Successful PearPC/Mac OS X Install Documented

rocketjam writes "OS News has an article by a user who successfully installed Mac OS X using the 0.1 version of PearPC, the PPC emulator for x86 machines. He said it took 5 hours to run the first install CD but he did get it up and running on an AMD Athlon XP 1600+ with 512MB of RAM. The article has several screenshots of the Mac OS X install and new user set up running on his machine." See our previous story.

Comments

PPC?

[hypermike]

Pears are better than apples...

Re:PPC?

[Atmchicago]

If this doesn't work too well it could turn out to be a real lemon!

Ba-ching! I'll be here all day, thank you.

OS X Panther Here

[TravisWatkins]

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.

Re:OS X Panther Here

[Fred IV]

The single use license similarly restricts use and installation to one "Apple labeled" computer.

Masking tape, marker, problem solved.

hmm

[Anonymous Coward]

Isn't one of the biggest pluses of a Macintosh system the flawless integration with the hardware? That's always been something I've admired, and something that's been a pain in the butt for both Linux and Windows. I wonder how stable this runs?

Sweet!

[Anonymous Coward]

So now I can finally run Photoshop on my Windows machine! What's that you say?

Re:I can see myself using this

[zgornz]

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.

Re:I can see myself using this

[Twirlip of the Mists]

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.

Re:I always wanted OSX on PC

[MBCook]

No. The number tossed around is at least 40x slower, and there are many reasons.

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:

1. Registers - A PPC chip has something like DOUBLE the number of registers (on CPU memory that's used to hold variables while being worked on) as an Opteron chip. And Opteron has many more registers than a standard x86 chip. To make matters worse, while with PPCs and Opterons most registers are general purpose (can be used for anything), many operations in the x86 world require you to use a specific register, so they are less flexable. All this means lots of register swapping and other such trickery to make things work, and it costs speed. A version compiled/written for an Opteron should be faster, but it is still not the same. All these registers is one of the reasons why it's so easy to emulate a x86 on PPC but not vice-versa.
2. The second big reason is Alitvec. This is basically MMX/3DNow!/SSE, but I've heard it described as those things on steroids. It allows things to be done VERY fast that would take much longer without them. Matrix transforms, running the same instruction on a large table of data, etc. PearPC doesn't emulate Altivec right now. While OS X will run without it (G3s don't have it, IIRC), things would run much faster if Altivec operations could be mapped to SSE/MMX/etc. whenever possible. They are working on this.
3. Graphics - The graphics engine is all software (I think). If the graphics calls could be "pushed through" to the graphics card so that OS X's use of OpenGL in Quartz (to draw windows and do effects on them) could be done in hardware (instead of in software like on Macs that don't have good enough graphics cards) that would speed things up too.

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.

Re:Bye Bye Mac Hardware

[wvitXpert]

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.

PearPC, for all your life needs

[Unnngh!]

From this article:

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

Bearing in mind Pear PC is only at v 0.01

[Phil John]

and is currently running only 40 times slower than host, that's very impressive given the register starvation problem. With future versions I'm sure they will be working on optimisations, the graphics code may be slowing things down simewhat as I understand Quartz uses 3d graphics hardware for some of its compositing magic.

I think this is definately a project to keep an eye on, plus with platforms like Athlon64/Opteron this may be far more viable.

Picture this: Pearpc with a bootloader and very basic stripped down gnu/linux system, or even pearpc with its own kernel acting simply as a Hardware Abstraction Layer to boot you into OS X. You lose the cruft of having it run on a full operating system and would hopefully improve speed .

Re:I can see myself using this

[TravisWatkins]

Ask and ye shall see pain: OS X on WinXP on OS X

Re:I can see myself using this

[Twirlip of the Mists]

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.

Re:I can see myself using this

[Kazymyr]

Here's an idea: why not put a PowerPC chip on a PCI card and use that to run the instructions natively, with the emulator front-end being a wrapper for the hardware (and possibly provide the rest of the emulated system)?

Like older macs used to have a PC compatibility card.

Re:Awesome...

[Anonymous Coward]

It's really not terribly bad on PearPC though. This has all been documented at Emaculation for about 3 days now.

The Jitc version of PearPC runs approximately 1/10-1/15 slower than a real mac. I successfully installed 10.2 on an Athlon64 3200+ and I can honestly say it's only a little slower than when I hacked 10.2 to run on a Powermac with a 603e procesor. The installation took about an hour and a half for a base install, and with the refresh set to around 40, it's quite usable. Were there a network bridge avaliable for Windows, I wouldn't mind doing basic functions on it.

Even the animation is bearable- again- only slightly slower than that 603e mac, which didn't have hardware acceleration either.

Also remember this is only the first release, 0.1. It's bound to increase in speed with subsequent releases. Just the fact that it works now is incredible in itself, given the architectural differences from x86 to ppc.