

[Joe Tie.]

Because I don't have any desire to switch from linux to osx, I'd still like to make sure my code compiles on osx, and I don't have the money to shell out for something I'd a couple minutes use out of every month.

Re:And this is ever so much better...

[Have Blue]

It may eventually be usable, but it will never even come close to catching up with even a several-generations-old Mac (and this statement will hold true no matter where in the future you take your readings, unless Apple really does go out of business or halt Mac development, which is unlikely in the extreme).

Re:And this is ever so much better...

[Wessler]

LowOnCash, meet Apple Store. Apple Store, meet LowOnCash. Go explore! Take your time! Have fun! Try an iMac. A G5. Download some programs. Run them. Whatever.

Re:And this is ever so much better...

[Anonymous Coward]

It's not affordable when you compare it to the PC you get for the same price. In fact it's offensive when you consider how little Apple gives you for $799.

Re:And this is ever so much better...

[RAMMS EIN]

No. Emulating a CISC CPU on a RISC one works a lot better then the other way around.

To get a feeling for how bad it is, consider that a PowerPC probably has 64 or more general purpose registers. An x86 has 6. Emulating these registers will likely be done in RAM. They would be cached, but that reduces available cache size, so it leads to more trips to memory, which means LOTS of wasted cycles.

A PowerPC can run x86 and 68k code at quite acceptible speed. I doubt if the same will ever go the other way around.

Re:And this is ever so much better...

[Anonymous Coward]

Because Mac hardware, particularly laptops, is going downhill. See the huge logic board problems, along with dodgy hinges, overheating, powerbook paint chips etc.

Most people don't realise that Apple laptops are made by AlphaTop, a Taiwanese ODM, and aren't anything spectacular as a result.

Also, I like to have choice in my hardware, and not be limited to a single supplier. And on laptops I prefer trackpoints and multiple 'mouse' buttons.

Those are several important reasons why most of us don't want to buy Apple's hardware.

Re:And this is ever so much better...

[Anonymous Coward]

Erm, you're talking about PearPC 0.1. That's right, 0.1. It's in a very early stage.

With the current performance ratio about 1/10th of a real Mac using the JIT, with plenty of tuning, development and optimisation we can expect the coders to reach 1/5th later.

So that makes a 3 GHz PC run Mac OS X at around 600 MHz. Great stuff, and you also have the benefits of A) hardware choice, B) better hardware (see the recent build quality problems) C) being able to run Windows, BeOS, various other OSes seamlessly.

Re:And this is ever so much better...

[Anonymous Coward]

OK, I am not an architecture person, as I'm about to show--but won't the relative lack of registers in x86 be obviated by on-die cache? Surely the emulated registers will have a high frequency of cache hits.

Re:And this is ever so much better...

[cfuse]

$200 gets you a refurbished G3 that runs several times faster than PearPC on a $5000 setup. The truth is PearPC doesn't really serve any actual use other than proving it can be done, and appealing to people with Aqua-Envy.

The scary part about this is that the number of people with 'aqua envy' is probably greater than the number of people who own/use a real mac.

Re:And this is ever so much better...

[RAMMS EIN]

``won't the relative lack of registers in x86 be obviated by on-die cache?''

The registers will be cached, but that means there is less space to cache code and (non-register) data. In other words, you merely shift the slow-down.

Re:And this is ever so much better...

[Trillan]

Well, you can't do anything about the trackpoint, but SideTrack will add multiple mouse buttons for you.

Took its time!

[antic]

From the article:

"...on their website they warn you: the emulated processor is about 40 times slower than the host processor."

5 hours, just for the first CD, and using 99% CPU and all available RAM. You have to admire the patience of Thom Holwerda...

Of course, once he's installed the OS, the Dock drops into an infinite loop that crashes the machine, but oh well -- actually navigating to any applications -- who needs that kind of junk?

There's definitely room for improvement, but it shows promise!

Re:Took its time!

[Anonymous Coward]

Who is Jordan, and no, they are never too big, just too long:)

Yepp!

[Morth]

Ok, let me get this straight. His only computer is a AMD (he cleaned the room while installing, implying he doesn't have another one), yet he possess Mac OS X 10.3 install disks? Did he actually go out and buy them just to try this? Evidently it's even his first time using OS X, considering he felt it was very alien.

Re:Yepp!

[Anonymous Coward]

If your mouse pointer stat
rted moving three pixels a minute, you'd describe it as alien too ... ... except if you've ever experienced WinME, that is.

Re:Yepp!

[Anonymous Coward]

Ok, Let me Get this straight.... He Heard About a PPC Emulator for a x86 System, So rushed to his local shop and shelled out on a nice shiney OSX Box... No he did what anyone (Who isnt Made of cash) Would do, borrow or download it. Its not like he has gone and burnt 10 copies and selling them? The copy he downloaded will probably never be used for any other purposes than watching the mouse jitter around the screen....

Re:Yepp!

[DrMrLordX]

The fact that the install time caused him to clean his room leads me to believe that slashdotters everywhere could benefit from Pear PC.

Now if only it had caused him to take a shower and change his underwear . . .

Apple is a hardware company, software is secondary

[AHumbleOpinion]

Sigh. If only Apple would port the thing themselves. Add a windows compatibility layer and you've got one hell of a competitor to Microsoft.

Apple is a hardware company, their software is "secondary" from a profit center point of view. Software is only important to Apple in that it drives the sale of hardware.

Not really...

[Omega]

The main benefit to the Mac is the flawless hardware integration -- the beautiful/powerful OS is just gravy. The lack of commodity h/w support does mean you pay more, but it also means you get more reliability.

Apple will never support this application because they wouldn't want to deal with all the h/w headaches. Running OS X on x86 will never be more than a hobby.

How long until...

[chrispyman]

So how long you think this project will last until Apple tries to squash it? Sure emulators are legal, but I don't think that'd stop Apple from trying.

Re:How long until...

[polyp2000]

I dont think that is actually possible. Since PearPC is a powerpc emulator, just because OSX runs on PPC it doesnt mean that PearPC is illegal. Other oses also run on ppc (surprise surprise , linux, darwin, et al) its up to the users what os they choose to run on it. I doubt Apple would be to phased by this anyway because performance is unlikely to be good enough to make it usable. It would be interesting to see the core used in something like a gamecube emulator. Again though its going to be a while before performance is anywhere near good enough for any real world applications (other than debugging (albeit slowly) and developing ppc code)

nick ...

I got it also to work took 3 hours on a 3 ghz p4

[Anonymous Coward]

but no login screen for 10.2 server it redraw slowly

They showed it on TSS

[Ryan Stortz]

The Screen Savers had a small demonstartion on this. Keven Rose was able to get it , but it was extremely slow.

Re:They showed it on TSS

[Ryan Stortz]

I'm sorry, that was supposed to read:

The Screen Savers had a small demonstartion on this. Keven Rose was able to get it working aswell, but it was extremely slow.

Re:They showed it on TSS

[Anonymous Coward]

When I saw that you used an acronym to refer to a TV show I thought, "That's stupid."

Then I wondered why you bothered with the T, as acronyms commonly ignore words like "if", "and" and "the".

I then quickly realized that "TSS" probably goes over better than "SS".

what I don't get is...

[bennomatic]

if Mac OS X runs on emulated generic PPC hardware, what's to stop people from running MacOS X on any number of PPC platforms? What does Apple do to "squash" that sort of activity?

Re:what I don't get is...

[vegetablespork]

Easy. They use legal threats against smaller and less well-funded entities, whether they're right or not.

Re:what I don't get is...

[TravisWatkins]

OpenFirmware reports that the system is an Apple. OS X won't install if it doesn't.

Re:what I don't get is...

[MyHair]

if Mac OS X runs on emulated generic PPC hardware, what's to stop people from running MacOS X on any number of PPC platforms?

Money.

PPC systems are expensive, presumably due to lower production volume. (Also the major vendors Apple and IBM presumably only sell very high quality workstations, and no other PPC workstation vendor manufactures enough PPC systems/boards to bring the price to near-cheap-PC levels.) After OS X & Mac-On-Linux came out I started investigating getting a "cheap" PPC to have a cheap OS X system. But PPC stuff that can run Linux and/or OS X is very expensive--even the used stuff. The IBM RS/6000 series of workstations is PPC-based but more costly than Mac. There were a couple of other vendors with obscure OSes but I don't recall finding a viable alternative cheaper than simply buying a Mac.

I want a Mac, but I don't want to pay for one. I have too much PC stuff that I can incrementally upgrade. Oh well.

Crazy thought that's probably totally impractical: I wonder if you could run Darwin/x86 and use PearPC to handle the proprietary code? Then the kernel and glibc calls would run natively.

Re:what I don't get is...

[tepples]

If Mac OS X refuses to install on a computer that doesn't report as having been manufactured by Apple Computer, then telling an implementation of OpenFirmware to lie about the maker of the system would probably not infringe Apple Computer's copyrights or trademarks. Sega v. Accolade, 977 F2d 1510 (9th Cir. 1992).

Re:what I don't get is...

[TravisWatkins]

SoftPear is trying to do just that.

Slashdot condones piracy?

[kiwioddBall]

Many other stories are fairly gray, but I'm pretty sure the license to use OSX pretty much says that you are only allowed to install it on Apple hardware (although correct me if I'm wrong). This is promoting a fairly blatant breach of the license (Pear doesn't actually breach that license by existing).

Re:Slashdot condones piracy?

[HeghmoH]

There is no indication that EULAs (an unsigned "contract" that is dictated by only one party and can't be examined before purchase) are legally binding, and certainly breaking an EULA is no major sin. If he had a purchased copy, it's certainly not "piracy" even if it is illegal to break an EULA.

Re:Slashdot condones piracy?

[ewhac]

Many other stories are fairly gray, but I'm pretty sure the license to use OSX pretty much says that you are only allowed to install it on Apple hardware (although correct me if I'm wrong). This is promoting a fairly blatant breach of the license [ ... ]

This presumes such "agreements" are valid and binding. Many intelligent, respected people do not believe they are, for very good reasons.

He may have committed a single instance of copyright infringement by running the same copy of OS-X on both his Mac and his PC (assuming he has a Mac, and that it's running the install image from the same CD). This may or may not be worth dragging before a court, but it's important to note such a copyright infringement is distinct from a breach of a fictious "license".

Schwab

Re:Slashdot condones piracy?

[SiMac]

No, it doesn't say Apple hardware. It says Apple-LABELED hardware. You could stick your PC board in a Mac Classic. Hell, you could even just slap an Apple sticker on the side and it would be legal.

Aren't loopholes fun?

Re:Slashdot condones piracy?

[shaitand]

"Many other stories are fairly gray, but I'm pretty sure the license to use OSX pretty much says that you are only allowed to install it on Apple hardware (although correct me if I'm wrong). This is promoting a fairly blatant breach of the license (Pear doesn't actually breach that license by existing)."

There is nothing to say that the terms of said license are legal. Thus far there is no reason to believe that licenses which extend control beyond what a copyright grants are legal, and a copyright grants the owner of said copyright control of distribution, it gives no authority over how a work is used once distributed.

Remember, without the copyright ALL the rights would be in the hands of the public. Copyright is the public giving the author/whathaveyou what is essentially a contract allowing them to control distribution for a limited time. The public owns OSX (well technically nobody does, or humankind does, ideas aren't ownable even under our screwed up legal system yet), apple just holds a copyright.

Simply because powerful copyright holders try to claim they own the material doesn't make it true, ideas aren't really ownable.

Re:Slashdot condones piracy?

[HTH NE1]

It says Apple-LABELED hardware. You could stick your PC board in a Mac Classic.... Hell, you could even just slap an Apple sticker on the side and it would be legal.

And are you Apple, labeling the hardware? Does your PC board in a Mac Classic case have an Apple-applied silkscreened logo on it?

Older versions of their license agreement may have had that loophole. This phrasing closes it.

Not that I'd rat anyone out for it. I like this project and hope it continues. Meanwhile, Apple will be putting in code to prevent it from running on unsupported hardware, as they have done as far back as ProDOS.

Re:Slashdot condones piracy?

[Kadagan AU]

Actually, I'd worry more about the legality of his Windows 2003 license. There is no proof behind this, but I'd imagine that if it's a home system, it wasn't actually purchased. If you're going to pay that kind of money, plus buy a copy of OS X, why not just buy a Mac? From the article (with emphasis added):

Test system:

- AMD Athlon XP 1600+;
- 512 MB SDRAM;
- Ati Radeon 9000 with 128 MB DDR-RAM;
- CMI-8738 based 5.1 soundcard;
- MSI K7T Turbo2 mainboard;
- 40 GB harddisk;
- Standard ps/2 keyboard;
- Microsoft Trackball Optical (USB);
- Windows Server 2003, Enterprise Edition (host);
- PearPC 0.1, emulating Mac OS X 10.3 Panther (client).

