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Is there a way to run Mac OS X (Leopard or Tiger) in Windows on a virtual machine? I have 2 GB of RAM and a 2 GHz processor. My processor is an 32-bit AMD, but I don't think this will matter because the VM will probably emulate a 32-bit Intel type processor.

Thanks for any help.

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Is there a way to run Mac OS X (Leopard or Tiger) in Windows on a virtual machine?

Technology-wise, yes, it's perfectly possible to virtualize Mac OS X on another x86 operating system. Legally, no. You are only allowed to virtualize Mac OS X Server, and only on Apple-labeled machines.

Similar question over at StackOverflow

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That's the only thing I hate about apple. They never let you use any of there software without getting some money from you first. – Lucas McCoy May 3 '09 at 19:46
@Lucas Aardvark: Well technically, doesn't that hold true for all paid software? – Kyle Cronin May 3 '09 at 19:59
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Yeah, how dare they try to make money from the things they paid to develop! – Paul Tomblin May 3 '09 at 20:26
I guess you can tell that I use Linux. – Lucas McCoy May 3 '09 at 20:46
@Lucas Aardvark: I don't care that you use Linux, but I don't think it's fair to hate Apple for charging for their products. – Kyle Cronin May 3 '09 at 21:00
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I've seen people who installed Solaris or other OS as their main OS on Apple hardware, then they can run Leopard in a VirtualBox or VMWare view.

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It cannot be done on your processor. Even if you got it to work, it would be slow and buggy at best. There is no good VM solution for running OS X on a non-OS X system at this time.

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There is no reason to believe it would be significantly slower than a native installation. – Sören Kuklau May 3 '09 at 20:17
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I've seen it in action on a 2.4GHz Core2 Duo with 8GB RAM. The problem is that the system runs like everything has bad drivers. The network card works but says it's not connected. Startup takes 15 minutes. Redrawing is slow as the VMWare video card is not a supported device is OSX. With all the right drivers, it would run as fast as a native installation, but without them, it is almost unusable. – Joseph May 3 '09 at 20:32
Ditto Joseph's comment. In VMWare, slow. The problem, I guess, is lack of proper driver support by VMWare. – John McC May 3 '09 at 22:37

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