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Operating Systems Businesses Software Apple

Successful PearPC/Mac OS X Install Documented 679

Posted by michael from the layers-upon-layers dept.
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.
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Successful PearPC/Mac OS X Install Documented More

Successful PearPC/Mac OS X Install Documented

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  • Comment removed (Score:5, Funny)

    by account_deleted ( 4530225 ) on Tuesday May 18, 2004 @06:39PM (#9190079)
    Comment removed based on user account deletion

  • OS X Panther Here (Score:5, Informative)

    by TravisWatkins ( 746905 ) on Tuesday May 18, 2004 @06:40PM (#9190091) Homepage
    I've gotten OS X Panther to install as well, you can see it here [realistanew.com]. Took about 7 hours on a Duron 1.6Ghz with 512MB SDRAM.

  • hmm (Score:5, Interesting)

    by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday May 18, 2004 @06:41PM (#9190099)
    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?

    • Re:hmm (Score:4, Interesting)

      by drinkypoo ( 153816 ) <drink@hyperlogos.org> on Tuesday May 18, 2004 @07:08PM (#9190421) Homepage Journal
      Flawless my ass. Ever owned a blue and white G3 and decided to upgrade it? If it's revision 1, then you cannot use UDMA transfer modes on most hard drives, and have to resort to PIO. You can use slower UDMA methods on some drives, and some will do the whole shebang, up to whatever UDMA mode it supports most. Unfortunately mine was not a drive which you could use and if there was any significant CPU use whatsoever it would write invalid data. I verified that this was the cause of my woes with an OS9 app that tests disk writing and yes indeed, I had this problem.

      There is a workaround which was considered acceptable given that these are some slow-ass macs, which is to use the PIO modes. However, you need a third party disk driver to do this. The cheapest software I could find to work around the problem was $80.

      And of course, there's no firewire booting on those models, so I couldn't get around the problem that way, either.

      Apple has since suppressed information about this by removing the applicable documents from the techinfo library when it was folded into their current support system. I have only excerpts from the document.

      Now, I can forgive apple for having a bug and for not replacing motherboards. Well, almost on the second count, but certainly I will forgive an error, even though Sun managed to use the same chip in several Ultra systems quite successfully. But what's stupid is that the OS was not designed to address this issue in the hardware.

      Apple's support of their own hardware is selective and short-lived at best, as evinced by the lack of support for several macs with G3 processors in OS X. The fact that you can make it run on them with third party software that tricks the installer into going ahead and doing its job is particularly pathetic.

      The biggest plus of a macintosh is that it is friendly and generally consistent in behavior. Macs are workhorse machines which will not always be the fastest horse but will usually run for a long time. My mother used her Mac IIci with System 7.1 or something for absolutely ages, until just a couple of years ago in fact. She paid five grand for it when it was new (and worth eight, or at least, it sold for eight grand with a two page mono and an 8*24 display card) and she definitely got her money out of it. I bumped up the hard drive (to 2*200MB!) and the ram (to 40MB) while she had it, never even did a cache card (by the time they were cheap, she was more or less done with it) and she used pagemaker, illustrator, and photoshop throughout the system's life, and her work has won several awards in the process. Current macintoshes are basically the same; somewhat quirky, mostly reliable, and quite consistent. And, still very pricy. But, if you get more work done on a mac, it's worth more money, and some people certainly don't seem to get as much done on windows as they do on a macintosh.

      • Re:hmm (Score:5, Interesting)

        by merdark ( 550117 ) on Tuesday May 18, 2004 @07:51PM (#9190880)
        Integration does not mean upgrading hardware beyond what Apple themselves will do. I just got my first Mac, and it's far far more integrated than any PC laptop I've ever used. I don't expect to be able to upgrade it much though, but that is a separate topic.

        What you are complaining about is the Mac's life cycle and lack of upgrades. Both are valid concerns, but neither has anything to do with Macs having good software/hardware integration.

      • Re:hmm (Score:5, Interesting)

        by WinterSolstice ( 223271 ) on Tuesday May 18, 2004 @09:33PM (#9191665)
        I know what you mean!!!

        I had the worst time putting AIX 5.1 on these old RS/6000s we had laying around. Sure, they were about 4 years old, but that's ok, right? It's still a RS/6000!

