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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'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."
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.
read the article
"Of course everything was not running very snappy; on their website they warn you: the emulated processor is about 40 times slower than the host processor. Still, I was amazed at what I saw: it worked!"
At 40 times slower than the host, you'd need one hell of a CPU to use this for as your primary environment.
Get a nice usb keyboard/mouse set, and a mac.
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
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.
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."
Oh SO FUNNY!
1992 called. They want their joke back.
I don't think the software is far enough along for you to be able to get a "normal experience" out of it. It's slow even on the fastest hardware. That's not to say that this will always be the case, and this is a huge step forward to that end. First you emulate accurately, then you emulate efficiently.
This screenshot on the pearpc site might give you a bit of an idea of the performance you can expect:
http://pearpc.sourceforge.net/screenshots/kde.pn g
-=(Lord Crosis)=-Andy Rooney of Borg: "Ya ever wonder WHY resistance is futile?"
OS X treats the right button of a two-button mouse as a control-click, which seems logical enough..
Elaboration follows:
On a Mac, control-click sends the target a mouse-button-2 event. If you plug in a two-button mouse, the Mac automatically understands the second button as mouse-button-2. It's not that the Mac is remapping the second mouse click to some other kind of event; just the opposite.
Furthermore, a third mouse button works as well. Clicking the third button sends a mouse-button-3 event. Same with scroll wheels, and so on and so on.
Basically you can plug in just about any USB input device and it'll Just Work.
I write in my journal
You are missing a leading decimal. This was installed with version .1, as in 1 tenth of 1.0.
This is still pretty early in the development cycle and if they only consider this to be 1 tenth of the way to a release version there is reason for immense optimism.
-=(Lord Crosis)=-Andy Rooney of Borg: "Ya ever wonder WHY resistance is futile?"
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?
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.
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.
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").
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.
Yeah, well--
.= "retort ";
#!/usr/bin/perl
$year = 1999;
$retort = "";
while(1) {
$year++;
$retort
print "$year called, and they want their witty retort $retort back\n\n";
}
That was the turning point of my life--I went from negative zero to positive zero.
I've run OS X on a beige g3 (233 mHz) and i can gurantee that it runs better than an emulated PPC running at, oh, lets say hypothetically... 70 mHz (2800 mHz / 40 ). Most problems running OS X i've had have been to a dearth of memory, not lack of proc.
Don't worry - its just stigmata. Pass me a napkin and don't you dare tell my mother.
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.
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.
It's mostly a problem of emulating the PPC chips themselves. There are emulators for the 68k based Macs (basillisk and executor to name two), and PPC based ones can be emulated too recently (SheepShaver has gotten this ability recently, I understand). Once you've got the chip emulated, the rest isn't that bad.
This is why there have always been "Mac on Mac" emulators (like Mac on Linux, or SheepShaver to run MacOS on PPC based BeOS and Linux machines). They don't have to deal with the whole processor issue, they just have to provide the right environment for the software.
So the ability to run OS X on Intel hardware is quite novel and interesting.
As for running Darwin, you can. Darwin is open source. The problem is that you can't run OS X on top of the x86 version because you can't get the source code to that. So you'd either have to rewrite ALL of the OS X libraries and then use emulation to run real Mac programs, or you'd have to use emulation to run the OS X libraries AND the software. Neither is easily done. Since they both require the CPU emulator, why not skip the middle man?
As for the "Virtual PC works well", see that post of mine I referenced above. It's MUCH easier to fake a x86 on a PPC than vice versa.
No one is claiming this is anywhere near usefull yet, but you never know what will come out if something like this.
Comment forecast: Bits of genius surrounded by a sea of mediocrity.
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 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
I wonder if PearPC will run in Virtual PC on a Mac. I mean, not that you'd want to, but it would be an interesting experiment: PPC running OSX --> Emulated x86 running Windows --> Emulated PPC running OSX.
Okay, enough caffeine for me today.
The Spoon
Updated 6/28/2011
...running VirtualPC again, with the PearPC running OSX with VirtualPC with.... hm. Wonder when it all says *poof* if you try this...
"The standard reply to the "I want OSX on Win" plea is that Apple will never do it as it would kill their hardware sales. However I don't think this is the case: Just look at Sony, they are aimed at the same market as apple : High end Multi-media. And their PC's are just as, if not more expensive, than Apple."
Yes but it's worth noting, apple at least has decent overpriced hardware. As a former sony employee, I can assure you, sony WILL put the cheapest piece of crap in the system they can find so long as it has spec X that the consumer looks at. And it's not like their other products, they don't give support for their pc's/computer hardware (internal hardware is altogether different, cdroms, burners, dats, etc) which even rivals that of gateway or compaq.
I agree though, sooner or later it'd be nice for Apple to go x86. For it to happen though, they are going to have to clue in to the fact that Mac hardware is has become too pclike and they don't have the tight hardware experience they used to have.
It used to be that you went to store, bought X piece of mac hardware, go home, plug X hardware in. Your done.
