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.
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."
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
Editor, A1-AAA AmeriCaptions
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
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.