Is it even remotely possible to run MacOSX (or Darwin) as VM under CentOS 5.10 / xen? Or am I better off not even trying and just getting a MacMini or MacBook to just jack into my LAN? I just need a 'build box' and possibly something to do light testing (eg does the program run? Does the GUI come up?). I don't really have the *physical* room for an iMac, unless the screen is tiny.
I can cross-build for MS-Windows using mgwin32 and I have VMs for CentOS 6, Fedora, Ubuntu, Debian, etc. Only MacOSX is missing from the 'mix'.
It is more likely to work on a later Kernel and then and more likely with KVM. KVM shipped with 5.x and 6.x Enterprise linux is now old and fusty. A bit like your Unix beard :)
I had all kinds of horrible problems running FreeBSD on these hypervisors. Try Fedora 19. This is sparkly and fresh.
Ta,
Andrew
On 6 November 2013 19:21, Robert Heller heller@deepsoft.com wrote:
Is it even remotely possible to run MacOSX (or Darwin) as VM under CentOS 5.10 / xen? Or am I better off not even trying and just getting a MacMini or MacBook to just jack into my LAN? I just need a 'build box' and possibly something to do light testing (eg does the program run? Does the GUI come up?). I don't really have the *physical* room for an iMac, unless the screen is tiny.
I can cross-build for MS-Windows using mgwin32 and I have VMs for CentOS 6, Fedora, Ubuntu, Debian, etc. Only MacOSX is missing from the 'mix'.
-- Robert Heller -- 978-544-6933 / heller@deepsoft.com Deepwoods Software -- http://www.deepsoft.com/ () ascii ribbon campaign -- against html e-mail /\ www.asciiribbon.org -- against proprietary attachments
CentOS mailing list CentOS@centos.org http://lists.centos.org/mailman/listinfo/centos
Gah! Top posting...
On Wed, Nov 6, 2013 at 2:26 PM, Andrew Holway andrew.holway@gmail.comwrote:
On 6 November 2013 19:21, Robert Heller heller@deepsoft.com wrote:
Is it even remotely possible to run MacOSX (or Darwin) as VM under CentOS
5.10
/ xen? Or am I better off not even trying and just getting a MacMini or
It might actually be possible to run OSX as a Xen VM (DomU). [2] [3] But I'd suspect it requires hardware virt support (not paravirt).
MacBook to just jack into my LAN? I just need a 'build box' and possibly something to do light testing (eg does the program run? Does the GUI come up?). I don't really have the *physical* room for an iMac, unless the
screen
is tiny.
It is more likely to work on a later Kernel and then and more likely
with KVM. KVM shipped with 5.x and 6.x Enterprise linux is now old and fusty. A bit like your Unix beard :)
I had all kinds of horrible problems running FreeBSD on these hypervisors. Try Fedora 19. This is sparkly and fresh.
I considered attempting an OSX install for testing a while back, but ended up moving on to other projects.
I recall that KVM had to emulate certain hardware -- requiring a patched version of the KVM hypervisor.
I can't speak for the accuracy or completeness of the following information, but here it is. [0] [1]
[0] http://www.contrib.andrew.cmu.edu/~somlo/OSXKVM/ [1] http://d4wiki.goddamm.it/index.php?title=Howto:_Mac_OSX_on_KVM [2] http://www.bisente.com/blog/2011/03/15/macos-xen-snow-leopard-as-guest-on-a-... [3] http://www.gossamer-threads.com/lists/xen/users/295693
On Wed, Nov 6, 2013 at 1:21 PM, Robert Heller heller@deepsoft.com wrote:
Is it even remotely possible to run MacOSX (or Darwin) as VM under CentOS 5.10 / xen? Or am I better off not even trying and just getting a MacMini or MacBook to just jack into my LAN? I just need a 'build box' and possibly something to do light testing (eg does the program run? Does the GUI come up?). I don't really have the *physical* room for an iMac, unless the screen is tiny.
I can cross-build for MS-Windows using mgwin32 and I have VMs for CentOS 6, Fedora, Ubuntu, Debian, etc. Only MacOSX is missing from the 'mix'.
If someone else is paying, get an imac for your own desktop and run anything else you need under virtualbox or hook to your work Centos via NX or X2go. Or use a mac mini. OSX likes to do hardware checks to make sure it is on Apple hardware. I think virtualbox has some hooks to make a virtual OSX run under real OSX by passing the hardware check through to the hardware, but otherwise you will need some kind of hack to bypass the check that is likely to break with updates. I think those hacks exist but I've never been patient enough to get anything to work.
And if you aren't using it already, you probably want Jenkins to run all these builds for you.
On 11/6/2013 12:21, Robert Heller wrote:
Is it even remotely possible to run MacOSX (or Darwin) as VM under CentOS 5.10 / xen?
Darwin isn't going to do you any good, since you need to test GUIs. Darwin is OS X minus everything Apple proprietary, including Cocoa, Finder, Dock...