Re:Slashdot condones piracy?

[Anonymous Coward]

Meanwhile, Apple will be putting in code to prevent it from running on unsupported hardware, as they have done as far back as ProDOS.

And people will be producing binary patches to circumvent this monopolistic behavior. As they have done as far back as damn near the beginning of time.

Re:Slashdot condones piracy?

[Anonymous Coward]

Just a heads-up for Canadians, our courts have ruled in favour (search the page for "click wrap") of the enforceability of "click wrap" contracts, so doing this in Canada would in fact be a legitimate violation of the EULA.

That said, if I in fact paid good money for a legit copy of OS X, I find it unlikely Apple is going to hunt me down and fine me for it. At this point they have no way to correlate who buys a copy with their use (eg, it could be someone buying to upgrade a previous version or something).

Re:Slashdot condones piracy?

[saarbruck]

Isn't it illegal for Ford to require the use of Ford parts on their vehicles? Once you pay for it, you can use whatever replacement brands you want. Why is it ok for Apple? I can't see this section of the EULA holding up in court if it ever got that far.

Re:Slashdot condones piracy?

[Anonymous Coward]

I wouldn't assume anything. There's numerous ways to get cheap MS software for 'testing and development' -- MSDN, Partner programs, student programs, 90 day demo discs, etc. It's obviously not real server hardware.

Re:Slashdot condones piracy?

[dmaxwell]

With a factory box in hand and a paid-up receipt, most of us would tell ole Steve just exactly where he could cram his EULA. I know the software and entertainment magnates are doing to their damndest to dispell this erroneous impression of ownership some of us can't shake. But how can I take it seriously when the commercial for the DVD of the week tells me I can own it today!?

Re:Slashdot condones piracy?

[JohnsonWax]

There is nothing to say that the terms of said license are legal.

There is nothing to say that the terms of said law are constitutional.

Not a very responsible reason for acting, nor one that will put you in good standing with the lawyers.

Re:Slashdot condones piracy?

[LocalH]

Only if he runs both simultaneously. Same reason you're not technically supposed to use a Mac ROM with an emulator at the same time you're using the actual Mac that the ROM was dumped from.

Re:Slashdot condones piracy?

[Have Blue]

The believe of intelligent and respected people does not affect the legal status of the agreements until the disagreement is ruled on by a court or codified in legislation. Until then, it's illegal, whether it's morally and ethically wrong or not, and that status should be kept in mind, especially by a news source like Slashdot.

Re:Slashdot condones piracy?

[(startx)]

Just playing devil's advocate here, but even if he didn't pay for Windows Server 2003, he could be running the 180-day evaluation version. I've got a machine running it on campus for one a group in the CS capstone course who insisted on testing their final project with it.

Re:Slashdot condones piracy?

[roger_ford]

Actually, as a legal conclusion this is far from true. Many academics have questioned whether "shrink wrap" type licenses are binding, but the court cases pretty unanimously hold them to be binding. See for example ProCD, Inc v Zeidenberg, 86 F3d 1447 (7th Cir 1996).

From Judge Easterbrook's opinion:

In Wisconsin, as elsewhere, a contract includes only the terms on which the parties have agreed. One cannot agree to hidden terms, the judge concluded. So far, so good--but one of the terms to which Zeidenberg agreed by purchasing the software is that the transaction was subject to a license. Zeidenberg's position therefore must be that the printed terms on the outside of a box are the parties' contract--except for printed terms that refer to or incorporate other terms. But why would Wisconsin fetter the parties' choice in this [*1451] way? Vendors can put the entire terms of a contract on the outside of a box only by using microscopic type, removing other information that buyers might find more useful (such as what the software does, and on which computers it works), or both. The "Read Me" file included with most software, describing system requirements and potential incompatibilities, may be equivalent to ten pages of type; warranties and license restrictions take still more space. Notice on the outside, terms on the inside, and a right to return the software for a refund if the terms are [**10] unacceptable (a right that the license expressly extends), may be a means of doing business valuable to buyers and sellers alike. See E. Allan Farnsworth, 1 Farnsworth on Contracts 4.26 (1990); Restatement (2d) of Contracts 211 comment a (1981) ("Standardization of agreements serves many of the same functions as standardization of goods and services; both are essential to a system of mass production and distribution. Scarce and costly time and skill can be devoted to a class of transactions rather than the details of individual transactions."). Doubtless a state could forbid the use of standard contracts in the software business, but we do not think that Wisconsin has done so.

(IAN[Y]AL)

Re:Slashdot condones piracy?

[ewhac]

The believe of intelligent and respected people does not affect the legal status of the agreements until the disagreement is ruled on by a court or codified in legislation. Until then, it's illegal, [ ... ]

Incorrect.

It is not illegal. It is not legal. It isn't anything until directly addressed by a court ruling or legislation. Until either of those things happens, it's just the vendor pissing in the wind. You are free to heed or ignore their shrill bleating, as you prefer, according to your own sense of morals and ethics.

Schwab

Re:Slashdot condones piracy?

[Tim C]

Many intelligent, respected people do not believe they are, for very good reasons.

That's argument by appeal to authority, which is a logical fallacy. Many inteliigent, respected people have believed many things throught history, and have been wrong.

Until a court in your jurisdiction rules otherwise, it's safest to assume that the licence is binding, and act accordingly. No-one is going to be taken to court for doing this sort of thing - there's absolutely nothing to be gained from it.

Re:Slashdot condones piracy?

[jasonsingha]

Sounds like Slashdotters want the GPL to be legal but for EULAs to be illegal.

Re:Slashdot condones piracy?

[technothrasher]

Sounds like Slashdotters want the GPL to be legal but for EULAs to be illegal.

Hey, I dislike the GPL as much as the next guy, but your comment here makes little sense. The GPL is about distribution, EULAs are about use. You're free to disagree with the GPL on any peice of software just the same as you can disagree with any EULA you'd like. Same result: Use the software any way you like, but distribute it and you've violated copyright.

Re:Slashdot condones piracy?

[Have Blue]

According to this guy, you're wrong. Got a link?

Re:Slashdot condones piracy?

[SiMac]

It doesn't say "labeled by Apple." It says "Apple-labeled." The phrasing is ambiguous.

What constitutes the hardware is also ambiguous. If you put a RAM chip that doesn't have an Apple logo on it into a Mac, are you violating the license? As long as the outside of it says Apple on it, it doesn't matter.

Re:Slashdot condones piracy?

[Sunnan]

Until a court in your jurisdiction rules otherwise

And this isn't "appeal to authority"?

Re:Slashdot condones piracy?

[Tim C]

Touché. In this case, however, I'm appealing to the authority that actually determines what is and is not binding with respsect to these agreements. That's a little different to saying "these well known, intelligent people say so, although it's not up to them and they're not actually lawyers or judges".

Re:Slashdot condones piracy?

[Sunnan]

In my (possibly warped?) view of the world, the difference is very small. I don't have very much respect for the law, especially with regard to what's been termed "intellectual property".

Appeal to authority is and remains a mostly fallacious argument when it comes to questions of morals and ethics.

"Doing X (say copyright infringement) is wrong because (say) police are somehow obligated to apprehend culprits."

(Now that's a flawed example, since copyright infringement is a civil matter in most countries, but does my point get through?)

I just have a hard time grasping the validity of modern law, from legislation via interpretation to execution. It seems very corporate-controlled to me.

Legality

[BumpyCarrot]

It should be noted that this actually goes against the OSX EULA, which specifically states that the software cannot be used on anything other than Apple branded hardware, unfortunately :(

Re:Legality

[nexex]

so take a picture of an apple and 'brand' your machine with it :)

Re:Legality

[Anonymous Coward]

And if Microsoft ever tried to attach a condition like that to their licenses, there would be a hue and cry from the Slashdot "community." But the Apple faithful think nothing of Apple disingenuously manipulating its EULA to support its monopoly.

Posting AC because posts that dare to criticize Apple go down like a gay prostitute in front of a Mac store.

Re:Legality

[exp(pi*sqrt(163))]

But it's not a real computer using the software. I mean, nobody things that my spaceship in defender is a real spaceship do they?

Re:Legality

[Anonymous Coward]

Next, you'll be telling me those little guys at the bottom of the screen I've been rescuing aren't really human!

Re:Legality

[dameron]

But the Apple faithful think nothing of Apple disingenuously manipulating its EULA to support its monopoly.

What monopoly?

-dameron

Re:Legality

[Anonymous Coward]

The one on OSX--unless Apple's started allowing to run on non-proprietary hardware now.

Re:Legality

[HTH NE1]

And if Microsoft ever tried to attach a condition like that to their licenses...

What, like you can only play XBOX games on unmodified XBOX-branded hardware?

Re:Legality

[Anonymous Coward]

There is no monopoly for Apple. Users have a choice - a PC box or an Apple box. 95% of users are going for the PC box.

Doesn't sound like a monopoly to me, unless those 5% wield one hell of a power.

Of course, looking at OS X as a monopoly is like saying that Ford have a 100% monopoly in Ford cars, or Reebok have a 100% monopoly in Reebok shoes... Every manufacturer on Earth has a monopoly in their own product line, but using the word 'monopoly' in this context is meaningless.

Re:Legality

[Anonymous Coward]

Console games come with EULAs now?

Re:Legality

[Anonymous Coward]

The one on OSX--unless Apple's started allowing to run on non-proprietary hardware now.

God, yes, it's terrible how Apple control 100% of the Mac market. I shall write to my congressman immediately. When I do so I shall also ask him to lobby for McDonalds to be stripped of their unfair monopoly on Big Macs.

Re:Legality

[Anonymous Coward]

Car and analogies aren't appropriate here, unless Ford is making cars that can only consume Ford gasoline, and Reebok shoes that won't fit unless worn with Reebok socks. Neither of which is true.

Re:Legality

[Anonymous Coward]

This analogy makes no sense. Anyone can make a hamburger like the Big Mac--McDonald's won't win a suit against a burger outfit that sells hamburgers with thousand island dressing and an extra bun. Apple has tied its operating system to proprietary hardware, when a mere recompile would allow it to run on non-proprietary hardware. They're using a monopoly supported by user interface design patents to prop up an overpriced hardware business. Last time I checked, McDonald's doesn't require you to buy a $10 Coke with your Big Mac.

Re:Legality

[Erwos]

Monopolistic tactics, anyways. And you can certainly engage in those even without being a true monopoly (see: Microsoft).

-Erwos

Re:Legality

[Anonymous Coward]

It should be noted that this actually goes against the OSX EULA, which specifically states that the software cannot be used on anything other than Apple branded hardware, unfortunately :(

Yes it can. Just tell them to RTFA.

Re:Legality

[BumpyCarrot]

I think the monopoly argument is more centred around Apple having a fairly big monopoly when it comes to PPC-based machines. Of course, as your analogies show, you can accuse anyone of a monopoly if you get really specific.

Re:Legality

[N1KO]

100% of Apple computers run an Apple OS. Apple does not sell machines with non-Apple OSs or with no OS at all.

BTW, PCs account for a very small percentage of all computers yet Microsoft is still considered a monopoly.

Re:Legality

[Anonymous Coward]

Apple sells *systems* -- a combination of hardware and software.

When you buy a microwave oven, it comes with controls to set the cooking time, etc. You cannot buy a microwave oven sans controls.

Re:Legality

[Anonymous Coward]

That would make sense only if most microwave ovens were sold that way--but they're not. Apple force-bundles their operating system with their hardware; the vast majority of the computer industry does not. (It's trivial to buy a white box PC without a copy of Windows, for example. Why? Because MICROSOFT GOT SUED FOR DOING THE SAME THING APPLE IS DOING and lost.)

Re:Legality

[mdwh2]

Who cares what Apple write? Apple don't make the law, thankfully.

Re:Legality

[BumpyCarrot]

No, but some people who *do* make the law say that if you want to use Apple products, you have to do what they tell you.

Re:Legality

[mdwh2]

Well, I'm glad I don't live in whichever countries that is ;) They abolished slavery along time ago here; under no circumstances do I have to do what someone tells me, unless possibly if a contract is signed up front.

Emulator Scmemulator

[Frigid Monkey]

Really I can't see whats so breathtaking about an Apple emulator, well don't get me wrong it's a nice trick....but wouldn't it be far MORE interesting if say somebody compiled that little Darwin kernel for x86 and got OS-X to run NATIVE on it?
Emulators are just too damn slow. The flip side of this is Virtual PC which works quite well but does not touch the performance of any Win box.

