[CentOS] Running MacOSX as VM under CentOS 5.10?

Thu Nov 7 00:29:58 UTC 2013
Warren Young <warren at etr-usa.com>

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