[Gllug] [OT] Mac OS X on a PC

[Peter Corlett]

On 10 Jan 2009, at 13:17, fendersan at aol.com wrote:
> It seems there's a way to install Mac OS X "Leopard" on a PC.

Yes, although it is against the licence agreement, assuming one has  
bought Leopard in the first place instead of pirating it. Mostly it  
involves torrenting a copy of a hacked Leopard - not just patches -  
which puts it on very dodgy ground.

> If I give this a go, will I be able to run native Mac applications? My
> understanding is that there is a new type of "universal" binary for
> Intel-based Macs but what about older PowerPC applications? Would  
> those
> work?

The "universal" binary is just a fat binary that contains both a PPC  
and an x86 executable. Stuff compiled before x86 support obviously  
only contains the PPC variant.

Leopard contains something called Rosetta, and this provides a PPC  
virtual machine for running PPC-only binaries. Copy-protection  
excepted, there's nothing particularly magical about Rosetta that  
would stop it working on a PC.

> It would also be interesting to know whether it is possible to run
> Linux and Windows alongside OS X on the same PC.

I have Linux and Windows running fine on my MacBook Pro. (From within  
Parallels, as it happens, but they'll also run happily on the bare  
metal.)


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