Info on OSX under VMWare

[Adam Smith]

Hi,

 

Its been a long and winding road so I figured I'd jot down some notes on how get OSX running under VMWare.

 

It seems that due to memory managment changes in the Kernel, OSX runs considerably less well under VMWare since 10.4.3 and this has been my experience. So you have the choice of either a responsive but out of date 10.4.3 OSX (which is completely functional) or tracking the newer ISOs.

 

The best OSX install for VMWare seems to be "10.4.3 8f1099 for dtk userdvd-PATCHED.iso" where "8f1099" is the last build without the kernel change and indeed this iso runs very well.

 

You may need to need to boot a more compatable kernel if you have an older CPU missing certain instructions by pressing F8 when the CD boots up and then mach_kernel.nonx -v from the boot prompt.

 

The complication however is that this now quite old iso only runs under VMWare 5.0 (easilly found though) and then only if you set the parameter paevm="TRUE" in the .vmx file for the VM. The iso also needs to be booted off a Virtual DVD drive such as Alcohol120%.

 

After my install networking was working but not audio. The drivers and install scripts are provided on the iso however. If you do have a problem with networking use the System Preferences/Networking panel to bing it to life or google one of the many entries for "kextcache".

 

One final note, you can change the screen resolution by using F8 again (if you catch the boot at the right time) and typing literally "Graphics Mode"="1280x1024x32" at the boot prompt. You can make this change permanent by adding this parameter to the file /Library/Preferences/SystemConfiguration/com.apple.Boot.plist.

 

Enjoy, but I'm sure once you've evaluated OSX your next PC will be a MAC.

 

J.

[Deepblue]

The complication however is that this now quite old iso only runs under VMWare 5.0 (easilly found though) and then only if you set the parameter paevm="TRUE" in the .vmx file for the VM. The iso also needs to be booted off a Virtual DVD drive such as Alcohol120%.

 

I use JaS Mac OS X 10.4.6 + vmware 5.5 on my intel PM laptop. I setup paevm="TRUE" , but I always met a PAE problem, any ideas?

[Adam Smith]

I use JaS Mac OS X 10.4.6 + vmware 5.5 on my intel PM laptop. I setup paevm="TRUE" , but I always met a PAE problem, any ideas?

 

It was only necessary to set paevm="TRUE" for VMWare 5.0 so perhaps this is the problem. Try to get a native install going if you can though. Running in a VM really slows things down. There is a very good tutorial here: http://blog.adonias.cl/leer.php?id=78&Lang=EN

[~pcwiz]

Hi,

 

Its been a long and winding road so I figured I'd jot down some notes on how get OSX running under VMWare.

 

It seems that due to memory managment changes in the Kernel, OSX runs considerably less well under VMWare since 10.4.3 and this has been my experience. So you have the choice of either a responsive but out of date 10.4.3 OSX (which is completely functional) or tracking the newer ISOs.

 

The best OSX install for VMWare seems to be "10.4.3 8f1099 for dtk userdvd-PATCHED.iso" where "8f1099" is the last build without the kernel change and indeed this iso runs very well.

 

You may need to need to boot a more compatable kernel if you have an older CPU missing certain instructions by pressing F8 when the CD boots up and then mach_kernel.nonx -v from the boot prompt.

 

The complication however is that this now quite old iso only runs under VMWare 5.0 (easilly found though) and then only if you set the parameter paevm="TRUE" in the .vmx file for the VM. The iso also needs to be booted off a Virtual DVD drive such as Alcohol120%.

 

After my install networking was working but not audio. The drivers and install scripts are provided on the iso however. If you do have a problem with networking use the System Preferences/Networking panel to bing it to life or google one of the many entries for "kextcache".

 

One final note, you can change the screen resolution by using F8 again (if you catch the boot at the right time) and typing literally "Graphics Mode"="1280x1024x32" at the boot prompt. You can make this change permanent by adding this parameter to the file /Library/Preferences/SystemConfiguration/com.apple.Boot.plist.

 

Enjoy, but I'm sure once you've evaluated OSX your next PC will be a MAC.

 

J.

 

Sorry to bring back up an old topic but some corrections here and there....The best ISO currently for VMware is the JaS 10.4.8 Intel AMD SSE2 SSE3 PPF1 +PPF2 ISO. And no one uses VMware 5.0 anymore, they use 5.5 or 6 so the 10.4.3 ISO won't work. I can't argue that 10.4.3 may have been faster, but if you have a dual/quad core CPU and a couple GBs of RAM, JaS 10.4.8 runs fine in VMware and it is very stable unless you install 10.4.9 or 10.4.10 updates.