RyanBlog:entry:Oct 02, 2004

Technically, I *am* root for the home team. Weird, huh?
(I need a new pun here, huh...)

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October 02, 2004

Virtual PC 7 on my G5 runs netbsd!

I'd not seen *any* mention of it in any of the press, so I'd kind of figured that since Microsoft had purchased the Virtual PC product line from Connectix, that it would become a "Windows only" emulator...

I was therefore surprised to see an option for "Linux" and for "Other" when I was creating new virtual disks while installing it (I ordered it from Mac Connection on Friday afternoon, and it was sitting on my porch in a DHL box when I finally woke up Saturday morning around 11...)

XP is pretty responsive (much moreso than other versions I've used in the past, but admittedly, this dual 2.0ghz G5 is a LOT more ballsy than any other Mac I've ever owned, but I've not been able to run Virtual PC (it didn't support the G5) until now...

...anyway, after seeing "Linux" as an option, I figured it was at least *possible* to run other operating X86 systems on it... I started up NetBSD 1.6.2 from a CD iso image I had, and bang-zoom, I've got NetBSD running.

Networking was a little tricky... in "virtual switch" mode, it keeps trying to send packets that are 22 bytes longer than the MTU, regardless of what I set the MTU to with ifconfig (at 1400, I got kernel messages that it was dropping ethernet frames of 1422, at 1500, it was dropping 1522... I couldn't see a ready way to drop the MTU on my Linksys, and lowering the MTU on the OS X side didn't help either. Switching over to "shared networking" fixed this issue, and that's as far as I've gotten (baseball came on the TV...)

Just now, I tried to install Solaris 10 for X86 beta on another virtual PC... That's never been happy by default, because the installer detected a 486 cpu and bailed, but the trick that got Solaris 9 working to some extent (documented here) sort of worked again... you used to have to patch the Solaris install ISO images to change "GenuineIntel" to "ConnectixCPU"... with the new Microsoft version, now the virtual PC reports it's cpu-type to be "Virtual CPU " (note, to keep the same number of characters, that's a space before and after the "CPU")...

Now Solaris 10 installers boot beyond the CPU check... my first try with a graphical install didn't go so well. A text-only install got a lot further but then hiccupped while I was watching more baseball (giants CHOKE...), and then I figured I'd blog this before going much further. I've got a meeting with Sun on Monday :) Maybe I'll ask them for pointers... it seems like half the Sun Engineers I meet these days have a Powerbook in his/her bag.


| Comments (4) - Posted by ryan at 09:24 PM