The standard reply to the "I want OSX on Win" plea is that Apple will never do it as it would kill their hardware sales. However I don't think this is the case: Just look at Sony, they are aimed at the same market as apple : High end Multi-media. And their PC's are just as, if not more expensive, than Apple.

There is more going on on a corporate level than we know. Jobs and Gates are in a hot tub somewhere in Switzerland right now thumb wrestling for million dollar bills. (no pun intended) IMHO-

Re:Emulator Scmemulator

[tolan-b]

wouldn't it be far MORE interesting if say somebody compiled that little Darwin kernel for x86 and got OS-X to run NATIVE on it?

Can't be done. Darwin is already on x86, but the source for the rest of OSX isn't available. Hence emulation :)

Re:Emulator Scmemulator

[MBCook]

Macs have always been quite hard to emulate, at least that's my understanding. Thanks to Altivec, register starvation, and other things (see another post of mine in this topic) it's not easy.

It's mostly a problem of emulating the PPC chips themselves. There are emulators for the 68k based Macs (basillisk and executor to name two), and PPC based ones can be emulated too recently (SheepShaver has gotten this ability recently, I understand). Once you've got the chip emulated, the rest isn't that bad.

This is why there have always been "Mac on Mac" emulators (like Mac on Linux, or SheepShaver to run MacOS on PPC based BeOS and Linux machines). They don't have to deal with the whole processor issue, they just have to provide the right environment for the software.

So the ability to run OS X on Intel hardware is quite novel and interesting.

As for running Darwin, you can. Darwin is open source. The problem is that you can't run OS X on top of the x86 version because you can't get the source code to that. So you'd either have to rewrite ALL of the OS X libraries and then use emulation to run real Mac programs, or you'd have to use emulation to run the OS X libraries AND the software. Neither is easily done. Since they both require the CPU emulator, why not skip the middle man?

As for the "Virtual PC works well", see that post of mine I referenced above. It's MUCH easier to fake a x86 on a PPC than vice versa.

No one is claiming this is anywhere near usefull yet, but you never know what will come out if something like this.

Re:Emulator Scmemulator

[jay-be-em]

"wouldn't it be far MORE interesting if say somebody compiled that little Darwin kernel for x86 and got OS-X to run NATIVE on it?"
Yes, the impossible is certainly interesting.

Re:Emulator Scmemulator

[shaitand]

"The standard reply to the "I want OSX on Win" plea is that Apple will never do it as it would kill their hardware sales. However I don't think this is the case: Just look at Sony, they are aimed at the same market as apple : High end Multi-media. And their PC's are just as, if not more expensive, than Apple."

Yes but it's worth noting, apple at least has decent overpriced hardware. As a former sony employee, I can assure you, sony WILL put the cheapest piece of crap in the system they can find so long as it has spec X that the consumer looks at. And it's not like their other products, they don't give support for their pc's/computer hardware (internal hardware is altogether different, cdroms, burners, dats, etc) which even rivals that of gateway or compaq.

I agree though, sooner or later it'd be nice for Apple to go x86. For it to happen though, they are going to have to clue in to the fact that Mac hardware is has become too pclike and they don't have the tight hardware experience they used to have.

It used to be that you went to store, bought X piece of mac hardware, go home, plug X hardware in. Your done.

Now it's the same as a pc, you go to store, buy X hardware, go home, plug X hardware in, pray, install driver if your prayers were answered, pray driver works.

Re:Emulator Scmemulator

[groomed]

Macs have always been quite hard to emulate, at least that's my understanding. Thanks to Altivec, register starvation, and other things (see another post of mine in this topic) it's not easy.

The more probable reason is that demand for a Mac emulator is very small. There's little need to postulate magical, unemulatable CPU capabilities. Nobody had any problems emulating 68K, even though those chips are very different from x86.

Re:Emulator Scmemulator

[TheNetAvenger]

As for the "Virtual PC works well", see that post of mine I referenced above. It's MUCH easier to fake a x86 on a PPC than vice versa.

Actually, this is not even close to being accurate.

A few companies have had PowerPC emulators running at near native speeds for years; however, Apple keeps suing the companies out of business. Check out SoftMac for example.

The reasons this emulator is slow on the X86 platform can be explain by actually looking at how the emulation is transpiring.
#1) All video calls are being software rendered - Even a G5 if forced to perform all video via software, and via software emulation would also run VERY SLOWLY.
#2) This is an early beta that barely covers the basics of the PPC functionality, let alone optimizations that would provide 'correlated' emulation through existing X86 architecture technologies. X86 technologies have many equivalent optimizations and processing advantages that this beta doesn't even attempt to use, as they are just in the process of 'getting' it to work.
#3) This emulator is written in a high level language for portability reason. Apple has many assembly specific optimizations in the upper (and some of the lower) layers of OSX. This emulator is tranlating these 'assembly' based optimized software through a non-optimized 'portable' language.

Apple makes ok products, and IBM makes ok chips, but neither are the best at everything - even in a delusional world.

Re:Emulator Scmemulator

[kunudo]

I read some place that there's an x86-native OSX version somewhere, only they won't let us have it.

Hmm... Couldn't that stupid cracker that broke into Cisco have done something useful instead? :D

Re:Emulator Scmemulator

[Anonymous Coward]

>Now it's the same as a pc, you go to store, buy X
>hardware, go home, plug X hardware in, pray,
>install driver if your prayers were answered, pray
>driver works.

Do you have any real experiences to back this statement up? I am not trying to pick a fight. I am just honestly curious what hardware you bought for your Mac that didn't Just Work.

I am speaking from the point of view of someone who has bought a lot of hardware for the Mac (and PC). I have never seen such a beautiful thing as plugging hardware into a Mac. Doing the same for a PC is a nightmare and I could never, ever compare the two!

Re:Emulator Scmemulator

[Derg]

usually dont reply to AC's but I'll bite. I've had a LaCie external burner that never quite worked in OS9 or X. Same with my Microtek Scanner and my cannon printer. Sure they "work" but OSX has a strange habbit of forgetting that they exist, dropping the connections to the devices. Never once had that problem with any of the above hardware when attached to a pc.

PearPC is Mighty Impressive!

[Anonymous Coward]

The main focus of this story should be on PearPC, which is a very reasonable PowerPC Architecture Emulator.

We've all waited so long to get this kind of emulator project going for the PowerPC platform that I can't help but feel all warm and fuzzy inside now that it's here.

Oh yeah.. Getting OS X to run on it is a huge accomplishment too!

Mostly a Proof of Concept

[gbulmash]

As noted in the article, this is 0.1 version software. As well, it runs on top of Windows. That makes the "40x slower than the normal processor" claim seem somewhere about right.

Now, the tricks as I see it are:

• Optimize the code in future releases for better speed.

• Build a version that boots out of Linux or BSD to minimize overhead. Seems that since OSX is PPC BSD at its heart, there might be some sort of way to lower redundancy if the emulator were running in x386 BSD.

Re:Mostly a Proof of Concept

[mtnharo]

It already does run on Linux and presumeably other *nixes. It will take A LOT of optimization before this becomes more than a neat hack, but from the look of things, there is a lot of room to improve. I'll bet if a version were made to completely take advantage of every bit of performance of something like an Opteron or Athlon 64-FX while running 64-bit native, it could be genuinely useful.

Re:Mostly a Proof of Concept

[BoneFlower]

Darwin already runs on x86, theoretically, the ideal OS host for this would be Darwin/x86...

you dumbass...

[Anonymous Coward]

I think your humor detection circuits are fried or something...

Wonder where it'll be hosted . . .

[vegetablespork]

. . . after SourceForge gets the C&D. Apple isn't just going to sit back and let this emulator get better and faster and start eating into their proprietary hardware sales.

Re:Wonder where it'll be hosted . . .

[exp(pi*sqrt(163))]

Apple stopped selling the Apple ][ years ago so it's not like there's a current Apple product, in a similar performance bracket, that this thing competes with.

Re:Wonder where it'll be hosted . . .

[vegetablespork]

But that's because the PPC emulation is very slow. If the PPC emulation were to get better, and a tighter coupling between, say, Quartz Extreme and the DirectX API hacked into this emulator, Apple will have a problem leveraging its operating system monopoly to sell expensive hardware.

Re:Wonder where it'll be hosted . . .

[Anonymous Coward]

Pear is just a PPC hardware emulator... You don't have to install OSX on it. You could install PPC Linux.

Re:Wonder where it'll be hosted . . .

[Anonymous Coward]

I doubt that fact will dissuade Apple from siccing the lawyers on it. Playfair couldn't be used to un-DRM tracks you didn't purchase, either, but that didn't stop the legal threats.

Re:Wonder where it'll be hosted . . .

[Anonymous Coward]

Some research on emulation is in order here. Long and shoft of it:

Not gonna happen.

Emulating the PPC's opposite endian, high register count, SIMD-enabled ISA on an x86 chip is very, very difficult. The only processor that has a chance at doing this usefully is the opteron (more registers; native SSE2), and by usefully I mean "you could run applications." Applications, like textedit.

Apple has no reason to fear this app, and they know as well as everyone else that emulators are legal. Why waste their time on a C&D that won't work and wouldn't help them anyway?

Re:Wonder where it'll be hosted . . .

[sparrow_hawk]

Right, because everyone and their mother is going to run out, download a piece of Open Source software, buy, beg, borrow, or steal an OS X disk, and install both on their desktop PCs because they want a Mac instead.

I mean, look at what happened to Microsoft when those Linux hippies came out with an operating system that ran *natively* on PC hardware. Poof! Marketshare gone overnight.

(/sarcasm)

Now if a) the emulation got so good it was reasonably close to a native PPC, and if b) a company started selling PC hardware running the emulator and Apple's OS (in violation of the OS X EULA, I might add), Apple's legal department would probably go after them. Until then, however, I suspect the project is entirely safe. It will mostly be used by hackers interested in the inner workings of the PPC architecture and/or OS X. Even if it does get fast enough it could be used for day-to-day tasks, it still isn't likely to catch on in a big way.

Re:Wonder where it'll be hosted . . .

[Anonymous Coward]

You don't have to install OSX on it. You could install PPC Linux.

I can say the same about a real Macintosh as well, so is there any difference here? other than that this machine (the virtual one) doesn't come preloaded with an OS.

Re:Wonder where it'll be hosted . . .

[LocalH]

Apple knows emulation is legal.

ReadySoft taught them so, over AMax.

Re:Wonder where it'll be hosted . . .

[Adnans]

PearPC emulates a PowerPC computer so Apple has no grounds to litigate.

That's like SCO trying to sue the BOCHS project for emulating an x86 computer just because one could potentially run a copy of their Crapware on it.

-adnans

What people will do ...

[Enrique1218]

...to get MacOSX on X86. My GOD!!! All those pesky slashdotters haunting the apple forum with their bemoaning the lack of MacOSX support for X86. They couldn't just go out and buy a Mac. They had to start open source project.

There is a new addage to the old cliche.

Where there stubbornness, there is a way.

My hat's off to you gentlemen

Classic George Carlin bit

[Valdrax]

Pears are better than apples...

Classic George Carlin bit:
"And now, a message from the National Apple Institute: FUCK PEARS!!"

SheepShaver?

[sirReal.83.]

How does this compare to SheepShaver? I've heard it's faster than PearPC but haven't tried either myself. To think I'd never heard of either until a few months ago!

Re:SheepShaver?

[mtnharo]

Sheepshaver is a PPC emulator for Linux or BeOS, but it does not emulate a G3, whereas PearPC does. Sheepshaver looks to be a sort of upgrade to the old Basilisk II emulator, which could only handle 68k based Mac emulation. Also, both of those old emulators required a Mac Rom file, and could only run System 7 or 8. Not particularly useful for anything modern, although Basilisk II runs Escape Velocity pretty well...

Re:SheepShaver?

[Anonymous Coward]

Why don't yoou read the first paragraph of the link you just posted. I think it sums it up pretty conclusively.

Re:SheepShaver?

[Kenja]

SheepShaver is not a CPU emulator. It is just a hardware abstraction layer. It needs to run on BeOS or PPC Linux.

Re:SheepShaver?

[Mekabyte]

Oh really? Then what's this? The SheepShaver page clearly states that it includes a PowerPC emulator for platforms that need it. It does not run OSX, however.

Re:SheepShaver?

