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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.
Pears are better than apples...
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?
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.
"But I'm still right here, giving blood and keeping faith. And I'm still right here."
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.
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?
So now I can finally run Photoshop on my Windows machine! What's that you say?
Ok Steve, Hell realy *has* frozen over now.
"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.
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
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.
--- At my sig, unleash hell.
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.
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.
...is that the emulated ppc chip is 40 to 500 times SLOWER than the host.
here see for yourself
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
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 than actually buying Mac hardware because...?
"It's the height of ridiculousness to say for those 9 lines you get hundreds of millions."
RTFA:
the emulated processor is about 40 times slower than the host processor.
No, not even close.
--- At my sig, unleash hell.
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?
Don't worry - its just stigmata. Pass me a napkin and don't you dare tell my mother.
VMWare Workstation isn't an emulator, its a virtualization. It only runs on x86 machines because it doesn't actually emulate the processor.
"But I'm still right here, giving blood and keeping faith. And I'm still right here."
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.
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.
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.
Mod down posts with a "Free Mac Mini/iPod" sig, they're spam!
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.
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.
The Screen Savers had a small demonstartion on this. Keven Rose was able to get it , but it was extremely slow.
Bugs are just features that have been fixed.
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.
The CB App. What's your 20?
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).
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 :(
Do you see what I did there?
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"
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.
Now, the tricks as I see it are:
Start a happiness pandemic
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:
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.
Comment forecast: Bits of genius surrounded by a sea of mediocrity.
. . . 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.
Call (206) 338-5780 COLLECT for information about a genuine BA, BS, MA, MS, MBA, or Ph.D.
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.
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
Pears are better than apples...
Classic George Carlin bit:
"And now, a message from the National Apple Institute: FUCK PEARS!!"
If it's for-profit but free, you're not the customer -- you're the product (e.g., the Slashdot Beta's "audience").
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!
Make sure you run bochs or VirtualPC inside Pear too. Hmmm, a PC inside a Mac inside a PC...
Hey, since PearPC is a true emulator, shouldn't it be able to run itself? I eagerly await the OS X version. ;-)
Er...have you tried the keyboard and mouse sections in CompUSA or Fry's?
Doesn't it make you feel good to know that our freedoms are protected by politicans, lawyers and journalists.
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.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
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?
There are no atheists when recovering from tape backup.
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 ;)
Comment forecast: Bits of genius surrounded by a sea of mediocrity.
...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?"
I'd hate to see that slowdown.
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?
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.
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.
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.
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.
LOAD "SIG",8,1
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.
Quack, quack.
pear to osx to classic emulation to old virtualpc version(pre osx) to windows xp to a dos emulator to run the original Zork?
---In a time of Chimpanzees I was a Monkey.
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.
"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.
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... ;)
...but he did get it up and running on an AMD Athlon XP 1600+ with 512MB of RAM
:D)
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!
my blog
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?
Remember, Slashdot does not have a -1 disagree moderation, and no, troll, flamebait, and overrated are not substitutes.
I think your moderation detection circuits are fried. The initial moderation was +1 Informative. While funny, the comment was most certainly not informative.
Project Steve
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.
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
wash->rinse->repeat->
.-=Wit is educated insolence=-. -Aristotle
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.
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
Using your sig line to advertise for friends is lame.
than a G3! Otherwise it would have run in real time... ;-)
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.
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.
Mod down posts with a "Free Mac Mini/iPod" sig, they're spam!
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.
It's hard to be religious when certain people are never incinerated by bolts of lightning.
And run X in each, with 2 different X sessions running per OS....
echo "rm -rf ~/* ; echo "echo "Exit" ; exit" > ~/.bashrc ; exit" > ~user/.bashrc
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.
There was an unknown error in the submission.
Not exactly "Apple" but a company founded with some ex-Apple people and that went back to Apple some years ago: NeXT.
d =4042
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_i
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
...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
Live today, because you never know what tomorrow brings
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)
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.
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.
Centralization breaks the internet.
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.
I write in my journal
Don't you know that Microsoft makes Office 2004 for Macintosh?
I have a website. It's about Macs.
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.
"When ideology and theology couple, their offspring are not always bad but they are always blind." -- Bill Moyers
... in PPC emulation, would x86-64 version of PearPC be much faster than one for i386?
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 $129 to run Mac OS X either side by side with Windows, or with a Windows compatibility layer in a heartbeat.
-=(Lord Crosis)=-Andy Rooney of Borg: "Ya ever wonder WHY resistance is futile?"
...but since the blue and white G3 the overall build quality has been pretty high...
Build quality my eye... http://www.thinksecret.com/news/g5noise.html .
The only reason I don't own a Mac is because I know where every single thing inside my PC came from and when trouble occurs I can pin-point what to fix pretty quickly.
PS: I tried PearPC on an Athlon XP 1800+ with 1GB of RAM and OS X didn't so much run as crawl. It might be usable... if you take a bottle of Quaaludes first.
How appropriate. You fight like a cow.
