opendarwin on pearpc

2004 Dec 19 at 20:30 » Tagged as :virtualization, rcs,

Having installed PearPc a couple of days ago, I decided to have a go at installing opendarwin as a guest operating system. It turned out to be a much more pleasent experience than installation of opendarwin as a OS that stands on it's own feet.

PearPC is a PowerPC emulator for linux. You can install opendarwin as well as OS X as a guest operating system for a PearPc host. Qemu is another virtualization system that can emulate several different processors ranging from i386 to ARM. However it has not reached the same levels maturity as pearpc. Qemu is worth wathchig but I digress...

Installation of opendawin as a client os is well documented. in fact the pearpc documentation is far superior to darwin's own doc. Not having to give darwin direct access to the hardisk means you need less courage to try the installation. After all the known issues page does say it may not work with IDE drives.

Though the installation takes quite a bit of time when you run it under the emulator it's considerably less painfull than having to constantly reboot the machine. The end result was pleasent as well. darwin did boot up when run as a guest system and I managed to login and get a shell. Now to figure out how xwindow could be started.