[R-SIG-Mac] Building binary packages for distribution

[Marc Schwartz]

On Apr 13, 2012, at 12:48 PM, Marc Schwartz wrote:

> Hi,
> 
> I will readily admit that I am naive in terms of some of the subtleties, but would running Leopard under Lion in a VM be a suitable possibility?
> 
> It would seem that with Lion, some of the licensing issues relative to running non-server versions of the older OSX distributions under a VM have changed, at least that it what is intimated by an article here for VMWare Fusion:
> 
>  http://www.macworld.com/article/1163755/vmware_fusion_update_lets_users_virtualize_leopard_snow_leopard.html
> 
> Not sure if that is helpful, but recalled seeing some discussions on this over the past few months or so.


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Just as a follow up and in the course of an offlist exchange with Prof. Ripley, I located some additional information on the issue of non-server versions of OSX running as guest OS's under Lion.

The Release Notes for VMWare's Fusion, version 4.1.1, include a "Resolved Issues" list (http://www.vmware.com/support/fusion4/doc/releasenotes_fusion_411.html#resolvedissues), which notes:

  Fusion 4.1.1 includes the Mac OS X Server check omitted from VMware Fusion 4.1.0.

So it would seem that the prior behavior described in the MacWorld article was either an error on the part of VMWare and/or Apple's corporate counsel made some phone calls.

I also posted a comment to the MacWorld article with the above information for the benefit of others who may, as I did, read the article and get the wrong impression of the current state of affairs.

So with that, based upon other research, each of the VM providers, VMWare, Parallels and VirtualBox, are limited to using the server versions of Leopard and Snow Leopard under Lion as a host.

Regards,

Marc