[Anonymous Coward]

Sheepshaver uses the PPC processor, using but hosting in a virtual environment. The hardware (PPC processor) is real, but the environment is virtual. Sort of like Wine - it runs the x86 instructions using the processor, and just intercepts Windows API calls. As a result, the speed is excellent.

With the PearPC, the entire machine is simulated, so it's a whole lot slower. Sort of like projects to get Wine working on the PPC - they have to simulate the processor as well as the environment.

Re:SheepShaver?

[Kenja]

That would be SheepShaver running on top of an emulator.

Re:SheepShaver?

[Kenja]

My bad. Looks like they integrated with BasiliskII. $ cvs -d :pserver:anoncvs@down.physik.uni-mainz.de:/cvs checkout BasiliskII $ cvs -d :pserver:anoncvs@down.physik.uni-mainz.de:/cvs checkout SheepShaver $ cd SheepShaver $ make links

Not a true hack...

[bobthemonkey13]

...until someone runs PearPC inside Windows on Virtual PC for Mac on PearPC running on a Linux/PPC system.

Hey, since PearPC is a true emulator, shouldn't it be able to run itself? I eagerly await the OS X version. ;-)

Re:Not a true hack...

[bobthemonkey13]

Actually, I was joking about PearPC on Linux/PPC, but now that I think about it, this might be the only software-only way to run apps/OSes that require a G3 on pre-G3 PowerMacs. If someone writes a just-in-time compiler/mostly-virtualizer for ppc, it might not be /horrendously/ slow. Maybe this could be merged with Mac on Linux, like bochs was with plex86?

Then again, maybe only three people would use it anyway.

Re:Not a true hack...

[plj]

Don't know about that, but imagine a copy of MS Virtual PC running on top of that! Now you'd have a x86 emulator on top of a PPC emulator on top of a natively running x86 OS, and perhaps even the speed of this machine!

Re:Not a true hack...

[Colin-W-Holywell]

You mean like this?

I hate the way the mice and keyboards feel

[exp(pi*sqrt(163))]

Er...have you tried the keyboard and mouse sections in CompUSA or Fry's?

great resource site

[aldoman]

www.peoplesprimary.com has great resources.. please link it to everyone nad stop the ms apple tyranny

Re:great resource site

[Anonymous Coward]

hey everybody, this is not even gay porno.

Re:great resource site

[LA_Samurai]

People, please do NOT browse to www.peoplesprimary.com! It's a gay p0rn site! The guy who posted it is a complete jerk and a perv. He should be modded way down and never be allowed to post to /.

using OS X as primary gui

[Keruo]

throw away kdm/gdm
start X without window manager
daemonize pearpc running OS X
export DISPLAY=linuxbox_emulating:0
and run OS X as primary gui from linux

wouldn't that be nifty if it worked?

PearPC Multithreaded?

[MBCook]

Yeah, you'd need multiple processors at least to try to get G3 like speed out if it.

Speaking of which, does anyone know if PearPC uses multiple threads? I mean can it really take advantage of SMP? Because while it may be slow (a 3 GHz PC would run like a 75 MHz Mac), if it could use multiple processors (different tasks use different processors) then it would FEEL faster.

If this was the case, all you'd need is 4 Opterons or Xeons with HT and you could get yourself the equivenent of a 300 MHz iMac that you could buy for a fraction of what all that hardware would cost you. But it would be really geeky! Who says Macs are more expensive than equivelent PCs ;)

Re:PearPC Multithreaded?

[Anonymous Coward]

How the hell is it equivalent?
This is running through TOTAL CPU emulation, idiot.

Re:PearPC Multithreaded?

[MBCook]

Thanks. I know that. 4 x 75 MHz is 300. If you use HyperThreading enabled CPUs it might be more like 350 or 400 MHz. By using all those CPUs and running multiple tasks (OS X is SMP enabled after all) the computer could FEEL like a 300 MHz G3. I say G3 because there is no Altivec. Four threads running at 75 MHz each means your getting the same ammount of work done that you would with one processor running at 300 MHz (roughly. I know that SMP doesn't scale at 100%, but I'm ignoring that for now).

I'm not saying it'd be good, I'm just saying that you could make it seem halfway decent if you throw enough hardware at it (which my parrent post said you couldn't do at this point).

Calm down, dude. How is my theoretical computer not that equivelent to a 250-300 MHz G3 computer if PearPC can take advantage of multiple CPUs?

Re:PearPC Multithreaded?

[Autumnmist]

No it doesn't. At least not yet. They've only released two very very early versions anyway.

Re:PearPC Multithreaded?

[ViolentGreen]

I can't say for sure but I kind of doubt that it can do that at the momemt. This is a 0.1 release and is more of a proof-of-concept than anything else.

Who knows though. It might be there. If it's not I'm sure it will be eventually. They are going to have a hard time increasing performance if they don't.

I have been aware of this for a few days

[Space_Soldier]

The project is cool, but unfortunetly it may never be fully usable. The target goal is for it to run at host/10 speed. For those of you who have used vmware (not an emulator) know that it can be quite slow, and its speed is way faster than host/10. Right now, it works at a speed host/500 or host/40. You know how people are, once the host/10 is reached he might just say to himself "I can do a little better," and host/9, host/8, host/7... One day, it might be usable. I'd love for Apple to release OS X on x86. There are some rumours of an x86 version being developed inside Apple for the day that they might switch to Intel. I am quite tired of the beige computer that I have in front of my face. The thing is that I will never by their overpriced hardware. For those of you that say that Apple will die if they switch to x86, I think that you are wrong. People don't care about the processor. When people buy a Mac, they buy the whole package: - the good looking monitor - the good looking tower - the good looking keyboard - the good looking mouse - the good looking speakers - the good looking OS X. I believe that they can get a lot of the market if the lower the price and switch to x86. In the past few months they have sold more iPods than macs, this should be a red flag that they have to do something about those prices. We all know that the hardware price is a ripoff. What I am wondering is if there is a scheme where the price from hardware goes to sofware. OS X comes with a ton of software for $130, while XP $300 comes with a crappy browser and notepad. They might be making the sofware look cheap and put hidden charges in the hardware. It is possible that I am wrong, but who trusts businesses this days?

Re:I have been aware of this for a few days

[GFLPraxis]

The problem is that if they switch to x86, suddenly every peice of Mac OS X software ever written for PPC OS X will no longer work.

What's the point of switching to another architecture if it voids every peice of software in existance? Everything will need to be recompiled for x86, and you will need to buy x86 versions of everything.

Re:I have been aware of this for a few days

[Eil]

I resisted the urge to reply as this is almost a troll. But a more thorough read of it shows that it is just more uninformed than anything else.

I'd love for Apple to release OS X on x86. There are some rumours of an x86 version being developed inside Apple for the day that they might switch to Intel.

I recall reading at one point that Apple has indicated that they do indeed maintain a nearly complete x86 port of OS X. But it will never, and I do mean never, be released. They use it only to verify the integrity of the codebase and to catch bugs that would be difficult or impossible to easily spot otherwise.

For those of you that say that Apple will die if they switch to x86, I think that you are wrong. People don't care about the processor.

In all likelihood, neither does Apple. But they won't switch for the following reasons:

1) They would piss off nearly every Mac user in the world by instantly dropping backward compatibility with current software. They're never going to support two different product lines either, especially when the difference is only in the CPU, so the chip would have to be fully compatible with both the x86 and PPC and such a beast would be ghastly to develop and manufacture. Maybe Transmeta could do it, but they focus on small, power-saving processors, not high-end desktop and server CPUs (assuming their architecture could even scale high enough and quick enough to compete with current high-end CPUs).

2) It would cost them far more money to switch their whole development, engineering, and manufacturing to a new architecture than it would to stay with the one they have. In bulk, the cost of a PPC CPU is not much greater than an x86 CPU. In other words, the cost of switching would far outweigh the cost of the silicon. Oh, and they'd piss off their engineers and developers, which are their main asset.

And Apple has stated that it will never get into the clone business again, so the rest of the system would still be as tightly controlled as now. Even if Macs ran x86s, you still couldn't go out and build your own $400 beige box and slap OS X on it.

When people buy a Mac, they buy the whole package: - the good looking monitor - the good looking tower - the good looking keyboard - the good looking mouse - the good looking speakers - the good looking OS X. I believe that they can get a lot of the market if the lower the price and switch to x86.

Your first sentence is the explanation of why the second is wrong. Apple hardware would still cost a lot of money because the price of an Apple system is all in the R&D to make a solid, easy-to-maintain, and stylish desktop computer. The cost of the silicon is siginificant, but not so much that switching to x86 would make it worthwhile.

In the past few months they have sold more iPods than macs, this should be a red flag that they have to do something about those prices.

Uh, iPods cost less than Macs and have a completely different function. Apples and oranges here, so to speak. Apple does quite well with their sales of computers. Just because there isn't one in every home doesn't mean their not making any money on them.

We all know that the hardware price is a ripoff.

If all you're buying it for is the hardware, yes. If you're buying a complete, solid, usable, good-looking, top-of-the-line system then most, inclusing myself, would argue an authoritative "no".

What I am wondering is if there is a scheme where the price from hardware goes to sofware. OS X comes with a ton of software for $130, while XP $300 comes with a crappy browser and notepad. They might be making the sofware look cheap and put hidden charges in the hardware.

The price of the hardware goes to developing the hardware. I have no earthy idea why Apple charges as much as they do for OS X except maybe because they know people will pay for it. I believe that they would have a lot more fans if they put each incremental upgrade o

Re:I have been aware of this for a few days

[mtrisk]

well..umm...MAC OS X doesnt work on an x86 processor either, so that wouldn't work. Fortunately thats not how it goes, PearPC emulates a PPC chip, so that everything works. So software isn't voided into oblivion ;)

Re:I have been aware of this for a few days

[zpok]

The only way to make a mac cheap is to take away it's mac-ness.
When you for one second don't think about all the R&D, look at the average mac configuration.
Strip those away and you can get it cheap, but then it wouldn't be the jack of all trades a mac is now.
As you already said, when you buy a mac, you buy the whole package, part of that costs real dollars, regardless of the processor used. And the processor isn't a real factor in the total cost anyway.

If you're serious, check out the refurbs section in the online store at Apple's website, or buy second hand. Or go deal hunting, there are great deals to be made if you look for them. That way you buy their overpriced (not really) hardware for a very reasonable price.

Good to know...

[athlon02]

that I'm not the only one who encountered the seemingly infinite Finder crash loop. I got it installed on my A64 3200 winxp pro machine a few days ago and gave up for now due to that loop. But I think I'll wait on PearPC updates to fix this issue and implement more functionality.

Re:Good to know...

[BinaryJono]

the finder lockup issue has been resolved in pearpc 0.1.1 which is available on the website.

Illegal

[Anonymous Coward]

Well, you can't do it legally, regardless if you have bought OS X or not. It's says right in the EULA that you aren't allowed to use the OS on anything but Apple Hardware. Personally I don't think it will be long before Apple does something to put a stop to this (technically), but in the meanwhile, we can all rest assured that this isn't legal ;)

Re:Illegal

[Anonymous Coward]

If I buy it, I'll run it on a god-damned C-64 if I so please. This crap about software being "licensed, not sold" is just that, crap. When I have to sign a real contract to get the software, and can't buy it on the shelf, that EULA will mean something.

*Gasp*

[msimm]

Why bother? Why...BOTHER??

*fart* *gasp*

Because!! Because it can be done!

Wha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha

You know the drill, not alway sane, but sometimes entertaining! Hell, if I had no concept of modern entertainment and nothing better to do...well I'd probably watch porn, but hey. :)

Hmm, would this be some type of record?

[Foo2rama]

pear to osx to classic emulation to old virtualpc version(pre osx) to windows xp to a dos emulator to run the original Zork?

dock

[Anonymous Coward]

the dock bug was fixed in version 0.1.1 availible on the pearpc website!

getting it up

[sewagemaster]

...but he did get it up and running on an AMD Athlon XP 1600+ with 512MB of RAM

I got my woody up too, but it took slightly a bit more time. I just found it way too hard...

(actually I use knoppix/unstable... shhhh! :D)

Why just run OSX?

[Orion Blastar]

Why not Yellow Dog Linux for PPC, why not AmigaOS 4.X, why not MacOS 9.X, why not the PPC version of BeOS? Anyone tried those yet?

Re:Why just run OSX?

[Anonymous Coward]

For those too lazy to actually check the PearPC website, here's the rundown:

• Mandrake Linux 9.1 for PPC installer: Runs well
• Mandrake Linux 9.1 for PPC after installation: Hard to boot. Runs very well afterwards.
• Darwin for PPC: Runs well
• Mac OS X 10.3: Runs well with some caveats
• OpenBSD for PPC: Crashes while booting (accesses PCI in an unsupported way)
• NetBSD for PPC: Crashes while booting

Re:Why just run OSX?

