Ever since we’ve seen Apples OSX operating system run on intel chips, people started trying to run the fabulous operating system on other intel based hardware. Understandble, Apples hardware is slightly more expensive than PC hardware, and officially it is not allowed to run OSX on other hardware than Apple hardware. VMWare’s manufacturer is aware of this issue, as according to Apple’s licenses, it is even illegal to run OSX on vmware instances.

Earlier this week there was a story about a (french??) manufacturer of intel hardware selling a computer @ $399 running OSX, which was included. An interesting move, that was quickly followed by two changes:

1 Name change to Open Computer

2 Selling hardware without OSX (Leopard) pre installed, as that takes away illegal actions and puts that responsibility with the buyer.

Dailytech claimed that Apple wanted to kill Psystars mac, but that is rubbish we know now. Instead of assuming all kinds of things, how would this exactly hurt Apple? Simple. Apple is succesfull because the company combines good quality hardware with a great operating system, and supports it completely and actively (unlike microsoft, who will sell an operating system and let the buyer figure out how to get hardware working).

Getting customers for their operating system running it on non-apple hardware isn’t that big a problem. It means more popularity for Apple and serious buyers like artists, designers and many others will still go for the complete package.

To be continued….

Most people I know use virtualization software. But most of them cannot answer the question “why” - it seems like they use it just like a lot of people use a lot of software ‘just to have it’. I don’t understand, but hey, that’s me.

I have only one reason to be interested in virtualization: the ability to use test systems for development tasks. In daily life I work with unix a lot (mostly solaris/aix). So having a virtual sun box to try stuff out seems logical these days.

Not being interested in parallels or vmware because of the cost, I decided to gove Virtualbox a spin. Must be good stuff, I thought as the manufacturer has been aquired by Sun Microsystems (creator of sun solaris).

Working with virtualbox is nice. You can install all kinds of guest operating systems, but you can also download working snapshots you can attach to virtualbox as disk images. Easy to try out an operating system!

So I started with Gos (Google operating system, actually ubuntu with extras). And guess what? It’s a matter of a few clicks!

It doesn’t even matter where you place the vdi - but placing it in ~/Library/Virtualbox makes virtualbox see the vdi file immediately.

A few links:

VDI images source

Another good source for vdi images

Migrate vid to *real* linux

More soon!

What is your experience with Virtualbox?