BeOS 5 on a MacBook Pro By MichaelCrawford in MichaelCrawford's Diary Tue Jun 06, 2006 at 08:42:26 PM EST Tags: BeOS, QEMU, Q, Ogg Frog, ZooLib, cross-platform, emulator, partition, sfdisk (all tags)
	One would think that one could install BeOS on a modern Macintosh by using the QEMU PC emulator, but everyone who tries to boot QEMU from the BeOS installation CD is stymied by the message "Please place the BeOS CD in the CD-ROM drive". I guess the BeOS boot loader tries to access the drive in a way QEMU doesn't emulate, that hasn't been needed by the other operating systems that QEMU does support. I really badly needed to install BeOS 5 on my MacBook Pro to support Ogg Frog's development, so I figured out a workaround. I want Ogg Frog to support all the operating systems supported by the ZooLib cross-platform application framework. Besides BeOS, there is Mac OS X, Windows, Linux, and PowerPC and 680x0 Classic MacOS. It would drive me bananas if I had to use real computers to test all those different platforms. My solution was to install the BeOS on a real PC, then to use the dd command to copy its partition to a disk image file. I used Linux' sfdisk to give the disk image a partition table that precisely reproduces the original partition's size, then I transferred the image to my MacBook Pro and installed it under QEMU. There are some gotchas, so the whole procedure is pretty complex. I describe it in detail with a working example in my new article: Single-Machine Cross-Platform Development Through CPU Emulation. Inside: You can run Classic on Intel Macs!

I knew you'd say "-1, Buy an Ad", so I did. Even if QEMU's developers were to fix the BeOS' problem with the emulated CD-ROM drive, my procedure would be useful for other purposes with most operating systems. For example, one could safely test proposed configuration changes before committing them to a real system, or one could debug arcane problems in a real installation by copying it to an image then running it in QEMU under a debugger. While it's tedious to perform manually, my method could easily be automated and made very quick and easy to use. A simple Perl or Python script would work under Linux, while a C program could be used from any operating system. So far I just discuss the BeOS under QEMU, but as I continue work on my article I'll talk about other operating systems and other emulators, for example how SheepShaver and Basilisk II can provide PowerPC and 680x0 Classic MacOS environments, which Apple doesn't support on Intel Mac OS X. I only give QEMU configuration instructions for the Q front-end to QEMU on Mac OS X, but anyone who's ever used QEMU will know what to do once they've been able to create a BeOS disk image. My article has the Creative Commons Attribution-Sharealike 2.5 license. On a more personal note, Ogg Frog represents my first BeOS development since I was unsubscribed from the bedevtalk mailing list after posting a particularly pithy flame back in 2000. While I resented Be's senseless business management and its "change in focus" after all my hard work to support the BeOS, I never lost my love of the platform, my admiration for the quality of work evidenced by Be's engineers, or the camaraderie of the tight-knit BeOS developer community. Thus when I decided that Ogg Frog would be Free (as in Freedom) Software, I knew from the start that I'd be supporting the BeOS. And with Haiku getting closer to release, I'd do my part in supporting it as well. Because ZooLib uses some assembly code to improve performance, its BeOS port only supports Intel. As part of my work on Ogg Frog, I'll also be adding support for BeOS PowerPC to ZooLib. Ever Faithful, Michael David Crawford PS. Yeah, I know my domain expired. I just renewed it, but the DNS isn't available yet.

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QEMU PC emulator Ogg Frog's ZooLib cross-platform application framework Single-Mac hine Cross-Platform Development Through CPU Emulation. I did SheepShave r Basilisk II Q front-end to QEMU Creative Commons Attribution-Sharealike 2.5 license. Haiku Michael David Crawford MichaelCrawford's Diary