[Anonymous Coward]

QEMU can run certain PowerPC Linux configurations...

http://fabrice.bellard.free.fr/qemu/

Mac OS X will be along at some point too ;o)

Re:Why just run OSX?

[Illissius]

IIRC Mandrake PPC installs and then supposedly something bad happens, which the site I read didn't go into much detail about, while OS9 doesn't work. The aim of the project is to emulate the PPC architechture, though, so if it works any PPC OS could supposedly be used on it. OSX has the highest interest out of these, for the assorted rather obvious reasons.

Requirements

[Anonymous Coward]

Anyone care to comment (do the maths) on how fast a theoretical x86 would need to be in order to acheive a usable speed (say even comparable to a 500mhz G4?)

you retarded...

[pyr0]

I think your moderation detection circuits are fried. The initial moderation was +1 Informative. While funny, the comment was most certainly not informative.

Wow, It's about time.

[templest]

I'm surprised it's taken this long for PearPC to have popped up in slashdot. I thought you guys where on top of everything.

I have been using this for about a week, on the same setup that that dude has. I have installed Panther (OS X 10.3), and I must say I'm impressed. These guys have managed to do what others thought of as impossible. Mind you, It's damned slow. It actually took a little over 3 hours to install on my machine. But that was a really basic install (no other but required software).

emaculation http://www.emaculation.com is running some pretty good forums, with already a ton of questions/answers on it regarding PearPC and the installation of OS X, ect. Plus some pretty good guides for those who don't know where to start.

I see really huge potential in this.

Mind you, if you want usability in this. You are going to be dissapointed, it's SLOW AS FUCK. But then again, It's justafiable. Give it some time, and you'll see. This baby is really going to go places.

PearPC, for all your life needs

[Unnngh!]

From this article:

Since I had nothing else to do (PearPC took 99% of my processor and all the RAM it could possibly find), I actually started to clean my bed/computer room. Thank you, PearPC.

Other testimonials:

PearPC changed my life! I no longer have to use this silly pacemaker - Dorothy Krutz, West VA.

Without PearPC, I wouldn't have been able to achieve cold fusion in my livingroom! Thanks, PearPC! - Johnny Taylor, Age 12, Branson, MO

PEARPC HAS MOST GRACEFULLY HELPED MY EMAILING BUSINESS, BASED IN NIGERIA. THANK YOU MOST SINCERELY, PEARPC - Mganda Ngawe, Nigeria

Re:PearPC, for all your life needs

[Raven42rac]

You need a steady heartbeat to live. -Some Doctor I just got assaulted and my work stolen, you insensitive clod! -Some Scientist You are most welcome. Here is my bank account information. -Some mugu.

Ahem

[Anonymous Coward]

In the past few months they have sold more iPods than macs, this should be a red flag that they have to do something about those prices.

iPods are cheaper than G5s and Inspirons and Vaios, etc. Daimler Chrysler has sold more Dodge Neons in the last few months than S-Class Mercedes. Should there be a price drop on the Mercedes?

Re:Ahem

[Space_Soldier]

I'm not sure on this, but I don't think that Daimler Chrysler ownes Mercedes. I think that they have a partenership with Mercedes to bring Mercedes to United States. By the way the European Mercedes are way cooler (larger, look better) than the US versions, but it costs a fortune to import one from Germany.

Re:Ahem

[Anonymous Coward]

Mercedes owns Chrysler.

Oh, and all Mercedes cars suck. I fucking hate them. Butt-ass ugly.

Re:Ahem

[Qwaniton]

PSSSST.

There is no "Mercedes" company. Mercedes is just a brand of Daimler-Chrysler. Always has been. Before they bought Chrysler, they were Daimler-Benz.

OS X machine to ssh in and compile on?

[molo]

This could be helpful for developers looking to test their open source code on Mac OS X.

Does anyone have any OS X machines available for open source developers to use? Something ssh-able with apple's developer tools (make and gcc) would be sufficient.

If no one knows of any services like this, would any OS X people be willing to open up user accounts on their boxen? (PearPC or real hardware, either would be fine) email me: molotov1134@hotmail.com

Thanks,
-molo

Re:OS X machine to ssh in and compile on?

[mlk]

Yes, SF.net have a Compile Farm, two of which is are Apple computers.

Re:OS X machine to ssh in and compile on?

[caseih]

Why not build yourself a darwin-target cross compiler for your linux machine: http://apple.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=04/04/22/ 1750204&mode=flat&tid=106&tid=126&tid=156&tid=179& tid=185&tid=190

Re:OS X machine to ssh in and compile on?

[catscan2000]

Try SourceForge's Compile Farm. They have a couple OS X boxes that are exactly what you are wishing for. All you need is an open-source project hosted on SourceForge, as far as I remember..

http://sourceforge.net/docman/display_doc.php?doci d=762&group_id=1

See! x86 hardware can't be 40 times faster...

[divisionbyzero]

than a G3! Otherwise it would have run in real time... ;-)

Not to get all retro on you...

[msimm]

But STFU. This is a tech story and I couldn't care less if he broke into Apple and stole, then compiled the source code himself unless this story touched on that explicitly.

If you were trying to be interesting and not irritating why don't you quote the license and link to it? I'd have given you +1 interesting for that but I don't need a conscience nanny.

Re:Not to get all retro on you...

[kiwioddBall]

Just for you, I found it. It is here, EULA in section 2A. And you should consider the fact that many people owe the quality of their life to people paying for software, and therefore get the privilege and pleasure of working with computers in order to earn an income. Some do it for free, I'd prefer not to :)

Re:Not to get all retro on you...

[msimm]

Thank you, but I'd still take issue with you piracy hysteria (a seemingly modern affliction) as expressed here:

And you should consider the fact that many people owe the quality of their life to people paying for software

Who stole software? And since when is breaching the (very disputable, largely untested) EULA the equivalent?

Still -1 troll in my book, but its your predicament.

Re:Not to get all retro on you...

[Anonymous Coward]

mod parent up

've got the Emulator blues!

[LaBlueCow]

So, how long does everyone think it'll be before someone writes an article (or, more correctly, a blog post) ranting that they can't believe how slow X product is on the PC emulator... oh wait, they're running the PC emulator on emulated Mac on a real slow PC to begin with... 1 frames/hour goodness...

Re:'ve got the Emulator blues!

[LaBlueCow]

Funny, at the time I posted this, there weren't any others posted. But now it's redundant huh? Probably because the other posts got modded up, and I got overlooked until farther down the chain.
CHECK THE TIME STAMPS BEFORE MODDING REDUNDANCY!

AMD64?

[Anonymous Coward]

Has anyone tried this yet on AMD64? I've searched around a bit and didn't come up with anything.

I'm curious how it will behave - it's my understanding the AMD64 chips will make use of their extra registers even for standard x86 code if possible, so in theory a computationally-intensive x86 program like this would perform significantly better on this than a standard IA32 32-bit chip.

WHY Bother???

[pbjones]

it'll never run at anywhere near native speeds, and the apps you want to run will seem like tar on a cold morning. You can buy a old iMac for the cost of setting up a PC to do this and still end up with the same 'speed'. Run X86 Darwin with the Aqua clone WM.

Actually they did it

[fmorgan]

Not exactly "Apple" but a company founded with some ex-Apple people and that went back to Apple some years ago: NeXT.

After failing with their hw sales, NeXT released OpenStep, the ancester of the actual Mac OS X, for x86. It was also a failure. It's a big risk for a company like Apple, to hurt their hw business with such previous experiences.

Next and OpenStep:
http://www.osnews.com/story.php?news_id =4042

Re:Actually they did it

[3) profit!!!]

Apple's early version of OS X, called Rhapsody, actually ran on x86.

Re:Actually they did it

[fmorgan]

Yes, but it was more a public alpha/beta than a released product. OpenStep was a released product, so they actually tried to sell it and make $$ with it.
It seems that they had the same success as BeOS.

Some people will buy it, but most of the "crowd" just uses whatever comes with the computer.

Speed issues

[222]

For anyone complaining about speed, keep in mind this is a .1 release of Pear, and speed is always (or should be) secondary to functionality. Im sure by a 1.0 release things will be a lot snappier.
Lets just all applaud the fact that this actually sort of works ;).

That's what I'd like to know as well...

[Kjella]

...I mean, even if Apple has OS X locked to their machines, it must be immensly much faster emulating an Apple PPC machine on a generic PPC machine.

I know you can get PPC processors as "upgrades" to Macs. All you'd really need was a PPC mobo somewhere... Is there anyone out there selling such a thing?

Kjella

Re:That's what I'd like to know as well...

[raodin]

You can buy non-apple PPC machines, yes. I haven't seen any non-apple motherboards for sale, though. IBM sells several PPC workstations - but they're even more expensive than a Mac. Yellow Dog Linux sold generic PPC machines for a while, but from a quick look at their website they now appear to be only selling Apple and IBM machines, as well as PPC BriQs - tiny g3 or g4 systems that fit in a 5 1/4" drive bay.

VMware slow? Yeah right

[Anonymous Coward]

Obviously you've never used VMware and you're talking out your ass... or you ran it on your 64MB machine.

I don't know what kind of hardware you were running VMware on but it's pretty damn fast. It's all about having enough memory.

My 450 Mhz P2 with 512MB RAM runs VMware excellent. And my 2.2 Ghz P4 laptop with 1GB RAM runs several VMware sessions superbly.

I use it for Windows development and performance of my application is only a hair slower than running it native in Linux.

Aw man...

[bobhagopian]

I finally got Windows installed properly on my computer, and now this. I bet that by the time I turn my cell phone on, they'll have it running Lin... oh crap, too late.

If register starvation is the main problem...

[juhaz]

... in PPC emulation, would x86-64 version of PearPC be much faster than one for i386?

It hits a specific economic bracket dead-on.

[solios]

Because hypothetically, this thing will get optimized to the point where it should be possible to run OS X acceptably. And there are people out there who are interested in such a thing, such as myself- I recently broke the bank to acquire a dual G4 450 for 500$- and it took another 300$ in upgrades to make it useable (to say nothing of the ~200$ worth of parts I'm permaborrowing to make it functional for entertainment purposes). That's a four year old machine.

By contrast, I can get a used PC (from a coworker) that's faster (133mhz bus as opposed to the 100 in the G4), at a used price of half the present value of the parts he put into it... which is about 160$.

The economically disadvantaged don't get the luxury of modern high-powered Macintoshes- for the price of a three-year-old G4, I can build a CURRENT PC.

If I could run OS X at useable speeds through an emulation system on a CURRENT PC, I'd buy the hardware and do things that way- seeing as how a current PC (bare bones) is between 1/4 and 3/4 the price of a current useable (re: expandable) Mac.

Re:It hits a specific economic bracket dead-on.

[GlassHeart]

I recently broke the bank to acquire a dual G4 450 for 500$- and it took another 300$ in upgrades to make it useable (to say nothing of the ~200$ worth of parts I'm permaborrowing to make it functional for entertainment purposes). That's a four year old machine.

Can you discuss why you didn't just buy an eMac for about $800? Honestly curious. Your $800 investment doesn't even include the cost of MacOS X yet.

Re:It hits a specific economic bracket dead-on.

[Chrimble]

You could have bought a brand new eMac for less than that. But then, you probably already knew that.

A fool and his money are soon parted.

Re:It hits a specific economic bracket dead-on.

[Have Blue]

That dual G4 450 will still be an order of magnitude faster than PearPC/OS X on any PC hardware available today, let alone a secondhand budget computer.

Re:It hits a specific economic bracket dead-on.

[EXrider]

Maybe he wanted PCI slots, and the ability to upgrade the CPU and video card. Then you also have 2 more spots for additional hard drives, and you can also use the monitor(s) of your choice.

Time to sell my Powermac G4 ?

[Anonymous Coward]

Maybe not now yet but if they improve the speed of that thing 287KB ??! (zipped) who knows.
Mac was always great investment and don't want to end up with worthless piece of hardware.
PC components are so dirty cheap that makes more sense buy top of the line PC and emulate OS X in it.
O! I forgot one thing. PC's are extremely ugly.

Re:Time to sell my Powermac G4 ?

[kuzb]

"O! I forgot one thing. PC's are extremely ugly"

Spoken like a true mac using troll. at least you have a *choice* as to what cases you use with a PC.

Buy Macs - the last word in hardware lock-in.

