Run Mac OS X on PC Hardware

This post is from our software engineer Hugo (pictured below).

You can now run Mac OS X in PC and thus gain immediately the benefits of costs and space saving at home or work. Just VMware software and a pre-installed Mac OS X is needed. Here is my story and the required steps.

When the time to start learning a new technology based on a different hardware platform came, I faced the necessity to migrate and leave the comfort of using a very familiar environment as Linux is. One solution to this matter was going to be software virtualization, so I began a research consisting in trying to boot a virtual machine with a pre-installed Mac OS X. Unfortunately, my Dell laptop and other Dell models wouldn’t work since the VMware software was responding with the following error message, “Mac OS X is not supported with software virtualization. To run Mac OS X you need a host on which VMware Workstation supports hardware virtualization.” (See the image below)

Many boot and even Setup-level options had been commented by (IT) people in forums and blog posts, but they wouldn’t work either in my attempts. However, the last chance was waiting for me. The brand new Dell Optiplex 380 resulted to have a full hardware virtualization support built-in, and I could confirm this by booting successfully the Mac OS X on it!

So now I’m working with both Linux (as my base/host system) and Mac OS X (as guest system) running on a same PC, with no need of a Mac machine (nor Mac devices).

To achieve this, the following steps should be enough (allowing you to run a pre-installed virtual machine with Mac OS X in a PC Dell Optiplex 380):

Steps:
1. Install and open VMware Workstation or VMware Player.
2. In the Home section, click on “Open a Virtual Machine”.
3. Choose the .vmx file (in my case, “Mac OS X Server 10.6 (experimental).vmx”) and accept.
4. In the section opened for the selected VM, click on “Edit virtual machine settings”. A window will appear.
5. In the Hardware tab, click on the “CD/DVD (IDE)” option.
6. At the right side, click on “Use ISO image” option, click on the “Browse” button, and select the .iso file (“darwin_snow.iso” file, which is in the “bootloader” directory, in my case).
7. Save the changes and click on “Play virtual machine”. The VM should start booting.

There are still more tests to do within the virtualized Mac OS X, but at least we have more than the basic functionality of this system running on our PC (see image below).

Avantica engineer Hugo, author of this post.