Getting OSX to run on a Thinkpad

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yukit · #1 Post by **yukit** » Fri Aug 19, 2005 3:40 am

You may have read about x86 version of OSX running on non-Apple-development machine like this link.

Anyone try this yet?

Bob Collins · #2 Post by **Bob Collins** » Fri Aug 19, 2005 7:27 am

None of the torrents work. It would seem Apples legal department has issed a stop order onsites hosting videos of OSX on non-Apple hardware, I would suppose they also lifted all torrents.

If the torrents come back, please post links here, I am intrigued.

<off_topic>
I have read so much about bit torrent, but have never been able to ever get anything to load, and the one or two things that did start to load, loaded as if they were fed from floppies. I had read many times that torrent is wicked fast, but never witnessed it.</off_topic>

yukit · #3 Post by **yukit** » Sat Aug 20, 2005 1:06 am

Got it running in VMware Workstation on my T40p.
Safari does work, but it crashes on thinkpads.com's home page

Fortunately, I can go directly to the forum page

http://photos30.flickr.com/35296353_a20b7b8b43.jpg

ps. It is a real PowerBook in the background, but this is not a VNC trick.

Orbitz · #4 Post by **Orbitz** » Sat Aug 20, 2005 2:20 am

This guy got it working...

http://www.notebookforums.com/forums/sh ... p?t=102382

yukit · #5 Post by **yukit** » Sat Aug 20, 2005 4:25 am

I just downloaded the video of the guy booting OSX on his Dell laptop from the link. It is neat that they got that far.
I think I will keep my OSX in the virtual machine.
Now I will finish setting up the Windows Vista beta1 vm.

lilserenity · #6 Post by **lilserenity** » Sat Aug 20, 2005 8:05 am

There are of course quite easy ways of getting 'classic' MacOS to work on a laptop or ThinkPad; which I'm sure you're all aware of. Up until fairly recently it has been limited to Christian Bauer's Basilisk II 68k Mac emulator; which is funky (I used to use his previous work, ShapeShifter to emulate the Mac on my Amiga at the time; they both used Motorola 68K CPUs so it was a breeze) and can be fairly useful, if limited to MacOS 8.1 at the best; but the 68K emulation is quite fast and reaches 68040 speeds and probably 68060 (never used in a real 68K Mac mind...) speeds on my 1.5GHz Pentium M system; of course there is now a JIT based version of Win32 Basilisk which in time should speed things up even more.

Of more interest though is Sheepshaver which was until recently limited to PPC based Linux distros and BeOS which could emulate a PowerPC based Mac. It has been ported to Win32 now; and actually works, it's still a little rough around the edges, as it uses Windows GDI for graphics (no DirectX here! Yet!) and has no Ethernet support, or indeed support for full screen emulation, just windowed, but it does work. It has a JIT compiler to make its emulation of the PowerPC G4 a little faster, of course, PPC G4 speeds are not likely.

At a rough guess performance is somewhere lingering around the original PowerPC 601/603 marks; but even attaining 66MHz 601 speed opens up PPC Mac software previously that could not be emulated on Win32 systems.

I have successfully run MacOS 8.6 on Sheepshaver and on the whole it is fairly stable. When it has full screen support, it will be better and can run up to MacOS 9.0 apparently, but stumbles on 9.1-9.2.2 apparently.

I know this is not OS X; but just a deluge of stuff from me having always been interested in Macintosh emulation and in general having soft spot for the Mac. (Well, I did used to own a IIfx and Powerbook 180c until 5 years ago)

Still, this is a world away from that old AMax II thing I used to have on my Amiga 500; with the 256K ROMs and a copy of System 6 and 800K Mac Floppy drive, black and white Mac emulation was a wonder to behold

Man those were fun days. So running Mac OS X on a PC, especially laptop does seem like a lot of fun.

Though, you can get an iBook 12" for just under £700 inc. VAT ($999 + sales tax in the US)... So in a sense, owning a Mac these days isn't unduly expensive (compared to buying a Mac II in 1987!) Even so, it shows that people are intrigued about running Mac OS X on a IBM compatible, even if it is only curosity without serious 'switching' intent IYKWIM.

As to what happens with Apple's move from IBM/Freescale PPC to Intel x86/x64 remains to be seen, although I don't doubt for one second that someone will find a way around Apple's protection for running OS X on non Apple hardware, that's not a question of if, but when.

I'm rambling

Still -- might be some stuff there people fancy trying, especially the PPC Sheepshaver emulator. You will of course need the Mac ROM; but since it's provided on the Mac OS 8.6 CD (NewWorld ROM architecture); it's not unduly difficult to get hold of. And of course, I am talking about legal avenues here, I am well aware it's easy to obtain on the 'net, but I don't condone that

I'll be quiet now, but suffice to say, peeps always found it funky seeing Mac OS on a computer that was not a Mac, be it an Amiga 500 or in later years 3000, or my ThinkPad T23 at the time with Mac OS 8.1 running full screen. Well I thought it was funky, but I'm sad

Vicky

lilserenity · #7 Post by **lilserenity** » Sat Aug 20, 2005 8:09 am

Oh and this may be of interest...

http://pearpc.sourceforge.net/

..forgot to mention it

Vicky

yukit · #8 Post by **yukit** » Sat Aug 20, 2005 3:32 pm

The good old days...