Re:Time to sell my Powermac G4 ?

[goMac2500]

This project will never be fast enough. The G4 is far more advanced than the Pentium, and AltiVec will be slow even mapped to SSE. With Macs just as cheap as PC's this program will only be a toy.

MaconLinux (MOL)

[solios]

MOL allows you to do this already. I lack the fu to make the damned thing work, or I'd be doing just that!

Mac on Linux is basically a VM of sorts that allows you to run the MacOS inside of Linux on PPC hardware.

PPC hardware meaning IBM AS/400s, POWER workstations, and lots of other non-Apple hardware. Definitely a niche market, but extremely neat nonetheless. Apparently the performance isn't THAT bad, though the one live demo I've seen of it (on a Wall Street, which may account for this) was SLOW. The guy showing it to me said that it lacked 2d accelleration. :|

Since I live in Photoshop, that's kind of a bad thing- but I don't imagine it being ANY worse than running Photoshop in OS X.

You are wrong on many points

[Anonymous Coward]

+ PCI-X is currently a standard feature on Intel Xeon workstation/server motherboards, just as with PowerMac workstation/servers. There is no "split".

+ PCIe is NOT back-compatible with PCI on the hardware level

+ PCIe is faster than PCI-X (?)

+ Apple WILL adopt PCIe because they depend on commodity components just like everyone else. Your Nubus comparison is ridiclous.

Re:You are wrong on many points

[gabebear]

Well, I thought PCIe was backwards-compatible, oops, I thought I'd read that it was, it's only compatible at the software level.

It is kind of a pipe dream, but I'd love to see Mac cards come with open-firmware-ish drivers on ROMs again. Apple doesn't seem to be headed in that direction though.

PCI-X has more bandwith in that it has 4.3Gb per slot with PCI-X 533, PCI-X's specs say it will have up to 4Gb/sec per bus. So if you have one slot per bus they have the same bandwidth, but PCI-X systems will normally have more bandwidth.

Yeah, the G3 doesn't have altivec.

[solios]

Add Altivec instructions to a G3 and you have a G4. I'm sure there are other minor differences, but that's basically all there is to it.

From personal experience, OS X with a QE-capable video card on a G4 totally SMOKES OS X on a same mhz G3 without the QE board. I have, in my grumpier moments (which are many) stated that it takes a G4 to make OS X useable at all (for anything beyond, say... email.) The current stock at the Apple Store seems to back up this view.

Re:Yeah, the G3 doesn't have altivec.

[stephentyrone]

Of course, on a G3 with a QE-capable video card (like my 900mhz G3 iBook), OS X performs perfectly. Altivec doesn't make everything faster, just certain instructions (which the OS doesn't really need to use much).

You'll notice a big speedup between the G3 and G4 running photoshop filters, or other programs that are easily vectorizable and written by people who know how to write decent code, but in terms of the OS, very little difference in my experience.

Re:Yeah, the G3 doesn't have altivec.

[solios]

Atlivec makes a difference, though unoptimized apps (such as Photoshop 5 or Bryce, for example) don't use altivec and consequently would be the same speed on a 900mhz g3 or 900mhz g4.

Video makes a HUGE difference- which is why the used / secondhand mac market is really depressing. QE only runs on the AGP bus, and only with certain cards- if you have a Rage128 or a beige g3, you're up the creek on video accelleration. :/

Remember people, its at an early stage

[nurb432]

I can see all they 'its too slow' threads coming..

Sure its slow, they just got started on this project, its not even a 'real' release.. Give it some time....

Bearing in mind Pear PC is only at v 0.01

[Phil John]

and is currently running only 40 times slower than host, that's very impressive given the register starvation problem. With future versions I'm sure they will be working on optimisations, the graphics code may be slowing things down simewhat as I understand Quartz uses 3d graphics hardware for some of its compositing magic.

I think this is definately a project to keep an eye on, plus with platforms like Athlon64/Opteron this may be far more viable.

Picture this: Pearpc with a bootloader and very basic stripped down gnu/linux system, or even pearpc with its own kernel acting simply as a Hardware Abstraction Layer to boot you into OS X. You lose the cruft of having it run on a full operating system and would hopefully improve speed .

Re:Bearing in mind Pear PC is only at v 0.01

[WhiteWolf666]

Nonsense!

Actually, that is a pretty good idea, if you want a cheap OS X box.

I don't want that.

I want Linux, OS X, and Wined W32 apps running side by side!!!!

On your own, personal, home built machine.

Computing nirvana, my friends.

Re:Bearing in mind Pear PC is only at v 0.01

[Bilestoad]

Hmmm. With the coming 64-bit processors on the Intel side and the usual stagnation of Apple's latest poster-chip looking inevitable, there may soon be no reason at all to buy a Mac.

40 times slower should be just about evened out by faster Intel hardware by mid-2005.

(unless the clause about "Apple-labelled" in the OS X license is going to stop you)

Re:Bearing in mind Pear PC is only at v 0.01

[burns210]

if you want a mac, buy a mac.

they ARE worth the cost, and the pains people go to to run macos on non-apple hardware just further shows that it is worth extra effort to get to run the system.

Re:Bearing in mind Pear PC is only at v 0.01

[ocelotbob]

Does this mean that Mac users who run programs like virtualPC should just give it up and buy a PC? I mean the pains people go through to run Windows on non-PC hardware just further hows that it is worth extra effort to run the system.

Re:Bearing in mind Pear PC is only at v 0.01

[burns210]

the benefits of having a mac, in their and my mind, outweigh the troubles of using VirtualPC as a way of running windows-only software.

Re:Bearing in mind Pear PC is only at v 0.01

[ocelotbob]

I'm not convinced. I used OS X exclusively at home for several months. The hassles of that oversimplified, slow system greatly outweighed any perceived "intuitiveness" gains that may be acheived. Intuitiveness gains which quickly collapse once you start looking at 3rd party tools which are much more powerful than their implementation than the built-in mac tools.

I'd rather run OS X in an emulator for the one or two interesting programs that aren't available on the PC, and save the money I would have spent on Apple hardware for more important things, like trips to visit my boyfriend.

Pointless

[houseofmore]

What a waste of time. A pretend version of Unix running on pretend version of Mac?

What not just install Linux?

Re:Pointless

[Anonymous Coward]

Because Linux is GNU, which is "Gnu's Not Unix" ... what were you saying about a "pretend version of Unix" again?

do Free/Open/NetBSD instead :P ... besides, you're not geeky enough to fit in on /. if you think like that :P

What about the real benchmark?

[joebolte]

How long did it take him to copy a 17mb file?

Too bad Transmeta doesn't have PPC firmware

[CustomDesigned]

Maybe there would be a market for a low power device that runs Win32, Linux, or MacOSX.

We used to have IBM 51x0 desktops. These were like Transmeta - they had a RISC CPU with a VM (CPU emulator) in ROM. There were two VMs available: System 360 (for running the System 360 APL interpreter) and System 36 (for running the System 36 Basic interpreter). There was a front panel switch to select the CPU emulation. Yes, like Transmeta, running the interpreter on top of the CPU emulator was fast enough to be very useful.

So, I am imagining a notebook with a front panel switch for i686/G4.

"One" user??!?!

[Autumnmist]

This is old news. What about the other hundreds?!? Including some who've gotten Virtual PC on OS X to run Windows XP and run PearPC with OS X in that?

Neowin
Emaculation

Spotting the memory usage...

[danalien]

ref - http://img.osnews.com/img/7085/pearpc5.JPG

HA! *I bet I can beat that mem. usage! in the weirdest way, too!*

note! - I'm runnig with 512Mb of memory!

• USER PID %CPU %MEM VSZ RSS TTY STAT START TIME COMMAND
• 
  danalien 24829 10.7 49.3 338640 246504 ? S 01:08 6:05 konqueror --profile backup3

PS. if you where wonder why it's eating so much; Because I'm running with 133 tabs open _simultaneously_ *mwwuaahhahahhaahaa* :-)

Think of the gaming power!

[Anonymous Coward]

now i can play games in Mac os X running inside PearPC running inside Gentoo Linux running inside vmware running inside Windows XP!

oh yeah.. shit.

Ob. convoluted & distorted simpsons ref:

[magefile]

I want my Jesus back, Jesus back, Jesus back ribs from Chili's!

Christian music is just pop, but s/baby/Jesus, as applied by a friend of mine

Re:Ob. convoluted & distorted simpsons ref:

[larkost]

Hey... that might be a way of getting more people interested in communion...

Re:Ob. convoluted & distorted simpsons ref:

[magefile]

It would certainly distract from the threats against Kerry's ability to get the Eucharist.

Sega v. Accolade

[tepples]

take a picture of an apple and 'brand' your machine with it

That would be trademark infringement.

Or would it?

Not like youd think...

[Cyno01]

Just about everything nowadays runs on XP and OSX, i dont know of any peripheral, mice mostly (except ps/2) or usb pen drives even that dont just plug in and work with both, or require a simple driver instalation (USB mass storage) for both. I've never tried installing a printer or scanner on MacOS (9 or X) but i assume its the same headache or maybe less than windows. Although i have no idea about Mac networking. They're really not all that different. Anyways, AFAIK the only people who expect computers to "just work" are mac users.

Great! Now bring on a terascale cluster....

[mclaincausey]

...to get it to run like a duallie G5

Installing

[Alternate Interior]

I managed to get Darwin installed, but I'm lost from there. I tried both my OSX.0 and OSX.3 CDs. Pear claims neither is bootable. Has anyone else encountered this?

They are real CDs that I'm ripping to ISO, no chance they're corrupt P2P copies. Yeah, this post is offtopic, but I don't see any forums on the Pear site.

Zealots

[dmaxwell]

Calling someone who uses or advocates a technology you don't like a "zealot" is just the latest intelligent conversation ender. Mr. Godwin already has our favorite group of 40's goose steppers taken care of. And you can just forget it once the commies are trotted out in any discussion about volunteerism or FOSS software.

Most of the people who toss "zealot" around shouldn't look too closely in the mirror. Really, check out the posting history of most anyone who resorts to the ephitet.

Re:Zealots

[Anonymous Coward]

I've called all sorts of people zealots in my day. If you want to cease a discussion with me because I referred to someone as a zealot, you can be my guest; you're probably rather stupid anyway. Certainly anyone that mentions Godwin's law isn't high on my priority list for discussion. Consider it a favor to me.

Re:Zealots

[dmaxwell]

you're probably rather stupid anyway

Q.E.D.

My bad

[magefile]

I was thinking "current" (being phased out by Dell) floppies were 3.25, and the old ones thus were 5.5. But, I checked, and it's 3.5 and 5.25 inches. And 8 point something before that. No idea what it is in metric, or how many it would take to equal the weight of the SI Kilo platinum thing in France.

Re:It already has a JIT

[Anonymous Coward]

PearPC already has a JIT core. If you used the interpreter, it would be 500 times slower according to the PearPC site. So even with a dynarec core it is still slow as hell.

And with that...

[Cantus]

you've just Slashdotted yourself for another 7 hours.

Congratulations!

style appreciation

[Anonymous Coward]

Be made the mistake of assuming Apple was going to purchase it, and use it, for the next MacOS release.

What a beautifully archaic use of the subjunctive.

0.1.1 fixes a noticeable issue

[CaptCanuk]

The article at osnews.com ran PearPC v0.1 and had a Finder infinite loop (last 15 minutes) which has been fixed since then.
Pear PC 0.1.1
FPU: fixed fmaddx and friends (That means your Finder will no longer crash-loop)

Unfortunately it doesn't mention anything about the dock loop issue.

Re:0.1.1 fixes a noticeable issue

[Canar]

The article at osnews.com ran PearPC v0.1 and had a Finder infinite loop (last 15 minutes)

And once again, we prove that Mac hardware is superior: even emulated, it does infinite loops in 15 minutes!

Better speeds are possible

[vlad_petric]

At the instruction level, these emulators do the "obvious" thing - they interpret instructions, one by one. What they could do instead is trace-based binary rewriting; pretty much like a JIT, you find the hotspots in your program, generate traces for them, then "compile" the traces into native instructions. This is clearly more difficult, but with off-the-shelf compiler technologies like libgcc, shouldn't be that hard.

This is pretty much what Transmeta does, and more recently Intel with x86 on Itanium. The software rewriter actually performs better than the x86 hardware mode of Itanium.

Device emulation is much harder to do fast, but OTOH unless you do 3d games, it's not such a big deal.

Comment removed

[account_deleted]

Comment removed based on user account deletion

_One_ succesful install documented?

