Slashdot Mirror
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.
"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.
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.
I write in my journal
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.
I write in my journal
And this is ever so much better than actually buying Mac hardware because...?
"It's the height of ridiculousness to say for those 9 lines you get hundreds of millions."
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?"
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).
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-
"It's all just meme meme around here"
Posting AC because posts that dare to criticize Apple go down like a gay prostitute in front of a Mac store.
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.
But the Apple faithful think nothing of Apple disingenuously manipulating its EULA to support its monopoly.
What monopoly?
-dameron
SheepShaver is not a CPU emulator. It is just a hardware abstraction layer. It needs to run on BeOS or PPC Linux.
"Have you ever thought about just turning off the TV, sitting down with your kids, and hitting them?"
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.
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.
Sarcasm and hyperbole are the final refuges for weak minds
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.
I write in my journal
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.
I write in my journal
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.
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
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.
STOP . AMERICA . NOW
Those who want the traditional Mac single button mouse gets it and those who request a multiple or scroll version gets one.
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.
Looking for freelance Actionscript (Flash/Flex) or ColdFusion work and/or freelance developers. Email me, put Slashdot
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.
I am TheRaven on Soylent News
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.
I write in my journal
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.
I write in my journal