        Sheesh. When you get stiff vertical integration, you get *stiff vertical integration*. We have systems here that literally must run the same OS they shipped with. And they were millions of dollars. I understand that you want to have the new OS on the old hardware (which is typical in the PC world) but that's why there are minimum requirements. In the case of Apple, they rebated a lot of software for this sort of problem. They didn't really have to. It was just to try and make customers happier. Heck, IBM would have simply laughed at you if you bought ZOS for a machine that wouldn't run it. Then offered you a new lease :)

        PS - I'm not apologizing for Apple, I just think that people whine too much about this. Ever tried to upgrade a Commodore? How about an OS/390? Macs are purpose built machines, not like x86 boxes. If you buy one, deal with it.

        -WS

        • Re:hmm (Score:3, Insightful)

          by aussersterne ( 212916 )
          Um, except that when you were buying OS X for your Beige or Blue-and-White hardware, Apple would tell you it was "Supported. Absolutely!"

          Would IBM do that? If so, then they're both in the wrong. Supported is supported. If your new OS isn't going to support onboard SCSI, onboard video, onboard floppy, or the hard drive and/or CD-ROM drive that shipped with the unit (as was the case with my Beige G3 and OS X), then you should tell the user that that's the case, rather than selling them a useless piece of sof

  • Sweet! (Score:5, Funny)

    by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday May 18, 2004 @06:42PM (#9190111)
    So now I can finally run Photoshop on my Windows machine! What's that you say?

  • Yikes (Score:4, Funny)

    by NilObject ( 522433 ) on Tuesday May 18, 2004 @06:42PM (#9190112)
    Ok Steve, Hell realy *has* frozen over now.

  • Awesome... (Score:5, Interesting)

    by stuffman64 ( 208233 ) <stuffman@[ ]il.com ['gma' in gap]> on Tuesday May 18, 2004 @06:44PM (#9190141)
    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.

    • Re:Awesome... (Score:5, Insightful)

      by bladernr ( 683269 ) on Tuesday May 18, 2004 @07:37PM (#9190741)
      There is no way in hell that OSX would run decently at that speed, what with all the transparancy and animation of the UI.

      Its worse than you think. Mac (on Apple hardware) does that stuff with hardware acceleration (Quartz). This high level of software-hardware integration results in tremendous performance and the nice OS X interface, but makes supporting other hardware even harder.

      I doubt PearPC does the pass-through to hardware acceleration on supported hardware (nVidia and ATI). That would make it even slower than the simple "slow down the processor" math, because of lack of hardware acceleration that Apple is so good at using.

      • Re:Awesome... (Score:5, Informative)

        by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday May 18, 2004 @10:04PM (#9191859)
        It's really not terribly bad on PearPC though. This has all been documented at Emaculation [www.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.
  • 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... (Score:5, Insightful)

    by Nom du Keyboard ( 633989 ) on Tuesday May 18, 2004 @06:46PM (#9190161)
    And this is ever so much better than actually buying Mac hardware because...?

    • It hits a specific economic bracket dead-on. (Score:5, Interesting)

      by solios ( 53048 ) on Tuesday May 18, 2004 @07:46PM (#9190830) Homepage
      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.

      • Re:It hits a specific economic bracket dead-on. (Score:5, Insightful)

        by GlassHeart ( 579618 ) on Tuesday May 18, 2004 @08:56PM (#9191401) Journal
        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.

        Can you discuss why you didn't just buy an eMac for about $800? Honestly curious. Your $800 investment doesn't even include the cost of MacOS X yet.

  • Yepp! (Score:2)

    by Morth ( 322218 )
    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.

  • Slashdot condones piracy? (Score:3, Insightful)

    by kiwioddBall ( 646813 ) on Tuesday May 18, 2004 @06:53PM (#9190243)
    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).

    • Re:Slashdot condones piracy? (Score:5, Interesting)

      by HeghmoH ( 13204 ) on Tuesday May 18, 2004 @07:07PM (#9190405) Homepage Journal
      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.

    • Re:Slashdot condones piracy? (Score:5, Insightful)

      by ewhac ( 5844 ) on Tuesday May 18, 2004 @07:11PM (#9190446) Homepage Journal
      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 [ ... ]

      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

    • Re:Slashdot condones piracy? (Score:4, Informative)

      by shaitand ( 626655 ) * on Tuesday May 18, 2004 @07:29PM (#9190654) Journal
      "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)."

      There is nothing to say that the terms of said license are legal. Thus far there is no reason to believe that licenses which extend control beyond what a copyright grants are legal, and a copyright grants the owner of said copyright control of distribution, it gives no authority over how a work is used once distributed.

      Remember, without the copyright ALL the rights would be in the hands of the public. Copyright is the public giving the author/whathaveyou what is essentially a contract allowing them to control distribution for a limited time. The public owns OSX (well technically nobody does, or humankind does, ideas aren't ownable even under our screwed up legal system yet), apple just holds a copyright.

