A report by Mac geek site OS X Daily claims that Sun Microsystem’s
VirtualBox can now run Mac OS X in a virtual machine on pretty much any Intel PC. It offers a link to a guide explaining how to get the job done. Apparently, you need to go through Mac OS X 10.5 Leopard to install the latest version of Apple’s OS (Snow Leopard).
VirtualBox is a virtualization solution available for Mac OS X, Windows and Linux. The software allows users to install additional operating systems over an existing one as guests, living inside what is called “a virtual machine.”
According to the release notes for VirtualBox 3.2.0, this is a major update. Some of the key additions include experimental support for Mac OS X guests, memory ballooning to dynamically increase or decrease the amount of RAM used by a VM (64-bit hosts only), and CPU hot-plugging for Linux (hot-add and hot-remove) and certain Windows guests (hot-add only).
“The latest version of VirtualBox allows you to create a Mac OS X guest host, providing the ability to virtualize different versions of Mac OS X,” a recent report by OS X Daily, which targets Mac geeks,
claims. “This is the first official support for Mac OS X running as a VM from VirtualBox, and is part of the latest beta.” According to the source in question, full support for this has been added only for Mac hardware (although there’s really no point to it), while Sun itself points out that support for Mac OS X VM’s is considered ‘experimental’ at this point.
Unofficially, however, the report claims that users can actually install Snow Leopard and run it in VirtualBox on any PC by using a number of hacks and installing OSx86. According to the post, users can achieve good results via a Windows XP, Vista, 7, or Linux host. Since hacking is required on the user’s end, in order to get Mac OS X up and running through VirtualBox 3.2.0 Beta 1 on a PC,
Softpedia does not encourage readers to use the software in this manner, even if just for testing purposes. Moreover,
Apple’s EULA strictly and specifically forbids the installation of Mac OS X on non-Apple-branded computers..
OS X Daily itself acknowledges that, “Running Mac OS X in a virtual machine is supposedly against the Mac OS X EULA,” but it claims it will be interesting to see whether VirtualBox will continue to add support for Mac OS X guests. If so, Apple may want to have a few words with the people at Oracle Corporation, who’ve acquired Sun Microsystems earlier this year.
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