Since the Mac Mini, I've been seriously eyeing Mac OSX and the possibility of a Mac as a secondary machine. I would like to try OSX before plunking down $500 as I'm on a college shoestring budget.
I've given serious thought to using Apple's academic discount to get OSX Panther for $69 and playing with it extensively in PearPC. My question boils down to performance.
I'm currently running a Dell laptop with a 3.4ghz Pentium 4 and a gig of RAM. Does anyone know if OSX will be usable under PearPC (using a P4 optimised JITC build) with this configuration? My definition of "usable" is launching, say, a web browser, and waiting less than thirty seconds for the application to launch, and having feedback to an action (text appearning when I type, menu starting to appear after I click, etc) occur less than 2 seconds after said action.
If these requirements are reasonable on this sort of system, I may very well plunk down $69 for OSX panther to ensure that Mac OSX is for me before I buy a shiny new box just because it looks pretty. (I'm considering that too, sadly.)
-Jim
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With this definition of "usable" I'd say it'll be.
I have it running on a 3Ghz P4 laptop with 1GB RAM, give PPC 768 and can do simple things like browse with Safari and read mail, even open NeoOffice/J.
A slightly less enjoyable experience is installing software and trying to do smth. else at the same time ... or running the laptop on battery power (which slows down my CPU).
I'm running PearPC on Linux with an optimized JITC build and nicing the process. This gives me an emulated machine that thinks it has a 1.19 Ghz G3.
Karl.
If you would like to refer to this comment somewhere else in this project, copy and paste the following link:
Since the Mac Mini, I've been seriously eyeing Mac OSX and the possibility of a Mac as a secondary machine. I would like to try OSX before plunking down $500 as I'm on a college shoestring budget.
I've given serious thought to using Apple's academic discount to get OSX Panther for $69 and playing with it extensively in PearPC. My question boils down to performance.
I'm currently running a Dell laptop with a 3.4ghz Pentium 4 and a gig of RAM. Does anyone know if OSX will be usable under PearPC (using a P4 optimised JITC build) with this configuration? My definition of "usable" is launching, say, a web browser, and waiting less than thirty seconds for the application to launch, and having feedback to an action (text appearning when I type, menu starting to appear after I click, etc) occur less than 2 seconds after said action.
If these requirements are reasonable on this sort of system, I may very well plunk down $69 for OSX panther to ensure that Mac OSX is for me before I buy a shiny new box just because it looks pretty. (I'm considering that too, sadly.)
-Jim
Definitely, yes. Especially if you use a 0.4pre/0.4pre-altivec build.
trygvebw
With this definition of "usable" I'd say it'll be.
I have it running on a 3Ghz P4 laptop with 1GB RAM, give PPC 768 and can do simple things like browse with Safari and read mail, even open NeoOffice/J.
A slightly less enjoyable experience is installing software and trying to do smth. else at the same time ... or running the laptop on battery power (which slows down my CPU).
I'm running PearPC on Linux with an optimized JITC build and nicing the process. This gives me an emulated machine that thinks it has a 1.19 Ghz G3.
Karl.