Installing Virtual Mac OS X with VMWare

step_1_vmware.png As I wrote before, testing web applications should be handled the right way, considering all kinds of platform varieties. Selenium Grid works on different OS, but not always do you have a separate machine for every OS. Thats where virtualization software comes in - Virtual PC, Parallels and in particular, VMware Workstation 7 (btw. some company got a bonus of 9 billion when it aquired VMWare).

Tenth's Mac OS has been released since 2000 just like Android with code names for microversions, except that instead of sweet candies it used cat familiae - cheetah, puma, jaguar, panther, leopard and now tiger is expected by the summer. Installing it on Intel CPU is done with modified boot-loader (because it uses some sort of digital verification)

  • OS distribution disc (in iso, you can convert dmg to it using PowerISO)
  • 17-mb darwin_snow.iso loader
  • VMware Workstation 7

So you need to create a virtual machine..

step_2_vmware.png step_3_vmware.png step_4_vmware.png

In settings enable USB support, and increase memory from 256 mb. Now you need to edit generated vmx-file in order to pass "Invalid front-side bus frequency 6600000 Hz" error during load — change system name from guestOS to "darwin10" (or darwin, darwin-64). Insert loader in virtual CD and run.

Leopard-2011-04-05-23-12-25.png Leopard-2011-04-05-23-18-08.png Leopard-2011-04-05-23-26-25.png

Loader is suggesting inserting DVD, since HDD is empty, everything is good. So we press CD icon below, change disc to installation DVD, confirm with C and right away F8 - now we can enter in verbose mode by entering "-v" to see load progress.

After GUI is loaded, we need to format virtual HDD; OS will take up to 10 GB of space.

Leopard-2011-04-05-22-38-06.png Leopard-2011-04-05-23-34-24.png Leopard-2011-04-05-23-35-00.png

Now if you need to increase screen size from 1024x768 to something bigger, open in terminal or in TextEdit file at /Library/Preferences/SystemConfiguration/com.apple.Boot.plist and change is as admin by adding

<key>Graphics Mode</key>
<string>1280x1024x32</string>

If you happen to have missing bridged internet connection, edit your vmx file and add

ethernet0.virtualDev = "e1000"

To enable sound drivers, use file below

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