1 reply to this topic

[sofakng]

I'm a little interested in the overview of the technical workings of darwin.iso.

Can somebody explain what it is and where it came from?

Also, why are there multiple versions of it?  (eg. the guy doing the VMware hacks created new versions of it...)

[MSoK]

sofakng, on Jul 2 2010, 05:57 PM, said:

I'm a little interested in the overview of the technical workings of darwin.iso.

Can somebody explain what it is and where it came from?

Also, why are there multiple versions of it? (eg. the guy doing the VMware hacks created new versions of it...)

The iso's in VMware Workstation, Player and Fusion are compiled pre loaders and the VMware tools to support virtual guests, and are installed when you install VMware, or are downloaded as needed in the case of Player, when you select a guest i.e. BSD. In the case of the darwin iso it is only included with Fusion as this is the only OS X supported environment due to Apple's EULA, and VMware honour that agreement, actually because Workstation, Fusion and Player share a significant amount of code, VMware disable the fuctionallity in Workstation and Player. But thanks to the great work from Donk, Albert, Zenith432 etc. the functinallity has been either unlocked (Albert) or bypassed (Donk). However to install the VMware tools for OS X the darwin sio is required from Fusion, and in the case of Donk's method is requred for OS X to boot.

The version thing is a combination of the various releases of Fusion i.e. 3.0.0, 3.0.1 and the latest 3.1.0 also some beta version have been floating around to enable OS X to be installed under ESXi, 310b1 to 310b6. If you are just running Snow Leopard under Workstation 7 or Player 3 then 301 or 310b2 should work fine. I understand Donk is intending to release a final version of 310 to support both Workstation and ESXi, although Albert's unlocker solution is probably currently anyway the preferred method and any of the 310 beta releases of the darwin iso can be used to install the VMware tools.

Hope this helps, sorry Legends if I have made any technical errors, MSoK!