Today I installed Panther on my laptop using PearPC 0.2.0. I’ve got quite an army of aging Mac hardware, but nothing that I can coax OSX on to. Over the years I’ve installed the OSX Beta and several versions of OSX on G3/G4 hardware, but never my own. I’ve always been in love with it, but only today have I actually been able to poke around and fall for it completely.
Panther is a wonderful thing. OSX is a wonderful thing. The fact that I can run both of those on my Athlon XP 2500+ laptop using an open source emulation program is absolutely wonderful. Some parts are faster than others, and it’s nowhere near usable for everyday tasks, but I’m running OSX on my AMD laptop. There is some Zen OS-fu to that.
I’ve been ambiently looking for some older but usable G3/G4 capable hardware so that I can run OSX on a dedicated native machine. My new love affair means that I really have to find some hardware so that OSX can become part of my daily life.
To the PearPC dev heads: you are amazing. I am thorougly impessed and in awe at the ablility to run a modern OS in emulation at a slow yet tolerable speed. It’s only going to get better from here. Networking didn’t work under Windows in the previous release, but I can assure you that I’ve been giving Safari a workout under 0.2.0.
Rock. On.