ArcaOS 5.1 on Apple Silicone

[Jean-Yves]

Hi,

I've been away from ArcaOS for a while, although I'd occasionally take a look here to see how things are giong. Anyway, I've been meaning to get back into it for a while as it always drags me back into its orbit when I've been away too long

I'm looking at buying a 5.1 license (upgrade from 5.0) and wondered whether anyone had got that working on the UTM in Intel emulation mode on an Apple Silicone Mac? UTM is effectively QEMU with a pretty front end plus a few extra bits.

My laptop is a MBP M3 if that has any bearing. A bit of a beast so the emulation should be zippy enough I think, assuming I can get it running.

If not I'll get it set up under VirtualBox on my Intel Linux laptop instead, so all is not lost.

Thanks

[Roderick Klein]

https://forums.macrumors.com/threads/oracle-virtual-box-windows-11-mac-arm-m-series.2417862/

[Jean-Yves]

Hi Roderick,

Thanks for the link - tbh I'm trying to avoid VMWare following the Broadcom buyout. I don't trust them to not ditch the free layer at the drop of a hat.

I'll probably just install on the Linux laptop.

[Sean Casey]

I also can't stand Broadcom.  I have 1.5 years remaining on my vSphere Essentials license, but have already moved to Proxmox because Broadcom now wants to charge me $9,000 USD annually for what was once a $350 product plus $75 annual maintenance.

I have also been licensing VMware Workstation Pro which I have been using with OS/2 (and SCO/Win/DOS).  OS/2 works very well on Workstation Pro with two SCSI tape autoloaders I have been using with BusLogic virtual SCSI adapters. 

I read yesterday that Broadcom has released Workstation Pro as freeware for non commercial use.  This is a big win as I have been paying $99/year maintenance on each of my licenses. 

I suspect there will be little to no future investment in Workstation Pro, but Broadcom only needs to maintain its kernel module source to allow continued use of the product into the future.

[Martin Iturbide]

I read yesterday that Broadcom has released Workstation Pro as freeware for non commercial use.

Thanks for sharing that. I found this post from may 13 that confirms that. I think it was a good move to try don't annoy the non-commercial/home users of it, and also maybe to try to get some space from VirtualBox.

Regards

[Martin Iturbide]

Hello Jean-Yves

I was checking the alternatives for a Mac with Apple Silicon to run ArcaOS. I don't know much about it since I don't have Macs.

If we go with the VirtualBox way to run ArcaOS as a guest, I found that there is an specific version of VirtualBox made for Apple Silicon. It is not on the main download page, but in the older releases pages:
- https://www.virtualbox.org/wiki/Download_Old_Builds_7_0
It is listed on the 7.0.8 release as "Deloper preview for macOS / Arm64 (M1/M2) hosts"

Will it work on the M3 Apple Silicon? I guess I would need your help Jean-Yves to confirm if it works and if you can run ArcaOS there. But maybe it is only a virtualizer and does not emulate Intel.

Regards

[Jean-Yves]

Sorry for late reply and thanks for looking into this.

I was aware of the native build for AS but I've been told to steer away from this as it's already no longer supported and from what I can tell speaking to a few people (on the webs, so pinch of salt, etc), there are no plans to resurrect it.  From memory VBox asks for escalated privileges for some of its processes - I'd rather not allow that for something that won't get security updates.

PS - I've not got around to buying 5.1 yet.  So it's not urgent.

[jailbird]

VMware Fusion and Parallels Desktop on Apple Silicone will ONLY run AArch64 (arm64) OSs, which obviously ArcaOS isn't one of.

Now once that arm64 OS is running, then that guest OS can run x86/x86-64 binaries using Rosetta 2 for speed ups, but the Guest OS has to support that. So either way, these aren't going to work for ArcaOS.

You might be better off using 86Box or UTM for this.

[Dave Yeo]

I doubt that 86box supports enough of the i386 to run OS/2 and for QEMU, they have finally fixed the bug that stopped OS/2 4.5+ running so as long as UTM has a new enough QEMU, it should work.

[Jean-Yves]

Hi thanks for that info and apologies for very late reply - I was hoping the fix would be incorporated into UTM, but that's still not done so for now I've just installed it in VBox on my Linux laptop that is Intel-based. Bought the 5.1 upgrade yesterday