[Keifer]

There have been a lot of people installing Panther since PearPC's release (esp. at different OSX emulation sites), and some have had different experiences installing/running OSX than others (different from the guy in the article). I'll quote somebody as an example..."[...] for me it's entirely usable. Changing a theme takes around 30 seconds, a wallpaper around 8 seconds, applying sytem icons takes around 40 seconds. It's not as slow as I would have imagined."

Also, .1.1, not .1, is the latest version of PearPC. Especially with the JITC-enchanced version, the new version has some speed improvements and stuff :)

If this was a real emulator...

[Nom du Keyboard]

It is has a real uber-geek emulator project...

...it would be written in Java.

Mac OS X running on Virtual PC running on Mac OS X

[Paladeen]

For what it's worth, I'm lonely and geekish enough to have actually done THIS

It took hours on end, but I finally got Mac OS X running via Pear PC on Windows XP being emulated in Virtual PC on MacOS X. :D

....so lonely....

Finally...

[ReadParse]

something I can run under bochs :)

uhhhhh

[dreemkill]

uhm, this is just getting /.ed now? i, as well as about 10+ other people in #pearpc had installed OS10 at least 3 days ago, if not more - it runs like hell, no networking support (yet, in windows) and you dont have direct access to cdrom (in windows)
it was "cool" or whatever, but ill continue to run OS10 nice and swiftly on my "real" mac.

old news!

Honestly,

[Bill, Shooter of Bul]

That is the stupidest head in the sand responce i have ever read on slashdot. Congratulations!

No one else in the entire world sells a zero button mouse. no one. no one sells a one button mouse. jsut like the hockey puck mouse, they are more concerned with a little bit more style, than functionality. Thats what they want to be, not a technology company that provides value to its customers, but a cool company that also sells technology. the mouse is such a small detail that speaks volumes about the company.

Re:Honestly,

[TheRaven64]

Bullshit. Have you ever used MacOS (in any incarnation)? Well designed applications never need more than a single button. The only times I ever miss three buttons is when I'm running VirtualPC or X11 apps (and then I can just plug in a three button mouse). By only having one button on their mice, they can also have one button trackpads, which are far easier to use the two button ones (which always end up requiring some horrible contortion of your hands to use properly). The trackpad on my PowerBook is the first one I've found that I could use for long periods.

Re:Honestly,

[Twirlip of the Mists]

In all fairness, there are some applications for Mac OS X that require three mouse buttons: Maya and Shake come to mind. The thing about these applications, though, is that they're IRIX apps that were ported to the Mac. They don't follow the Mac human interface guidelines.

That's not necessarily to say that these are not well-designed applications. It's just that these applications have a very specific user base.

Re:Honestly,

[ViolentGreen]

Well designed applications never need more than a single button.

Perhaps most applications never need a two button mouse but it makes it a lot easier. OS X in fact encourages it by having so many context menus.

But since they are two stubburn to update their mouse, they resort to having their users use the ctrl-click.

20 minutes later...

[yani]

I'm still waiting for my Dual Xeon (2.4Ghz) to get past only the FB tux logo on the gentoo livecd :-P !

Very impressive though nonetheless...

Saw this on techtv like 3 days ago.

[Anonymous Coward]

This story is late. and while yes it sure is neat, no practical use can come of it at this point.

Better yet...

[RadRafe]

A Mac running Yellow Dog Linux with Mac On Linux running Panther with Classic running OS 9 with the Classic version of Virtual PC 5 emulating a Pentium running Windows 2000 with PearPC emulating a PowerPC running Yellow Dog Linux with Mac On Linux running Panther with Classic running OS 9 with the Classic version of Virtual PC 5 emulating a Pentium running Windows 2000 with PearPC emulating a PowerPC running Yellow Dog Linux with Mac On Linux running Panther with Classic running OS 9 with the Classic version of Virtual PC 5 emulating a Pentium running Windows 2000 with PearPC emulating a PowerPC running Yellow Dog Linux with Mac On Linux running Panther with Classic running OS 9 with the Classic version of Virtual PC 5 emulating a Pentium running Windows 2000 with PearPC emulating a PowerPC running Yellow Dog Linux with Mac On Linux running Panther with Classic running OS 9 with the Classic version of Virtual PC 5 emulating a Pentium running Windows 2000 with PearPC emulating a PowerPC running Yellow Dog Linux with Mac On Linux running Panther with Classic running OS 9 with the Classic version of Virtual PC 5 emulating a Pentium running Windows 2000 with PearPC emulating a PowerPC running Yellow Dog Linux with Mac On Linux running Panther with Classic running OS 9 with the Classic version of Virtual PC 5 emulating a Pentium running Windows 2000 with PearPC emulating a PowerPC running Yellow Dog Linux with Mac On Linux running Panther with Classic running OS 9 with the Classic version of Virtual PC 5 emulating a Pentium running Windows 2000 with PearPC emulating a PowerPC running Yellow Dog Linux with Mac On Linux running Panther with Classic running OS 9 with the Classic version of Virtual PC 5 emulating a Pentium running Windows 2000 with PearPC emulating a PowerPC running Yellow Dog Linux with Mac On Linux running Panther with Classic running OS 9 with the Classic version of Virtual PC 5 emulating a Pentium running Windows 2000 with PearPC emulating a PowerPC running Yellow Dog Linux with Mac On Linux running Panther with Classic running OS 9 with the Classic version of Virtual PC 5 emulating a Pentium running Windows 2000 with PearPC emulating a PowerPC running Yellow Dog Linux...

Older Apple OSes

[linguae]

I hope this isn't a stupid question, but since PearPC is a PowerPC processor emulator, wouldn't an older version of the Mac OS work with PearPC or not? If Darwin and Mandrake Linux 9.2 are supposed to work under PearPC, wouldn't an older Mac OS version work, too?

Devil's Advocate?

[Anonymous Coward]

Wouldn't that make you some kind of, er, angel's advocate? Hey, I can't help it if I'm not funny!

I call Bull Shit

[Anonymous Coward]

I run OSX 10.3.3, on a 450Mhz G3 B&W REV 2 with 386 megs of SD RAM, and a PCI graphics card (this means no Quartz Extreem). So...I'd have to say you're full of shit.

Some things may take awhile to load, but the UI, Adobe CS, KDX, EV Nova, as well as MS Office all fun at perfectly acceptable speed.

And the machine takes less time to boot than my friends expensive 3 Ghz XP Pro box with 1.5 gigs of DDR and a Radeon 9600, though in all fiarness..Darwin boots very quickly on the PC

Re:I call Bull Shit

[Anonymous Coward]

No, they don't. You are a liar. MacOS X is not acceptable on a Geforce 2-equipped dual 450MHz G4 - and this is well documented.

(Thanks for bringing up EV Nova - the only game worth playing that is available for Mac! When are you guys getting Far Cry? Or how about Half Life?)

You're in the reality distortion field, that's all.

You forgot one fact.

[neilyos]

Even if it's current, it's still a PC. You still have to deal with all the hassles of running Windows.

Re:You forgot one fact.

[ocelotbob]

I've run windows, I've run OS X. Windows is a hell of a lot nicer than OS X once you run necessities such as LiteStep. Plus I get to run fun programs like GunBound.

Or, you caould always run Linux, or FreeBSD, or OpenBSD, or NetBSD, or BeOS, or OS/2, or... PC doesn't always equate to running Windows.

Re:You forgot one fact.

[Art Tatum]

I've run windows, I've run OS X. Windows is a hell of a lot nicer than OS X

Except that you have to develop with the shitty Windows API. At least until GNUstep is stable on Win32.

Re:You forgot one fact.

[ocelotbob]

I'm not a developer. I don't come in contact with APIs on a daily basis. Thus, API issues don't concern me all that much. And even if I did program windows, I'd probably be using QT, as it's a pretty kickass API and works well on all the important operating environments.

Re:You forgot one fact.

[Art Tatum]

QT's not bad. Pretty much anything is better than the old win32 stuff. I've heard that .NOT is actually tolerable but I'm understandably skeptical. :-)

But I still like Objective-C and OpenStep probably will until I die...

Q: 100 Milliseconds...

[Chordonblue]

A: The amount of time it will take Apple Computer to sue the living hell out of this project. ;)

Re:Q: 100 Milliseconds...

[1u3hr]

A: The amount of time it will take Apple Computer to sue the living hell out of this project. ;)

Unlike earlier Mac emulators which ran into legal problems because the ROM code is copyright, "New World" Macs running OS 9 and X just need hardware emulation.

Re:Q: 100 Milliseconds...

[Abjifyicious]

I'm sure they'd love to, but I don't think they have any legal ground to stand on. Older Macs used a proprietary ROM to boot the system, but new ones use Open Firmware which is, well, open. And the PowerPC instruction set isn't owned by Apple either...

However, I won't be surprised if they try to design future versions of OS X to be incompatible with PearPC. At the moment though, this thing is so slow that I doubt they're seeing it as a serious threat.

Re:Q: 100 Milliseconds...

[bhtooefr]

They couldn't sue the hell out of PearPC, but they could sue the hell out of anyone who tried to use it for running OS X on a non-Apple computer.

Re:Q: 100 Milliseconds...

[CaptainAvatar]

This is true - I assume you are referring to the fact that the Apple EULA specifies that OS X can only be installed "on a single Apple-labeled computer" (clause 2.A).

Re:Q: 100 Milliseconds...

[bhtooefr]

Exactly. Now, if I just had an APPLE COMPUTER to try OS X on...

I'd like to try OS X, but I don't want to buy a new computer to do so. PearPC? I have to buy a quad Opteron system. Native OS X? I have to buy a Mac. Why isn't there something like Workspot, just with OS X boxes?

Re:Q: 100 Milliseconds...

[connorbd]

Get a used iMac or eMac. You can get them for $500-$700 with Firewire, and you should be able to run all versions of OS X (though you'll have trouble with some of the iApps on G3 hardware, especially Garage Band, I'm thinking that's probably not a concern in your case.)

Re:Q: 100 Milliseconds...

[bhtooefr]

If I get a Mac, it'll probably be a B&W G3. My budget would be under $300, not including RAM upgrades.

Re:Q: 100 Milliseconds...

[DarkVader]

They won't even try. They might bluff a bit, but they know if they really try it, they would lose.

Because software is actually sold, not licensed (at least if you walk into a retail store, and walk out with a box) the first sale doctrine applies. They can't prohibit you from running it on a non-Apple computer unless they make you sign a license BEFORE you buy the product.

That case, therefore, would be the test case that destroyed the concept of shrink-wrap licenses once and for all. And Apple isn't going to risk that.

Re:Q: 100 Milliseconds...

[Anonymous Coward]

You're assuming the individual they call to the carpet wouldn't fold. Microsoft has already taken people to task for shrinkwrap license violations and miraculously it never goes to trial.

When you're a poor college student or out of work geek who's named in a multi-million dollar lawsuit by a multi-billion dollar company any lawyer worth his salt (e.g. in need of a paycheck, which you're barely able to pay him as it is) is going to tell you to capitulate and negotiate a settlement. Otherwise you will, eventually, completely run out of cash and be unable to defend yourself in court, thereby handing the company the win.

Re:Q: 100 Milliseconds...

[DarkVader]

I think you're assuming the individual would be on his or her own. I think there's a very good chance the EFF would jump on this one.

Installs, but do apps run?

[sakusha]

Installs are easy, you're just copying files. But do apps run? The only reports I've read indicate that every app crashes immediately on launch, taking down the OS with it. Even clicking on the Dock causes a crash. This is not a successful install.

Re:Installs, but do apps run?

[Ibanez]

No, that is a successful INSTALL, but an unsuccessful emulator...

we'd all KILL for OS X on PCs

[Anonymous Coward]

I think we'd all KILL for OS X on PCs

Why? That is like saying we would all kill to have Satellite radio, GPS, On-star(tm), heated seats, and automatic windshield wipers on our base model Chevrolet cavaliers.

Spend the money on a Cadillac if you want the premium features and don't complain about the sticker price or HUGE margin for the dealer.

I would rather see the Pear brainiacs bend their efforts to making more that just a select few appliances work on a regular Macintosh first.

Ah, the wonder that is Photoshop...

[Pippity]

...but then again, it could also be the GIMP...

Project Marklar

[absurdist]

I would assume everyone here has heard of it, but let me bring those new to the party up to speed...

Apple IS working on an x86 port of OSX. Or was, anyway. Never officially, but Google "Project Marklar" and see what you find.

You don't think Bill is keeping Office alive on the Mac platform for altruistic reasons, do you?

Apple (undoubtedly) HAS ported OS X to x86...

