I’ve been toying with the idea of running Windows XP on OSX 10.4 in my Powerbook G4. You know, just to run the occasional odd program that somehow has no Mac equivalent (like programs provided by the university :S).

Unfortunately, my choice is very limited as I’m using a PowerPC Mac and not an Intel Mac. Almost all virtualization software run on Intel Macs only. As explained by some people, Windows and OSX work the opposite way - just as reading English and Chinese. One reads from left to right and the other, right to left. That is the main reason it is so difficult to run Windows on PowerPC.

Options

Since Virtual PC has been reviewed as slow, I’ve decided to find another (free) way. I have considered the following solutions:

1. Use Wine - but I didn’t know how to download and install as it looks pretty tricky. Didn’t know what to do with tar balls.

2. An easier alternative called Darwine - but only available for Intel Macs (darn!)

3. Install Linux on OSX then use Wine - nuh uh. Involves partitioning my drive and installing in a new partition. The end result would probably be really slow anyway.

4. Use Q - A GUI version of QEMU, open source CPU emulator for OSX.

As I pretty much didn’t have any other choice, I went for option 4.

Result

It took me 24 hours to finish the XP installation and the result was less than functional. For some reason, it only managed to emulate a 33 Mhz processor although I have 867 Mhz. So it wasn’t a good idea but hey, at least I did it

Virtual XP on OSX

So, you might ask “Why did you go through all that then?” and I’ll say “Because I knew it would be challenging”. xD