Puppy on Apple - A Work in Progress

In order to run Puppy (or any other X86 based OS) on an Apple computer you need an emulator such as Virtual PC. The following examples are done on an 800MHz G4 Apple iBook running OS X 10.3 Panther and Virtual PC 6 with 640MB of RAM.

I find that by running an operating system in an emulator really brings out it's strong and weak points. An OS with a lot of overhead slows to a crawl in emulation.
The first thing to do is download the Puppy live-CD ISO disk image from the Puppy web page. A convenient place to put it is on your desktop. You do not need to burn the disk image to a CD.

Start up VPC and select "New.."

Check "Create a PC manually" and then click the right arrow.

Check "Install an operating system onto an empty PC" and then click the right arrow.

Choose "Windows 98" since this gives a FAT32 format. Click the right arrow to continue.

Adjust the memory setting to something other than "32MB". I gave it "256MB". This will give Puppy plenty of room. If your Mac only has 128MB or 256MB of RAM total than you shouldn't be using VPC. You can however choose a smaller setting as long as it is more than 32MB. Puppy will fail to boot in VPC if you only have 32MB of RAM set aside for it.

I suggest that you select the "No" option in "Undo Drives". Click the right arrow to continue.

At this point you name your "PC". I called mine "Puppy". Click the right arrow to continue.

Check your settings and click "Create".

Back in the main VPC window, select your Puppy PC and click "Start Up". At this point VPC will try to boot but will stop since it can not find an operating system.
At the bottom of the Puppy PC window click on the CD icon and select "Capture CD Image..." This will let you browse to your desktop and select the live-CD ISO image that you downloaded earlier.

Once you have selected the ISO image, go back to the main VPC window and shut down your Puppy PC. Make sure to select "Turn off PC" and not "Save PC's state".

Now restart your Puppy PC. It will boot and go through the Puppy set up.

A Few Notes

I chose to configure the mouse as a PS/2 since VPC emulates the trackpad as a PS/2 mouse. The scroll wheel feature works as well if you have the "two finger" drivers installed on your iBook or Powerbook. Selecting USB may work but I have not tried it. If you install Puppy onto a USB flash drive, VPC will not boot from it. You can however store all your settings and files on the flash drive as long as it is plugged in and being shared through VPC while Puppy boots. I do not use the "Save State" option when shutting down my Puppy PC. Instead i use the shutdown option from the Puppy start menu. I also had to change the VPC networking from "Shared Networking" to "Virtual Switch". I have a Kangaru brand 128MB USB 1 drive that works very well with Puppy. My USB 2.0 256MB Lexar "Jumpdrive" will not work with Puppy though in VPC. As of Puppy 1.0.2rc the ethernet connection in VPC6 does not get recognized.

Categories