Mine the Harvest

Last year I had some fun getting an OS X virtual machine  running under VM Ware server on my Windows box. (That was a geeky thing back then.) That box since died and I built a new system with Open Suse 10.3 as the primary OS. I installed VM Ware server and rounded up the Virtual Machine files I had made for this OS X Virtual Machine under Windows and just copied them into the new Linux environment. Honestly, I thought it would likely choke – I didn’t expect simply dropping the VM files into the Linux install to actually work – it did.

I find it greatly amusing to run OS X on my regular old Intel P4 2.8 generic system. It runs pretty much perfectly, though is slow given the fact the underlying Linux OS and the hosted OS X VM are all running on 512MB or memory, hehehe . . . All the more humor.

Getting the VM configured the first time required a few install attempts and a couple partitioning attempts from the install disk. If you want to run OS X on an generic Intel platform I found this site to be very helpful: http://www.osx86project.org/

Here is the underlying Linux host OS, Open Suse 10.3 running VMWare Server:

And here is the OS X running as a Guest OS:

I truly love VM Ware. You can run multiple different OSes simultaneously and switch effortless between them – Linux, Solaris, OS X, Windows – all running nicely. You can even make a virtual machine from your existing physical machines and move the entire install around to different hardware as though it were basically a file. You can also download many ready to go virtual machine appliances for all manner of purposes to test drive, all without having to install the OS and stack needed – download a virtual appliance to check out Wikipedia, or check out pfsense – a FreeBSD firewall appliance – and you won’t even have to bleed getting it all set up and sacrificing to the BSD Gods – just install and run the entire environment virtually.

I first started playing around running Virtual Machines about a year and a half ago. I thought I had died and gone to heaven. If you have not already, I highly suggest you play around with this. At long last, running whatever platform I want with easy. Wow, I remember talking about how nice that would be . . . someday. The frustration of trying to get multiple OSes to get along with each other, etc. All that is basically history. This makes me feel like a kid again – it’s what I always wanted to be able to do. While virtualizaton  is hardly new technology – the easy of use (and low cost) it has reached is unparalleled.