Leopard calms down; switching to the Intel Mac; VMWare

[ka9q]

A few months after my screed on Leopard and the PowerPC, when a few patches had been released, I tried again. This time it came up without a hitch on both my 17" G4 Powerbook and my wife's PowerPC iMac. Whatever problems were in the first release of Leopard (10.5.0) seem to be fixed now. Thanks, Apple. But I really should have heeded the warnings

Comments

virtualizer for PowerPC

[skolk]

There is the Mac-On-Linux project, a virtualizer for PowerPC.
It's here: http://mac-on-linux.sourceforge.net/
The drawback is that host OS must be Linux, but you can use any PowerPC guest OS.

Re: virtualizer for PowerPC

[ka9q]

Thank you! I'll check it out. OSX is a great desktop end-user environment, but I still very much prefer Linux for development and as a server. I don't like working in proprietary environments.

A virtualizer for an Intel Mac would probably be more useful now. I originally bought a Mac to play with the PowerPC CPU, and I was sorry to see Apple drop it for Intel. The PowerPC is a much cleaner architecture than the x86. At last count there are 7, count 'em, SEVEN SIMD instruction sets on Intel CPUs alone (AMD has a few more) while the PowerPC got it right with Altivec the very first time.

But as inefficient as the x86 architecture is, I guess the PowerPC just couldn't keep up with the Intel steamroller. I wonder: how many extra megatons of CO2/year does the world emit because of the Intel architecture?

Intel Mac OS X virtualizers list

[skolk]

For Intel-based Macs, alternatives to VMware Fusion include:
VirtualBox (free for use) http://www.virtualbox.org/wiki/Downloads
Parallels Desktop (commercial) http://www.parallels.com/products/desktop/
QEMU (binary translation, no kqemu for OS X) http://www.kju-app.org/

For other host OS-es, you can use free-for-use VMware Server 1.0.x instead of Workstation in most cases. (2.x is a bloatware)

Also I'm wondering, if all other Intel Unixes (All other BSD, Solaris and SCO) can directly run Linux ELF binaries, why OS X doesn't?

Re: Intel Mac OS X virtualizers list

[ka9q]

I don't know why OSX can't run ELF binaries. Maybe it's because OSX uses a different shared library structure.

Fortunately, OSX has become a pretty popular flavor of BSD, so most open source tarballs can be extracted, configured and compiled on OSX and I don't have to run ELF binaries originally compiled for a non-OSX system.

I use the 'port' system pretty regularly and I'm amazed at how well it works. Once in a while something breaks during compilation, but it's rare.