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Windows Vista Beta Running on a PPC Mac
goombah99 writes "Macosxhints is giving a set of tips that let any Mac user boot Windows Vista on a Mac. In this case, it's not a native Intel boot but rather VirtualPC running on a PPC G5 Mac. Thus Vista and Mac OS X can run concurrently. There are no extravagant hacks needed, just a matter of finding the right set of configurations to let VirtualPC present the proper disk images for mounting and BIOS settings to the installer. This bodes well for native installs onto the Intel Mac." Actually, there have been successful (though not glitch-free) installs of beta versions of Vista on Intel Macs for a few months now. Here's a report from Hans Verbeeck (Developer Evangelist for Microsoft EMEA) on putting Vista Beta 2 on a MacBook Pro.
VirtualPC for Mac is an existing product that I'm assuming has the requisite number of customers who think it's worth doing.
From a personal standpoint, some of the reasons for wanting to do this are:
1. I like working on Macs but it's a Windows world out there. I need to be able to run some Windows software but don't want to buy and maintain a separate machine just to do that.
2. Running VirtualPC makes it easer for me to share the data between my Mac and the Windows machine I occasionally need to use.
Mmmm.. Donuts
PowerPC-based Macs (you know, what the article is about) don't have EFI partitions. Unless I'm missing something, there's nothing about this that indicates that Vista can be run concurrently with OS X on Intel-based Macs.
"[Regarding the 'cloud,'] ownership was what made America different than Russia." -- Woz
Other than the "it's cool, look what I can do!" factor, why would anyone do this? PPC Macs are much more expensive than Intel Macs, so why would you even WANT this on a PPC Mac?
well, some of us already have a PPC mac. I use VPC for 2 reasons; primarily to test how websites look/work in different versions of IE. sure, you could build a cheap x86 machine and pop a bunch of different versions of windows on there, but that can be expensive and requires a lot of rebooting. with VPC, I can see win2k and XP side by side, and when I close the window, it freezes the state, so I don't need to reboot windows every time I fire up VPC.
the other reason is to test how code works in cygwin and occasionally how pygtk apps run in windows.
I tried installing the vista public beta last night, but it failed complaining about the bios thing and I assumed that it wasn't possible to do, but now that this has been shown to be possible, I can actually see how the new version of IE will render my sites. I'm not really looking forward to seeing how it'll perform, though. XP is only usable for webstuff. win2k runs pretty well. my dual 2.7ghz G5 emulates about a 550mhz pentium4, so I'd hate to see what a mess vista will be.
...spike
Ewwwwww, coconut...
And then Apple would go out of business.
Rule #1 when it comes to understanding Apple is this: Apple is a hardware company . They make their money selling those Macs and iBooks, and if they lose that revenue stream they go out of business. That is why Apple will never release a version of OS X for generic PCs unless their entire business model changes. Apple is first and foremost a hardware company that only happens to make some really, really good software. The margins on software are such that Apple could not offset the losses on hardware that would be incurred by selling boxed copies of OS X.
In other words, no, that is not going to happen. You're right, the margins on Apple's hardware is quite nice, and the margins on software are nowhere near as nice. Apple doesn't play the software game for that very reason - unless it's to boost their own hardware sales.
I have been tweaking with getting Vista Beta 2 (5384) working since it was released out in the wild. I have been able to install without a glitch, although slow. It works great. I have poked around and found that by installing Virtual Server 2005 R2 and extracting the files and installing the virtual machine additions that come packed with that, that you can get a significance performance increase (ppc virtual pc 7.0.2), although I have yet to get networking and sound working. anyone here been able to get these two devices working?
u alserver/software/default.mspx for FREE. As a mac user, I booted into a WinXP virtual machine and performed the following commands to extract the new virtual machine additions to be installed in Vista.
/c /t c:\temp
/a "c:\temp\Virtual Server 2005 Install.msi" targetdir=c:\temp\extract /qn
you can download Virtual Server 2005 R2 @ http://www.microsoft.com/windowsserversystem/virt
Command Prompt type:
-------------------
setup
If you then run the following command, you can unpack the MSI file. And you then you have access to the VS2005 R2 additions ISO, which you can install into your VPC (just use the CD -> Capture ISO Image... option)
msiexec
after doing this, I have been able to install Office 2007 beta on vista's virtual machine with acutally not too bad performance, considering the emulation.
I did this a few days ago on my 1.67GHz PowerBook G4. Yes I am insane.
All you need to do is ensure the RAM setting is at 512MB otherwise the installer refuses to work. Then just before booting hit the delete key and enable APCI in the BIOS. Once installed, you can lower the RAM setting to something like 256MB. You also need patience because it took almost four hours to install (although it only asks for information at the beginning and end.)
It's extremely pointless though. For starters the Aero Glass interface won't work because the best graphics card Virtual PC emulates is a 16MB generic VGA card.
The only thing I learnt is that Microsoft have created an installer that requires 512MB to merely display a fake Aero Glass interface, you get seemingly random error codes with less RAM. Vista seems to use about 300MB once booted.
I really have to ask.... WHY!
I have a 2.1GHz PPC iMac, with 1.5GB ram. I also have Office Professional with VPC. I have VPC to the max amount of memory allowed (512). It has Win XP Professional installed.
You can JUST ABOUT use VPC to render a page in IE. However, don't try anything with Flash. or Javascript. Or try any form of new application. They all run like molassas. Emulated performance is about a 300MHz machine. VPC is so sluggish, that I bought a wintel box just to do my website checking. (ok, and run oblivion)
Anyway, point is, XP is slow, Vista I am sure would be unusable.
This