Left Justified
FeedsRunning OSX on XP?
∞ | October 24, 2004 | Category: Web Nerdery
Are you using a PowerPC emulator to run OSX on top of XP? If so, I want to hear about it.
As a web designer, I want to know what about any cross-platform variations in my work; preferably before it launches. Currently, the only way I can get a glimpse of any bugs in Safari is to line up for a screenshot at iCapture or ask Brady to have a look.
Thanks to products like Pear PC and Cherry OS, it is now possible to run OSX from within XP; potentially allowing a single PC to run Windows, OSX and Linux — the ultimate test box. This is where you come in.
- Who has had a go setting up Pear PC + OSX? (Or Cherry OS if you were able to get the download in the brief time it was available).
- What specs did the system have?
- How long did setup take? Reports of 4 hour setups littered the net when Pear PC was first released — scary stuff
- Did Safari run smoothly? IE 5.2? Omniweb?
- Where there any strange side effects?
Any feedback is welcome; I’m not real keen on buying an OS that I may have very little use for until I’m more confident in the results.
Have Your Say
Sorry, comments are closed on this post.
Sorry never tried Pear PC or Cherry OS so couldnt answer your question. Though personally, I’m thinking of getting a powerbook, for testing purposes and also portability, I can then work from anywhere. Kills two bird with one stone rather than have everything in one static dump/desktop. hee.
I tried PearPC on an Intel P4 1.8 GHz with 512 MB RAM.
S-L-O-W. The installation took 2 hours.
Yep, I’ve had it up and running.
On a 3ghz Pentium4 with 512mb ram OS X ran ok. It was pretty workable, but since I had no internet connection I couldn’t test it much.
Some things of interest:
- http://dev.realistanew.com/win32net/
To get networking working. (I found it after I’d uninstalled)
- To save myself the trouble of installing OS X, I downloaded a copy already installed on an img (disc image).
- Use something like WinISO to make iso’s with files you want to view and work on under OSX. This is necessary as PearPC doesn’t access windows partitions (yet).
- PearPC.net is a good place for all PearPC info.
PS. Why doesn’t your post preview do linebreaks and paragraphs. If you want, you can copy it off of my contact form on my site. (based on Andy Budd’s code, btw)
PPS. Safari ran fine, but then again, had no inet connection to really tet it properly.
I once saw it running on a AMD FX-53 with a couple gigs of RAM, even on that it was very slow…
Personally I’ve got no reason for it now my Dual 2.5GHz PowerMac G5 and 30″ Cinema Display has arrived
Mac OS X on a PC box… sacriledge!:)
Thanks for the tips and links - great stuff. I would ideally like to run OSX on my test box - PIII 500mhz w/768mb ram. Somehow I don’t think that’s going to happen…lol.
It does, but I was stupid and added a line to my CSS which hides all <br />s that are inside forms.
Fixed now
Personally, I’d opt for bothering a Mac-using buddy than dropping $129.00 on an OS whose browser would be of more use to me than anything else that came with it…
Though I guess to some it may seem a worthy investment. I think we should all just lobby to get Safari for Windows
Or start an online forum on which designers can kindly ask for browser tests. All sorts of money-saving alternatives 
PS: Your linebreaks work, but double line breaks don’t
And if you don’t mind, I’d like to test my theory on a SmartyPants bug:
“‘Is this a SmartyPants bug?’ I ask you.”
Good luck on the Mac emulatin’
Andrew - That’s a lot of Ram, you might get lucky. Try to borrow a copy (or download) before you buy as the processor might be a problem.
PS. Your line breaks work now, but your code doesn’t allow for paragraphs.
from the (breakOn) line it should be helpfull to you
This isn’t a very good substitute, I know, but in a pinch Konqueror can give you a good idea about how your site will look in Safari.
Konqueror is usually a little behind Safari (unless maybe you’re using it from CVS), but it gives you a pretty good baseline.
Of course, that doesn’t help if you want to know how it looks in Mac IE 5 or OmniWeb.
Actually, in regards to OmniWeb, it may just help.
OmniWeb browser is built off WebKit (the older version) – so essentially, Safari 1.2 is all the goody new stuff with major bugs fixed (min-height the exception), and OmniWeb is the equivalent of pre-safari 1.2. So OmniWeb is just Safari with a completely different interface… why I refuse to pay money for that program is your guess then:)
IE 5, on the other hand, is it’s own beast I have since made it my agenda to remove from every Mac computer i come in contact with – public computers are no safer:)
However, I think the benefits of having an OS X emulator you’ll find might be more than just running safari/firefox/chimera/IE/Opera – there are a lot of useful and cheap programs that work wonders for my Mac I can’t find for a PC. That opinion, may be biased:)
Regarding OmniWeb, I’ve never really used it because they charge you for an out of date version of the WebKit, which I find annoying.
As for RAM, my 4.5GB is enough for Safari… Or at least running natively with OS X as the host OS…
I agree with Brady about the littl’ cheap apps… But I’m probably also biased
Aaron: I don’t have smartypants turned on…
Sorry ’bout the line breaks, this thing has become seriously buggy of late! I made a stand-alone page and the script runs fine. I added AkaXakA’s double line replace and it works. Once I use it on the site though, whether my local version or the live version, it doesn’t work!
It’s already chewed too much time today, I’ll come back to it in a week or so when I actually give a damn about the little things again.
