osx86 on vmware/osx or parallels

[sg]

i'm wondering if anyone has installed osx86 on vmware or parallels for osx.

[SteveStar]

Why should you?

[sg]

because i want to have a virtual machine to test out various osx86 patches. that is the entire point of virtualization, so you can run multiple OS's without rebooting or distrupting your work.

[macgirl]

I did not installed it on Fusion, but I run it, since VMware Image Disks / guests are compatible across platforms I run them on XP and OSX

 

My Guest OSs are Win 98, Linux, WinXP, OSX10.4.3 and OX10.4.8.

 

Yes I run XP on XP, somteimes fresh install behaves different.

[MrZarniwoop]

I'm playing with OSx86 (Mac OS X 10.4.8 [JaS AMD-Intel-SSE2-SSE3 with PPF1 & PPF2]) on VMware Fusion 1.0 (51348) using my Mac Pro Quad-Core 2.66 running Mac OS X 10.4.10. For the most part, it works, as long as I don't try any of the 10.4.9 patches. It's generally stable and functional, which I cannot say about the deadmoo or uphuck versions I tried, although wow did the deadmoo "feel" peppy.

 

Some comments:

 

1. I did try a previous install once choosing both the Intel and AMD patches, and actually, that installation seemed "happier" with networking. By that I mean, after installing MPIP103_10.4.9.SMB.CIFS.APF.FIX, I was able to attach to a Mac share using afp:// shares. My current install (Intel patches only) can use web browsing and ftp, although once I install the MPIP patch, I can no longer use ftp. smb:// (CIFS) shares don't work before/after the MPIP patch, although I didn't try them when I had the install with both Intel and AMD.

 

2. When I installed Intel and AMD patches, the virtual machine guestOS was set to "darwin", and it worked. With Intel patches only, it complains about it being a 64-bit guest OS, so I set it to "freebsd-64", which makes the error go away. Networking is quirky under this setup, in that I have to boot up, change the network setting to NAT in VMware, then Bridged, and then renew the DHCP lease in the guest OSx86. But after that web browsing (and downloading from Safari) works ok, although slow (around 37KBps).

 

3. It's terribly slow overall, much much slower than Ubuntu, Win XP, or Vista (in a Boot Camp partition) running in VMware. Overall, OSx86 "feels" much slower than my PowerMac G4 Dual 1.25GHz MDD, even though this is a reasonably decent Mac. It helps to use something like OnyX to disable a lot of the graphic effects, but it's still pretty rough. For example, I haven't timed it, the Mac Pro boots to a desktop in just seconds from grey screen, to grey Apple logo, to OS X startup screen, to desktop. This same process takes about a minute in the OSx86 VM. I guess I should time it, huh?

 

4. It felt like it took forever to install, and required burning the DVD. It would not install from the ISO image, although for comparison both deadmoo and uphuck ISOs I tried *would* install from an ISO mounted in VMware.

 

5. Set for Intel patches only, I always get a notice (which I ignore) during booting from VMware that the guest OS should be set to use DMA for CD/DVD drives. It must send a PIO command that was not sent when it was Intel and AMD patches.

 

6. Sound doesn't seem to work at all, the guest doesn't think there's any Sound hardware. It did work on deadmoo.

 

7. It won't install this way, but once installed, I can enable two virtual X86 processors without issue. In that case, System Profiler shows:

 

Processor Name: Dual-Core Intel Xeon

Processor Speed: 2.66GHz

Number Of Processors: 1

Total Number Of Cores: 2

L2 Cache (per processor): 4 MB

Memory: 1 GB

Bus Speed: 200MHz

 

1GB is what I allocated in VMware, the bus speed of the actual Mac Pro is 1.33 GHz with 5GB of RAM.

 

I may set up another VM with both Intel and AMD patches to see if in general it's better, I screwed it up by installing the JaS 10.4.9 patches without a backup or snapshot.