Now it's the same as a pc, you go to store, buy X hardware, go home, plug X hardware in, pray, install driver if your prayers were answered, pray driver works.
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.
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
Wonder when it all says *poof* if you try this...
When you try to install the Virtual PC inside virtual PC and get an error that reads something like
"No, you cannot install Virtual PC inside another Virtual PC. You just had to try, though, didn't you?"
...and that's all there is to it.
Ask and ye shall see pain: OS X on WinXP on OS X
"But I'm still right here, giving blood and keeping faith. And I'm still right here."
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
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
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.
I hadn't known there were so many idiots in the world until I started using the Internet -Stanislaw Lem
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.
I resisted the urge to reply as this is almost a troll. But a more thorough read of it shows that it is just more uninformed than anything else.
I'd love for Apple to release OS X on x86. There are some rumours of an x86 version being developed inside Apple for the day that they might switch to Intel.
I recall reading at one point that Apple has indicated that they do indeed maintain a nearly complete x86 port of OS X. But it will never, and I do mean never, be released. They use it only to verify the integrity of the codebase and to catch bugs that would be difficult or impossible to easily spot otherwise.
For those of you that say that Apple will die if they switch to x86, I think that you are wrong. People don't care about the processor.
In all likelihood, neither does Apple. But they won't switch for the following reasons:
1) They would piss off nearly every Mac user in the world by instantly dropping backward compatibility with current software. They're never going to support two different product lines either, especially when the difference is only in the CPU, so the chip would have to be fully compatible with both the x86 and PPC and such a beast would be ghastly to develop and manufacture. Maybe Transmeta could do it, but they focus on small, power-saving processors, not high-end desktop and server CPUs (assuming their architecture could even scale high enough and quick enough to compete with current high-end CPUs).
2) It would cost them far more money to switch their whole development, engineering, and manufacturing to a new architecture than it would to stay with the one they have. In bulk, the cost of a PPC CPU is not much greater than an x86 CPU. In other words, the cost of switching would far outweigh the cost of the silicon. Oh, and they'd piss off their engineers and developers, which are their main asset.
And Apple has stated that it will never get into the clone business again, so the rest of the system would still be as tightly controlled as now. Even if Macs ran x86s, you still couldn't go out and build your own $400 beige box and slap OS X on it.
When people buy a Mac, they buy the whole package: - the good looking monitor - the good looking tower - the good looking keyboard - the good looking mouse - the good looking speakers - the good looking OS X. I believe that they can get a lot of the market if the lower the price and switch to x86.
Your first sentence is the explanation of why the second is wrong. Apple hardware would still cost a lot of money because the price of an Apple system is all in the R&D to make a solid, easy-to-maintain, and stylish desktop computer. The cost of the silicon is siginificant, but not so much that switching to x86 would make it worthwhile.
In the past few months they have sold more iPods than macs, this should be a red flag that they have to do something about those prices.
Uh, iPods cost less than Macs and have a completely different function. Apples and oranges here, so to speak. Apple does quite well with their sales of computers. Just because there isn't one in every home doesn't mean their not making any money on them.
We all know that the hardware price is a ripoff.
If all you're buying it for is the hardware, yes. If you're buying a complete, solid, usable, good-looking, top-of-the-line system then most, inclusing myself, would argue an authoritative "no".
What I am wondering is if there is a scheme where the price from hardware goes to sofware. OS X comes with a ton of software for $130, while XP $300 comes with a crappy browser and notepad. They might be making the sofware look cheap and put hidden charges in the hardware.
The price of the hardware goes to developing the hardware. I have no earthy idea why Apple charges as much as they do for OS X except maybe because they know people will pay for it. I believe that they would have a lot more fans if they put each incremental upgrade o
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.
Check out my sci-fi/humor trilogy at PatriotsBooks.
I take some issue with #3 - but whatever.
Mostly, I'm just really peeved about Apple's laptops, which are otherwise essentially my dream machine in every regard. If the laptops came with a two button or *gasp* three button mouse, I'd be ecstatic. Because you _can't_ just replace it.
EVEN IF most users would be confused - my solution is to have a "mouse" control panel, and map all the buttons back to the same damn button click. At least then we COULD set it differently, without having to add an external device to an otherwise very autonomous, wonderful laptop.
If this doesn't get resolved soon I'm going to have to take apart and retrofit one, and then somebody is going to feel my wrath.
Looking for freelance Actionscript (Flash/Flex) or ColdFusion work and/or freelance developers. Email me, put Slashdot
Bullshit. Have you ever used MacOS (in any incarnation)? Well designed applications never need more than a single button. The only times I ever miss three buttons is when I'm running VirtualPC or X11 apps (and then I can just plug in a three button mouse). By only having one button on their mice, they can also have one button trackpads, which are far easier to use the two button ones (which always end up requiring some horrible contortion of your hands to use properly). The trackpad on my PowerBook is the first one I've found that I could use for long periods.
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