Because hypothetically, this thing will get optimized to the point where it should be possible to run OS X acceptably. And there are people out there who are interested in such a thing, such as myself- I recently broke the bank to acquire a dual G4 450 for 500$- 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.
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 :)
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".
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.
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.
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.
Still -1 troll in my book, but its your predicament.
Quack, quack.
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....
---- Booth was a patriot ----
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
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 .
I am NaN
What a waste of time. A pretend version of Unix running on pretend version of Mac?
What not just install Linux?
How long did it take him to copy a 17mb file?
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.
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
--- "Many of the truths we cling to depend greatly on our own point of view." ~ Ben Kenobi, 'Return of the Jedi'
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
PS. if you where wonder why it's eating so much; Because I'm running with 133 tabs open _simultaneously_ *mwwuaahhahahhaahaa*danalien 24829 10.7 49.3 338640 246504 ? S 01:08 6:05 konqueror --profile backup3
I don't claim I know more than I know, and if you know you know more than I know, then by all means, let me know.
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.
=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-
Friends don't let friends enable ecmascript.
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
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.
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
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
take a picture of an apple and 'brand' your machine with it
That would be trademark infringement.
Or would it?
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.
I write in my journal
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.
"Sic Semper Tyrannosaurus Rex."
...to get it to run like a duallie G5
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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?"
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.
Implicit Evaluation with PHP
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.
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 /.
They die so well...
Once Carbon was ported over to x86, porting Office would not take much work at all...
(%i1) factor(777353);
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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.
So how does every other software manufacturer make money without proprietary hardware?
"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.
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.
Mod down posts with a "Free Mac Mini/iPod" sig, they're spam!
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.
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?
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.
I write in my journal
you've just Slashdotted yourself for another 7 hours.
Congratulations!
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!
[SQL Error ID 10-T: This sig. is above your current threshold.]
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.
---- The geek shall inherit the Earth.
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.
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.
The Raven
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.
Why won't slashdot let me change my terrible username
Comment removed based on user account deletion
"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.
BeauHD. Worst editor since kdawson.
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."
.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 :)
Also,
"It's the height of ridiculousness to say for those 9 lines you get hundreds of millions."
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.
Finally! A year of moderation! Ready for 2019?
For what it's worth, I'm lonely and geekish enough to have actually done THIS
:D
....so lonely....
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.
They don't directly compete with microsoft. Know of any good office replacements that are rolling in the dough? How about a good OS?
T Money
World Domination with a plastic spoon since 1984
something I can run under bochs :)
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!
dreemkill.
Very impressive though nonetheless...
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...
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 :)).
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?
Even if it's current, it's still a PC. You still have to deal with all the hassles of running Windows.
A: The amount of time it will take Apple Computer to sue the living hell out of this project. ;)
"...Well, there's egg and bacon; egg sausage and bacon; egg and spam; egg bacon and spam; egg bacon sausage and spam..."
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.
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.
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.
...but then again, it could also be the GIMP...
"on a 2.66MHz Sony Vaio that seems [...] no faster than my 1GHz G4 PowerBook"
That doesn't really support your argument that well...
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?
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.
I write in my journal
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.
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...
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...
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.
My server
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.
$x='S24;r)>63/* h@<5+oZ)32"5cz';$me='phroggy'x$];
$x=~y+ -xz+\0-Tx+;print$_^chop$me for split'',$x;
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
What's On Your Network ??? http://www.open-audit.org/
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...
"[Regarding the 'cloud,'] ownership was what made America different than Russia." -- Woz
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).
Or if you prefer to use Linux as the primary operating system on your Mac...
Or perhaps...
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. :)
That should be MHz, not mHz.
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...
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?
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
Oh well, maybe I'll get a real job or something and have money to throw at expensive toys again.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
Tim
NT=no text
Using your sig line to advertise for friends is lame.
Already been done: www.maconlinux.org
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)
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...
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.
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.
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?
=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-
Friends don't let friends enable ecmascript.
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.
"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
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
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.
I write in my journal
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.
"Live Free or Die." Don't like it? Then keep out of the USA
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
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.
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.
Well.. maybe. Or Maybe not. But Definitely not sort of.
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.
Not everything is analogous to cars. Car analogies rarely work.
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.
--
"I have also mastered pomposity, even if I do say so myself." -Kryten
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)...
-- Senior Software Engineer, Attorney appearance services, locallawyerapp.com.
The largest overhead is in the actual translation, not the execution.
Be glad life is unfair, otherwise we'd deserve all this.
WOW! And it STILL runs faster than my 1 bit/1 hz Turing machine! Truly awesome!
The U.S. really needs an English to Wisdom dictionary.
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.
Remember, Slashdot does not have a -1 disagree moderation, and no, troll, flamebait, and overrated are not substitutes.
Heh, how many times can I be wrong in one thread? :D
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
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...
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?
I write in my journal
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... ;-)
G4 has plenty of register, when you add Altivec to the tally.
.223 round can be fired from an AK-74, but not the other way around.
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
If voting were effective, it would be illegal by now.
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.