Emulators have been around for a long time. The really interesting part today is that the OS is running on the native platform (in my case, virtualized platform)

#9 Post by **BillMorrow** » Sun Aug 21, 2005 6:06 pm

yukit wrote: Safari does work, but it crashes on thinkpads.com's home page
Fortunately, I can go directly to the forum page

EVERYTHING crashes on thinkpads.com's home page..

most everything WORKS on the open forum, though..

yukit · #10 Post by **yukit** » Sun Aug 21, 2005 7:50 pm

BillMorrow wrote:
yukit wrote: Safari does work, but it crashes on thinkpads.com's home page
Fortunately, I can go directly to the forum page
EVERYTHING crashes on thinkpads.com's home page..

But Safari running on the real PowerBook works just fine on the home page

Also works fine from IE7 running on Windows Vista.

suaveguyc · #11 Post by **suaveguyc** » Thu Sep 08, 2005 10:20 pm

I got it working on an external USB2 drive to boot! Of course its nearly a month on, but its pretty fun. Just wish there was an ethernet driver.

Rob · #12 Post by **Rob** » Sun Sep 11, 2005 6:54 am

Well, just FYI. While it runs on a T43, but the network stuff doesn't work so it's not that useful. It's fun to try out. The sound works and 1400x1050 works too. I haven't tried a DVD movie yet, though I tried burning a DVD.

Wired networking works on the T42 because they have a different controller than the T43. And with all the people wanting and looking into a wireless driver, I'm sure there will be one before too long.

There are some pretty good hackers out there. You can now get the install DVD torrent, patch it, and then install it natively on a partition, and it works!

Rob

#13 Post by **BillMorrow** » Mon Sep 12, 2005 1:49 pm

Rob wrote:Well, just FYI. While it runs on a T43, but the network stuff doesn't work so it's not that useful. It's fun to try out. The sound works and 1400x1050 works too. I haven't tried a DVD movie yet, though I tried burning a DVD.

Wired networking works on the T42 because they have a different controller than the T43. And with all the people wanting and looking into a wireless driver, I'm sure there will be one before too long.

There are some pretty good hackers out there. You can now get the install DVD torrent, patch it, and then install it natively on a partition, and it works!

Rob

are you saying that OS X will run on a thinkpad..?

and

what the H... is a "torrent" or a "bit torrent" though this last one begins to suggest some sort of very fast download site or source or whatever..

Bob Collins · #14 Post by **Bob Collins** » Mon Sep 12, 2005 2:27 pm

Yes, Bill, there is a version of OSX that is X86 capable. It is Beta I think. Apple is working on the full version, ostensibly to 'ONLY' run on Apple branded x86 hardware. How well or not it runs is to be seen. This is an early developers release.

<speculation>Apple is going to say that OSX is for Apple hardware only, but once they see the great demand for it, they will release a full x86 version that shall run on any x86 hardware.</speculation>

Someone has released a Vmware image of it to the wild. It is suppose to work for most. I have had no luck on three different machines. YMMV

Bit Torrent is a file sharing system where you load a client/server piece onto your PC. Then as you download the file(s) you can also upload the pieces of the file(s) you already have. This is of course automatic, however you can throttle just how much BW you use for outbound.

yukit · #15 Post by **yukit** » Mon Sep 12, 2005 7:17 pm

Bob Collins wrote: Someone has released a Vmware image of it to the wild. It is suppose to work for most. I have had no luck on three different machines. YMMV

You stand a better chance at getting the tiger image to work in VMware with the newly released beta:
http://www.vmware.com/products/beta/ws/

You can get networking to work by manually updating the vmx file.
Replace or add NIC setting with
ethernet0.virtualDev = "e1000"

YMMV, it works on my T40p, but it does not work on my desktop with the identical VMware setup. This is the picture I posted earlier.
http://static.flickr.com/30/35296353_a20b7b8b43.jpg

greg025 · #16 Post by **greg025** » Tue Sep 13, 2005 8:39 pm

The VMWare image runs fine on my desktop under VMWare 5.

Haven't had a chance to try under the T40P as yet.

Next job is to try installing the raw image.

Cheers,

Greg

Rob · #17 Post by **Rob** » Tue Sep 13, 2005 9:46 pm

There is also a patch you can apply to the full developers x86 version which lets you burn a real install cd.

Rob

Getting OSX to run on a Thinkpad

Getting OSX to run on a Thinkpad

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