[neurocutie]

If only Apple would port the thing themselves.

There is no doubt that Apple already has OS X ported to the x86 architecture. What there is of OS X that isn't Darwin or FreeBSD (both run on x86) is largely based on the NextStep and NextStep was ported to the x86. So there is no doubt that OS X is around internally on x86. If ever Apple decides to give up on PPCs (not inconceivable (insert all old arguments about the difficulties of competing with x86/Intel/$10B chip foundries/etc)), then it must be ready with an OS X for the x86, so you know that Apple has x86 OS X internally just as a smart business precaution, to hedge its bets. But Apple is going to be extremely cautious about deciding to actually market and release x86 OS X... I think you can see why...

Re:Apple (undoubtedly) HAS ported OS X to x86...

[nutznboltz]

Apple can't compete with M$. They must remain vertical (H/W + S/W). The PPC is not going anywhere except over Apple's dead body.

Re:Apple (undoubtedly) HAS ported OS X to x86...

[neurocutie]

Except that Apple doesn't own the PPC. And of course M$ doesn't own x86. So the question is whether IBM will decide to keep on developing the PPC in the face of a continued onslaught of the x86 (it costs so much to make a competitive chip foundry with the latest geometry capabilities required to keep on the current bleeding edge performance curve). All others have died out... (Sparc nearly, MIPS, NS32000, 88000, WE32000, 68K, Alpha, VAX, etc). Apple could move to x86, still build their own proprietary hardware, and stay relatively "vertical" with respect to M$.

Re:Apple (undoubtedly) HAS ported OS X to x86...

[nutznboltz]

M$ is a software vendor who effectively enslaves hardware vendors like DELL. That's vertical in a way.

NS32000, 88000, WE32000, 68K and VAX are obsolete CISC CPUs while the x86 platform is internally a RISC CPU with a RISC-macro-language-like CISC API.

Intel killed the Alpha, HP just complies with their will.

Sun's not dead, it just smells that way sometimes.

I do agree with you about the cost but IBM is using the technology that they let Apple use so they get double duty from a single CPU family.

Apple use Intel with a dongle

[munwin99]

Couldn't Apple make i386 hardware, control the devices like they do with normal Macs - specific graphics card, sound chips, etc, etc. Then use some sort of hardware dongle to only enable OSX (or whatever OS they are using), to run if the dongle is present ? Essentially it's an encryption on a chip. Encryption is always being cracked, I know.... maybe they could tie each single OS install to a specific chip ? Just thinking out aloud...

Windows Inventory

millihertz? No wonder it's slow...

[GrahamCox]

That should be MHz, not mHz.

Doesn't something hideous happen...

[Op911]

When you try to put a bag of holding into another bag of holding??

Oh wait...

We're not playing D&D here...
Although if we're trying to run an emulator on an emulator it's a good bet we used to...

OS X port to x86...

[barfarf]

I've heard rumors that internally Apple has an x86 port of OS X running. They could spare the Pear PC project a whole lot of time and hassle if they just released it.

Yes, yes, I've heard the arguments of it cannibalizing their existing base of PPC machines, but I can still dream, can't I?

It's the laptops the really get me.

[arete]

I take some issue with #3 - but whatever.

Mostly, I'm just really peeved about Apple's laptops, which are otherwise essentially my dream machine in every regard. If the laptops came with a two button or *gasp* three button mouse, I'd be ecstatic. Because you _can't_ just replace it.

EVEN IF most users would be confused - my solution is to have a "mouse" control panel, and map all the buttons back to the same damn button click. At least then we COULD set it differently, without having to add an external device to an otherwise very autonomous, wonderful laptop.

If this doesn't get resolved soon I'm going to have to take apart and retrofit one, and then somebody is going to feel my wrath.

Re:It's the laptops the really get me.

[jred]

Good job, saved me the trouble of a post.

Oh, wait..

Re:It's the laptops the really get me.

[Anonymous Coward]

Look, if you're hitting a trackpad anyway, what is the problem with holding control at the same time? I know I have trouble typing and using either of two trackpad buttons on a PC laptop, and I can't see how having two buttons would help. Control click and a wider mouse button to give you easier aiming is what I'd go for any day.

Re:It's the laptops the really get me.

[Anonymous Coward]

Dream machines? Check out some of the discussions around the net about build quality - particularly the massive logic board failure issue that nearly had Apple in a lawsuit.

Then there's been the hinge problems, overheating, oversensitive touchpads, paint chipping, etc. Not many people know that Apple's laptops are made by a Taiwanese ODM called AlphaTop, and the QC and build quality is no better than your average x86 machine as a result (CPU aside, they use pretty much the same components).

Apple hardware has gone downhill severely, and the recent problems have been shocking. Yeah, if you want to run the lovely OS X there are no other sane options, but at least wait and see first.

Re:It's the laptops the really get me.

[Anonymous Coward]

If this doesn't get resolved soon I'm going to have to take apart and retrofit one, and then somebody is going to feel my wrath.

You don't need to go that far, it can be addressed with software. I installed Sidetrack on my iBook

http://www.ragingmenace.com/software/sidetrack/

You get vertical and horizontal scroll wheel functionality by using the edges of the trackpad, and I configured it to do a right-click by tapping on the trackpad. All fully configurable and adjustable. I was initially concerned that the scrolling functionality would interfere with regular trackpad usage, but I've been using it for a couple of weeks now and it hasn't been a problem, although it can be a little over-sensitive to tapping on the trackpad for a right click.

Re:It's the laptops the really get me.

[Alpha_Geek]

My solution was to buy a 5 button bluetooth mouse for my powerbook(yes, the Microsoft one, Logitech didn't have their BT model out at the time). No cord or adapter necessary (if you have a PB with the BT module). It works like a charm, and I can map the two thumb buttons to Expose functions (Bonus!).

Re:It's the laptops the really get me.

[for_usenet]

Then you'd really want to check this out. Not sure if it does ALL you want, but it certainly enhances the present mac laptop trackpads.

Enjoy !!

Other OS's ....

[thempstead]

... hmmm i wonder if this could run other OS's which normally run on PPC architecture chips ... e.g. AIX?

Tim

Cool, thanks. I'm looking into that now. [NT]

[molo]

NT=no text

OSX under Linux on Native (Amiga) PPC Hardware?

[Anonymous Coward]

I know it's not possible to install OSX on non mac-PPC hardware ... but now I've seen this, I'm wondering what the chances are of running OSX under Linux on a PPC based architecture (like the new Amiga One PPC motherboard). All Linux would need to do would be to emulate the hardware ...

Whilst this would be less flexible than running on 80x86, it would give us the flexability of running Linux, and AmigaOS. It'd also be considerably faster!

Plus, running on an Amiga One motherboard, would mean PPC CPU, but with cheap PCI based cards ... a real hybrid mac :)

Re:OSX under Linux on Native (Amiga) PPC Hardware?

[beeblebrox87]

Already been done: www.maconlinux.org

Re:OSX under Linux on Native (Amiga) PPC Hardware?

[Arker]

The other poster already pointed out mac-on-linux, but I'm trying to figure out what the heck you meant by 'less flexible than running on 80x86[sic]?' Huh? Less flexible how?

Respect

[Anonymous Coward]

You're a mad bugger, but deep respect.

Re:Mac OS X running on Virtual PC running on Mac O

[kristjansson]

this is why they still speak of varangians in whispers of hushed terror here in the middle east. we of icelandic descent are just plain crazy...

If it's any consolation, I'd have probably done the same thing by now, lord knows I have enough time between patrols. I just don't have the hardware.

you will find the humble icelander in a bar sitting next to the honest man.

Q: 100 Years...

[Anonymous Coward]

A: The amount of time it will take you to get a clue.

Marc Barret eat your heart out!

[Anonymous Coward]

your real mac will soon not be as good as my emulated one!

Anyone who was around comp.sys.pc.amiga.emulators back in the old days of Softmac and Emplant should remember the scourage of the earth - Marc Barret!

Jim Drew - do you remember this character?

... or just go to the store

[PardonMyFrench]

and buy a two (or three) button mouse. I bought one at costco for $10. Two button mouse with a scroll wheel. When I get home, I plug it into my powerbook and I'm ready to edit in photoshop! Right-clicking & everything (no, really!).

"I dreamt that I died last night and when I got to heaven, Anna Paquin was there to greet me. I though to myself, I never thought I'd meet Anna Paquin as long as I lived. I was right."
-- Christopher Mollica

Hey cool :-)

[ta bu shi da yu]

If they can make it work on non-32 bit architectures, then I can get OS X running on my old PowerPC that Apple have discontinued support for!

The puns continue...

[doublem]

You're really squeezing all you can out of this dried up idea.

I just can't sink my teeth into something like this, it's not juicy enough. It has the seed of a good series of puns, but you'd think it was left out in the sun too long and shriveled up.

I'll stop now, but not out of decency, but the need to refresh my caffeine supply.

well designed applications...

[Bill, Shooter of Bul]

well you start a rant you have to stick to it I say.

I can't believe anyone can legitimately say that. Is it easier to move the mouse than it is to press a button on it? Its a heck of a lot easier on the hand s and wrists to use a wheel mouse than to drag the slider. mouse movement should always be kept at a minimum.

Anyone remember when UAE came out?

[greywire]

All the Amiga people at one time said the same things that are being said here. UAE is too slow, it will never be fast enough, stable enough, etc.

The reason this thing is so slow is because its interpreting the PPC code. Its slow for the same reason that Java is slow (sans JIT). Once they get JIT on it, or some other kind of direct conversion to x86 code, it will get much much faster. Google for JIT, code morphing, check out this link: Dynamo.

Its entirely possible to create an emulator that would approach the speed of the real thing.

I think its only a matter of time before this type of technology gets good enough that CPU compatibility will be irrelevant (even though we could do it now with things like Java or Slim Binaries)...

Speed is an issue

[Orion Blastar]

if it takes 3 to 5 hours to install OSX on a Pear emulator on a X86 box, I think I'd be better off without it, or buying a real Mac to run it on.

I mean it sounds like it is even slower than Bochs, which when I used it with Win98, I thought it was really slow, to the point of not being usable. I myself would have no use for it, esp if Apple forbids the running of OSX on Non-Mac hardware.

Ob. convoluted & distorted Sealab 2021 ref:

[Anonymous Coward]

It's like veal...only it's Jesus. I'm talking *real* Jesus back ribs.

Re:Mac OS X running on Virtual PC running on Mac O

[Anonymous Coward]

Have you ever tried WINE -> Cygwin -> WINE -> Cygwin -> WINE ro run Windows XP? I heard this is the bomb.

1337est

[Anonymous Coward]

Run OpenVMS!

PC Users are always the same

[Mocenigo]

They must enjoy Windows security flaws, like
the Epsilons in Huxley's Brave New World that
enjoy their state... NOW that security flaws
are found in Mac OS X they badly WANT to have
it on their PC at all costs... ;-)

(It's meant to be funny, if you want to flame me,
note that I am fireproof :-)

Re:Mac OS X running on Virtual PC running on Mac O

[easter1916]

I am Irish and used always look forward to the Christmas shopping season in Dublin because of the arrival of the Icelanders on charter flights, to avail of cheaper shopping and cheaper booze... completely mad bastards, the lot of them! Great fun to hang around with and party with, but I have to say -- never try to keep up with an Icelander in a drinking session. They know no limits... Icelandic women are absolutely gorgeous too. I have a theory that all the redheads are the descendants of the Celtic women you fellows stole from us a thousand or so years ago... ;-)

Some small errors

[Perdo]

G4 has plenty of register, when you add Altivec to the tally.

Convenient list of AMD64 registers:

http://www.sandpile.org/aa64/index.htm

As you can see, it is a mild misrepresentation to say that the G4 has "more registers". It simply has different registers. Keep in mind that half of AMD64's registers are not in play under anything but Linux or "Windows for 64 bit extended systems" beta.

An "Athlon XP 1600", the tested system, is not an "Athlon 64 3400".

I am not sure how this would apply to emulation, but the G5 is basicly pc harware with a G5 chip. The G5 uses the AMD 8000 chipset and commodity pc graphics cards. Quartz serves the same role that direct X or open GL serve, but os X uses it for routine tasks while these api's are not used for general windowing tasks in x86 operating systems.

OS X runs nicely on my 250mhz G3 (don't ask) except for window resizeing, which is all but impossible. Since window resizing is such a mundane task, and no advantage is achieved by using quartz to accomplish this, it makes me think that Apple simply wanted to force upgrades.

Apple reminds me of russian assault rifles. The nato standard .223 round can be fired from an AK-74, but not the other way around.