Thursday, October 02, 2008

Running MacOS X as guest in VirtualBox

I have been looking for a while for a solution where I could easily work with MacOS X on my workstation. I am currently running Ubuntu, with a virtual Windows XP in VirtualBox for Photoshop, Flash and some other Windows-software.

Since the MacOS X runs on the x86 architecture these days, I figured I should be able to run a virtual MacOS X as well.
However after some looking around, it appears not to be possible. And it's not a technical problem, but rather a issue of the MacOS X EULA:

"This License allows you to install and use one copy of the Mac OS X Server software (the "Mac OS X Server Software") on a single Apple-labeled computer."

The only solution for now appears to be to use VMWare together with a cracked version of MacOS X and follow a long series of installation instructions.
However, this is not a working solution for me, since I prefer to use the open source VirtualBox rather than the commercial and NSA funded VMWare [1, 2].

There is some discussion in virtualbox.org regarding MacOS X guest support, but Sun appears to officially ignore it (the OS is not even listed here for example).

5 comments:

Anonymous said...

Thanks for writing this.

Anonymous said...

Have you had any luck?

Anonymous said...

The reason you can't guest Mac OS in VirtualBox is actually rather a DRM issue as well as a license.

Unlike Windows, that uses software registration, Apple uses a TPM (trusted path management) chip on their motherboards to verify you have a genuine motherboard. VirtualBox cannot emulate that chip.

Anonymous said...

yes it can emulate it very well.

there are hacked distros out there for native installation of mac os x on pc computers. they do it with EFI Boot emulation. you can install a native mac dude :)

plus there is a hacked version of VMware to install Mac Os as guest.

why not now VirtualBox cannot emulate that chip ? :)))

ask again.

ZUCO said...

@Anonymous

Could you share some links to do that?