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

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

[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

[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

[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

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: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.

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?

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: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.

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: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: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.