[KLUG Advocacy] Novell 'opening' SuSe

[Adam Tauno Williams]

> > If VMware emulates Apple's weird little chipset you should be able
> > to
> > run OS/X in a VM.  I'd be suprised if VMware didn't port their
> > product
> > to iOS/X.

> If there were a way for Mac OS X inside VMware to talk to the
> Palladium (or whatever) DRM chip is soldered to the motherboard of a
> mactel, I don't think it would be too hard. Of course, eventually that
> DRM chip will get cracked, too

The chip that limits the Darwin kernel in OS/X on white-boxes isn't
"DRM" in the sense of Palladium or any of that stuff.  It is simply
something the kernel checks for and requires and if it doesn't find
disables portions of itself.  Somewhere there was a rather extensive
write-up about it (sorry, didn't keep the URL) but it looked rather
simple.

If the DRM gets cracked or not isn't the issue - it has to be legal to
do so before any commercial products like VMware will use it.

> I'm predicting (or at least hoping) that there will be a product like
> Wine (or WineX ('scuse me, "Cedega"), or Crossover Office) that won't
> require booting Windows to run windows apps on a mactel. 

Possibly, but I still think that will ultimately be bad for Apple.  It
reduces the pressure for a native port.  This is why the existence of
WINE doesn't help LINUX.

> And, of course, it should be theoretically possible to run Linux apps
> natively on the Mactel boxes, provided all the necessary dependencies
> are installed, as Mac OS X already sports linux binary compatibility
> (which, of course, it has from FreeBSD).

This already works well now.  The issue currently is really just
packaging,  which is actually harder than just cross-compiling.