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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."
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
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.
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.
There is no indication that EULAs (an unsigned "contract" that is dictated by only one party and can't be examined before purchase) are legally binding, and certainly breaking an EULA is no major sin. If he had a purchased copy, it's certainly not "piracy" even if it is illegal to break an EULA.
Mod down posts with a "Free Mac Mini/iPod" sig, they're spam!
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.
This presumes such "agreements" are valid and binding. Many intelligent, respected people do not believe they are, for very good reasons.
He may have committed a single instance of copyright infringement by running the same copy of OS-X on both his Mac and his PC (assuming he has a Mac, and that it's running the install image from the same CD). This may or may not be worth dragging before a court, but it's important to note such a copyright infringement is distinct from a breach of a fictious "license".
Schwab
Editor, A1-AAA AmeriCaptions
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 - $1368
1.33GHz G4 1.4 GHz Pentium M
256MB RAM 256MB RAM
60GB HD 40GB HD
64MB Graphics 32MB Graphics
Combo Drive Combo Drive
*note - regarding the eMac vs. the 4600 processor. I am writing this on a 2.66MHz Sony Vaio that seems for most things no faster than my 1GHz G4 PowerBook, so I don't think that comparing the two processors is too far off.
Since I had nothing else to do (PearPC took 99% of my processor and all the RAM it could possibly find), I actually started to clean my bed/computer room. Thank you, PearPC.
Other testimonials:
PearPC changed my life! I no longer have to use this silly pacemaker - Dorothy Krutz, West VA.
Without PearPC, I wouldn't have been able to achieve cold fusion in my livingroom! Thanks, PearPC! - Johnny Taylor, Age 12, Branson, MO
PEARPC HAS MOST GRACEFULLY HELPED MY EMAILING BUSINESS, BASED IN NIGERIA. THANK YOU MOST SINCERELY, PEARPC - Mganda Ngawe, Nigeria
I wonder if PearPC will run in Virtual PC on a Mac. I mean, not that you'd want to, but it would be an interesting experiment: PPC running OSX --> Emulated x86 running Windows --> Emulated PPC running OSX.
Okay, enough caffeine for me today.
The Spoon
Updated 6/28/2011
Because hypothetically, this thing will get optimized to the point where it should be possible to run OS X acceptably. And there are people out there who are interested in such a thing, such as myself- I recently broke the bank to acquire a dual G4 450 for 500$- 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."
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
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.