      Simply because powerful copyright holders try to claim they own the material doesn't make it true, ideas aren't really ownable.
    • Actually, I'd worry more about the legality of his Windows 2003 license. There is no proof behind this, but I'd imagine that if it's a home system, it wasn't actually purchased. If you're going to pay that kind of money, plus buy a copy of OS X, why not just buy a Mac? From the article (with emphasis added):

      Test system:

      - AMD Athlon XP 1600+;
      - 512 MB SDRAM;
      - Ati Radeon 9000 with 128 MB DDR-RAM;
      - CMI-8738 based 5.1 soundcard;
      - MSI K7T Turbo2 mainboard;
      - 40 GB harddisk;
      - Standard ps/2 keyboard;
      -
      • Just playing devil's advocate here, but even if he didn't pay for Windows Server 2003, he could be running the 180-day evaluation [microsoft.com] version. I've got a machine running it on campus for one a group in the CS capstone course who insisted on testing their final project with it.

  • Legality (Score:4, Informative)

    by BumpyCarrot ( 775949 ) on Tuesday May 18, 2004 @06:53PM (#9190244)
    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 :(

    • Re:Legality (Score:3, Insightful)

      by Anonymous Coward
      And if Microsoft ever tried to attach a condition like that to their licenses, there would be a hue and cry from the Slashdot "community." But the Apple faithful think nothing of Apple disingenuously manipulating its EULA to support its monopoly.

      Posting AC because posts that dare to criticize Apple go down like a gay prostitute in front of a Mac store.

    • Re:Legality (Score:3, Interesting)

      by exp(pi*sqrt(163)) ( 613870 )
      But it's not a real computer using the software. I mean, nobody things that my spaceship in defender is a real spaceship do they?

  • Mostly a Proof of Concept (Score:3, Interesting)

    by gbulmash ( 688770 ) <semi_famous@yah o o . c om> on Tuesday May 18, 2004 @06:54PM (#9190263) Homepage Journal
    As noted in the article, this is 0.1 version software. As well, it runs on top of Windows. That makes the "40x slower than the normal processor" claim seem somewhere about right.

    Now, the tricks as I see it are:

    • Optimize the code in future releases for better speed.

    • Build a version that boots out of Linux or BSD to minimize overhead. Seems that since OSX is PPC BSD at its heart, there might be some sort of way to lower redundancy if the emulator were running in x386 BSD.
    • It already does run on Linux and presumeably other *nixes. It will take A LOT of optimization before this becomes more than a neat hack, but from the look of things, there is a lot of room to improve. I'll bet if a version were made to completely take advantage of every bit of performance of something like an Opteron or Athlon 64-FX while running 64-bit native, it could be genuinely useful.

  • Why just run OSX? (Score:4, Interesting)

    by Orion Blastar ( 457579 ) <orionblastar AT gmail DOT com> on Tuesday May 18, 2004 @07:15PM (#9190494) Homepage Journal
    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?

  • PearPC, for all your life needs (Score:5, Funny)

    by Unnngh! ( 731758 ) on Tuesday May 18, 2004 @07:18PM (#9190528)
    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

  • OS X machine to ssh in and compile on? (Score:3, Interesting)

    by molo ( 94384 ) on Tuesday May 18, 2004 @07:23PM (#9190575) Journal
    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

  • Bearing in mind Pear PC is only at v 0.01 (Score:5, Interesting)

    by Phil John ( 576633 ) <philNO@SPAMwebstarsltd.com> on Tuesday May 18, 2004 @08:03PM (#9190996)
    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 .
  • Maybe there would be a market for a low power device that runs Win32, Linux, or MacOSX.

    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.

  • 0.1.1 fixes a noticeable issue (Score:4, Informative)

    by CaptCanuk ( 245649 ) on Tuesday May 18, 2004 @09:17PM (#9191554) Journal
    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.

  • Mac OS X running on Virtual PC running on Mac OS X (Score:5, Funny)

    by Paladeen ( 8688 ) on Tuesday May 18, 2004 @09:46PM (#9191746)
    For what it's worth, I'm lonely and geekish enough to have actually done THIS [vefsyn.is]

    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. :D

    ....so lonely....

  • Finally... (Score:3, Funny)

    by ReadParse ( 38517 ) <john@IIIfunnycow.com minus threevowels> on Tuesday May 18, 2004 @09:56PM (#9191806) Homepage
    something I can run under bochs :)

  • Installs, but do apps run? (Score:3, Interesting)

    by sakusha ( 441986 ) on Tuesday May 18, 2004 @11:16PM (#9192301)
    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.

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