Will: How similar is Konquerer? I thought Saf. forked from khtml? Mmm, me thinks it’s testing time…
The WebKit, which Safari’s rendering engine is, branched off Konquerer’s CVS, but Apple have changed things, which have all made it more standards complient…
Drastically different than Konqueror now – you wouldn’t really notice much of a rendering similarity. Given it a go at the work computers;)
But Brady… We could install Fink and from there install KDE (include Konquerer) on OS X
Had it running on an Intel 2.6 GHz with 512 MB RAM and a 9600 Pro. It was slow/unresponsive/buggy. Still needs alot of work but it was cool to see OS X in windows. heh
I have PearPC running on my 2.8GHz 512MB laptop… It’s FAR too slow for everyday use but it’s just the job for a bit of testing. I have Safari 1.2 and IE5.2 running on mine.
Having said that, it’s slippier to get working properly than your average eel. I wrote up a few brief notes (glossing over the fact that I downloaded a hard disk image with Panther pre-installed): PearPC Rocks. There were a few little tips and tricks required for the networking. That said, the networking has since stopped working and I have no idea why.
Why not use a mac as the base system and run the new VirtualPC (recently aquired by Microsoft) with Windows XP, this is the option i’m considering.
The latest version of Virtual PC doesn’t work on a G5 with over 2 GB RAM (I have 4.5 GB)
Although they are working on a fix 
Also, remember that emulation is slow, and it can emulate anything from a 3MHz to a 1 GHz Pentium III… And the graphics card emulation is about 1/2MB…
Personally, I have a cheap Windows (around £350) which I use for games, but rarely goes online, and my G5 for everything else.
A while back I managed to get PearPC working on an XP pro machine with 512MB RAM and a 2.4GHz P4 - It ran fairly well but networking support was very intermittent.
I stopped up til about 1am in the morning fiddling with settings until I finally managed to bridge the TAP networking adapter to my home LAN successfully and get Safari working. The next morning it refused to work.
A few weeks later I had another go with a different approach - using a proxy to gain a network connection - only to recieve the same output. It worked once and then never again.
I’ve not tried again in the more recent versions yet - but I definately intend to at some point. What I saw was promising but unfortunately inconsistent - but that should have been expected from beta software such as PearPC
Well, I came across PearPC just few days ago, but I’m gonna give it a try. At least until I buy my (i|Power)Book…
I managed to find a daily builds page, and got an athlon sped up build, and it ran quite a bit faster. Can’t seem to run more than 128 of ram under win me, and the tap server isn’t avail in me. Otherwise it worked pretty good. Enouph to give me dirty looks from my mac loving girlfriend
I work the same as Geoffrey. I do all my work and development on Macs and use a Mac as a test server (apache, PHP, croning, MySQL etc). I built a fairly cheap PC for gaming and web testing. Spent about $600.
Why not buy a used Mac on ebay or yahoo? Then you can use it for testing purposes along with the pc you already have. By buying used, you won’t feel like you’re investing a whole lot in a new system and most web testing technologies that you will run on your mac are free (apache,PHP,MySQL,web browsers, text editors and ftp). Infact, you might just become a MacAddict after using it for a little while
.
Anyway, that’s my suggestion.
I would also love to know if safari can be run under window xp or not…anyone know? kindly message me in my blog forum ok
by the way my forum url is http://www.kahsoon.com/forum/index.php
It seems like you were way ahead of your time on this post with concern to the recent speculations on what is possible with the new IntelMac.
In this article I’ve written a step by step instruction for setting up OSX in Windows XP. You will need a few things to get started. The first being pearpc available Here. This is an architecture emulator that will allow you to run OSX. You will also need the PearPC Config file to setup OSX, I have written one for you, for ease of use. You can download it Here. Now on with the walkthrough.
NOTE: forward slashes are stripped out by the PHPNuke for security reasons. I have swapped out the forward slash with the backslash. Please switch these only when referring to X:/.
1. set the PPCCFG file to use the Darwin 10.3 ISO (darwin-701.iso) for pci_ide0_slave_image
2. boot off Darwin and when asked for installation device enter “shell” to get a shell
3. enter pdisk
4. enter e and then /dev/disk0 to edit the partition map of the hard disk
5. enter i to initialize the disk
6. confirm the default values by pressing enter to each
7. enter p to print the preliminary partition map and note the length of the Apple_Free partition
8. enter C to create a new partition entry
9. enter 64 as first block then the length of the Apple_Free partition from above.
10. enter Mac_OS_X as partition name and Apple_HFS as partition type.
11. enter w to write to partition map, confirm with y and then enter q and q to quit pdisk
12. enter reboot and wait for PearPC to quit
13. restart PearPC
14. when asked enter 1 as device, 0 as partition and then yes to confirm the installation to the selected disk. press 1 to reboot when prompted
15. change the PPCCFG file to use OSX.V10.3.Panther.1.iso for pci_ide0_slave_image and restart PearPC
16. begin installing OS X
17. items to not install (if CD2 and CD3 are not present):
——— additional applications (requires CD2)
——— printer drivers (requires CD2)
——— fonts (requires CD2)
——— additional speech voices
——— language translations
——— x11 (requires CD3)
18. after reboot if installing additional OS X items change the PPCCFG file to read: pci_ide0_slave_image = “x:/OSX.V10.3.Panther.2.iso” or pci_ide0_slave_image = “x:/OSX.V10.3.Panther.3.iso”
I am running OS X 10.3.9 on XP Pro SP2+ within Cherry OS 1.0 (Yes I was one of the quick people to get that) and it seems to be running ok.
That is once you get the hang of it all with Cherry OS, which is pretty basic really…
It is running a bit sluggish though, but I reckon this is partly because of the fact that I have an ageing AMD Barton ticking at 2.1Ghz and 512MB DDR PC3200.
Safari seems to behave rather naturally and funny enough IE 5.2 is quite quick (relatively speaking).
I think for testing or experimental purposes it is all right.
It does not feel like a proper G4 though.
Like your design.
Best regards
Skitalo