OSX in a VM? If you want…

As you may have noticed in my previous articles (here and here), getting OSX Leopard onto a PC is not exactly easy, but sometimes it is do-able. However, if you just want to look around the OS a bit, here’s an easier way…

Rather than going through all the hard work yourself, wouldn’t it be nice if someone made a pre-installed VM (Virtual Machine) that you could just download and boot-up in any supported VMware environment? Well, fortunately for us, someone has!

Search the Torrents for “VMware OS X 10.4.7″. This is a hacked version of Tiger of course - minus a few recent updates - but it’s fairly similar to Leopard if you just want to see what OSX is like. I downloaded this over the weekend (1.2Gb - RAR’ed) and was pleasantly surprised to find that it booted up under VMware Fusion (1.1) on my Macbook with no problems at all!

Ok - I lied, there was one small problem initially. Under Fusion, if you simply un-rar the downloaded file (I used UnRarX), and start the VM from the FreeBSD.vmx file, the boot fails with a ‘kernel reset’ error. However, you can get around this by creating a new VM with OS = ‘Microsoft Windows’ and Version = ‘Windows NT’, and then for Virtual Hard Disk settings click ‘Advanced’. This enables you to select ‘Use an existing virtual disk’ to point to the downloaded ‘FreeBSD.vmdk’ file.

Of course, this problem may not occur with VMware Workstation (Windows or Linux) or VMware Player (Windows only).

Anyway, running a pre-installed VM is a lot simpler than installing Leopard on a PC from scratch, and downloading 1.2GB is a lot better than 4.3Gb! On top of that, it will run an any VMware Platform. And while not everything will work like it does on a genuine Mac (see the profiler shot below), the basics do! Enjoy.

P.S. Apparently installing updates will ‘break’ the VM so do so at your own risk…