First Look: Mac-on-Linux
Note: This article first appeared over at Maximum Linux. The original article can be found here.
By:imhotep.
MOL (Mac-on-Linux) is an open source project that lets Linux PPC users run the Mac OS on Linux. The project has been around in some form since 1997 and although I had heard of it before I really never even gave it much thought until I installed Yellow Dog Linux on my PowerBook Ti.
Now keep in mind that I didn't really expect too much, well I guess that I mostly expected it to be a royal pain in the ass to install and according to Yellow Dog, "Setting up Mac-on-Linux (MOL) is an advanced operation and not recommended for those new to Linux." I have to disagree, MOL was super easy to install and only took only took a few minutes of my time.
Features:
- Supports MacOS 7.5.2 to 9.2.1
- Full screen video
- MMU accelerated X video
- Audio support
- Block device support (Ide, Scsi, Zip, Jaz)
- ADB & USB support for mouse and keyboard
- Ethernet (multiple interfaces supported)
- Runs natively - good speed!
- Very compatible
- Idle sleep (8.6 or later)
- Session save and restore (temporary unavailable)
- AltiVec? support
- Multi-session support
Installation:
System: PowerBook G4 with Yellow Dog 2.0 with 2.4.4 Kernel
MOL: mol-0.9.60-4, mol-kmods-0.9.60-4
First of all you need to have a PPC machine to install MOL. It's not all that clear to me whether or not it has to be a PPC Mac, but according to the MOL FAQ...
"Q: Does it run on Intel hardware?"
"A: No, MOL can only on Power PC hardware since no emulation is performed."
So I assume MOL will run on any PPC hardware, but for this article I will only be discussing how to install MOL on Macintosh hardware.
Now go grab the latest source tarball or RPM from http://www.maconlinux.org/download.html and unpack it.
tar --unlink -xzvpf mol-9.xx.tgz
Time to compile (Make sure you have your kernels source installed)
cd mol-9.xx
make clean
make
make install
If all went well we can test whether or not MOL installed properly. As "root" run this command:
/usr/bin/startmol --loadonly
This should load the kernel modules for MOL. It will look something like this:
[root@localhost markw]# startmol --loadonly
Loading Mac-on-Linux kernel module:
/usr/lib/mol/modules/0.9.60/2.4.4-1a/mol.o
Loading SheepNet ethernet kernel module:
[root@localhost markw]#
If all is well run "/usr/bin/molvconf" this will configure you monitor. When finished edit the "/etc/molrc" file, you want to change the location of your Mac OS partition. If you don't do this MOL will try to mount all partitions including your boot partition. (Mounting the boot partition will damage it)
blkdev: /dev/hda12 -rw
#blkdev: /dev/hdb -ro
OK, now you're ready to run MOL, type "startmol" at the command line. MOL should start booting, in my case Mac OS 9.1.
First Impressions:
I also didn't expect many of my Mac OS 9 applications to work well within MOL, or to work at all for that matter, but they did, they all did, even PhotoShop.
On my machine (PB G4 128MB RAM) it took 56 seconds for MOL to boot Mac OS 9.1 with all extensions turned on. Which isn't brazenly fast, but if I remember correctly loading the same MacOS 9.1 partition in Classic under Mac OS X took well over a minute. (I no longer have OS X installed to verify this, since I had to blow it out in order to install Linux. If anyone has a similar hardware setup and verify Classic load times please post a comment below)
Application load times are pretty good, EI 5 loaded in 6 seconds, bbedit loaded in under 2 seconds. Microsoft Entourage loaded in 18 seconds and once it did load it consumed 40 - 50% of CPU time. Not sure what the deal is with that.
I was able to view QuickTime movies at normal size without them getting "jumpy", doubling the size you really see just how slow screen refreshes actually are. So don't expect to be able to play 3D Mac games within MOL.
The only thing that I wasn't able to get working was sound, most likely do to the fact that sound is broken in the 2.4.4PPC kernel. It would have been cool to be able to use iTunes but still something I can live without.
For PPC Linux users who still need to use a handful of Macintosh applications MOL is an excellent alternative.