Or am I better off not even trying and just getting a MacMini or MacBook to just jack into my LAN?
Yes. :)
The OS X license doesn't allow installing it on non-Apple hardware, even inside a VM. This means that you *can* install OS X in a VM on a Mac, so if you need several Mac instances, you don't necessarily need several physical Macs.
I don't really have the *physical* room for an iMac, unless the screen is tiny.
OS X comes with VNC, configured and ready to go. You just have to check one box, in the Sharing settings pane, I believe. With a Mac Mini on WiFi, you can put it anywhere in WiFi range with a power plug. There are mounting brackets available for them, too. So, you could screw it to the wall of a utility closet, if you wanted.
Being a real Unix[*] it also has ssh, and everything else you'd want for remote administration. SSH access is also off by default, but like VNC, just a checkbox away from being enabled. I believe they call it Remote Access or some such, also in the Sharing pane.
I can cross-build for MS-Windows using mgwin32
OS X makes a fine VM host, by the way. There are three major VM systems for it, VMware Fusion, Parallels Desktop, and VirtualBox. All three run Windows nicely.
By the way, it's MinGW, not mgwin. Minimal GNU for Windows. "Minimal" here refers to the fact that it was created as an alternative to Cygwin, which is much more heavyweight, but also a lot more capable.
There is a complete Cygwin cross-compilation toolchain for Fedora:
https://sourceforge.net/projects/fedora-cygwin/
It may be possible to port it to CentOS. Since there are MinGW cross-compilers in Cygwin, you could probably build for Windows through that.
It's a lot less up front work to build on Windows, though.
[*] http://unix.stackexchange.com/questions/1489/is-mac-os-x-unix
On 11/6/2013 17:29, Warren Young wrote:
I don't really have the *physical* room for an iMac, unless the screen is tiny.
OS X comes with VNC, configured and ready to go.
Although OS X does make a reasonable server, it's even better as a client OS. Have you considered flipping this problem around, replacing your current desktop machine and using it to access everything *else* remotely? I wrote an article outlining the gotchas:
http://unix.stackexchange.com/questions/723/726#726
If your CentOS boxes need the full power of dedicated hardware, OS X makes a fine remote terminal for them. In the previous message, I mentioned that OS X has built-in SSH and VNC servers, but it also has built-in clients.
The built-in SSH client is OpenSSH from the Terminal. I find OS X's Terminal much more functional and usable than Gnome Terminal on CentOS. For an even better user experience, I recommend SecureCRT, a commercial GUI SSH client for Windows, OS X, and Linux. I *live* in SecureCRT 5 days a week. It is rock solid, and much more capable than Terminal + OpenSSH.
OS X's includes an VNC client. You can run it directly, but it's quicker to just say Cmd-G from Finder, then enter vnc://my.box.address in the box that pops up. You can save these URLs for later use, so you don't have to keep retying them. There are several more capable VNC clients, including Apple's own ARD: https://www.apple.com/remotedesktop/
If you can put your CentOS boxes in VMs, OS X is probably the least troublesome VM host I've ever used. OS X is great GUI platform with strong usability norms, but is also a real Unix underneath so VM systems can do everything they need in order to be transparent hosts. Linux fails the first criterion, and Windows fails the second.
A particularly nice feature of OS X is the full-screen app mode, which lets you put your VMs on dedicated virtual screens, kind of like virtual desktops feature of some X window managers, except that they are not hosting desktops, but instead app windows that take over the screen completely. Then you can Ctrl-Arrow around to switch OSes, with the keyboard and mouse moving between them seamlessly.
I almost never physically touch a CentOS box, even though I use them pretty much every day. Between VNC and SSH, I don't need to.
Also consider that a Macbook Pro is plenty powerful enough to run VMs at reasonable speed. In clamshell mode, an MBP is kind of like a mini:
http://support.apple.com/kb/ht3131
A mini is far more compact, though, and cheaper.
On 2013-11-07, Warren Young warren@etr-usa.com wrote:
The built-in SSH client is OpenSSH from the Terminal. I find OS X's Terminal much more functional and usable than Gnome Terminal on CentOS. For an even better user experience, I recommend SecureCRT, a commercial GUI SSH client for Windows, OS X, and Linux. I *live* in SecureCRT 5 days a week. It is rock solid, and much more capable than Terminal + OpenSSH.
If you hate Terminal, but are too cheap to spring for SecureCRT, you can try iTerm 2. It has support for profiles, and probably a bunch of other stuff Terminal doesn't that I can't think of at the moment.
I've used OS X as a host for a CentOS VM, but it's usually for a fairly limited task (e.g., I need to access an Avocent KVM remotely, but perhaps all of my local servers are down, and these devices for some reason support linux but not OS X). I spend much more of my time accessing my CentOS machines over XQuartz or NX.
--keith
-
Andrew Holway -
Keith Keller -
Les Mikesell -
Robert Heller -
SilverTip257 -
Warren Young