Three questions about speeding up macports builds

[Ken Cunningham]

> Ken what VM do you use?)
> I found VirtualBox a bit iffy. I made a proper VM (create the iso from install app etc) but often the mouse wont move and the VM is sluggish (4G ram 4 core)
> 
> Parallels are anal about the licence, if that verion is not licensed for a VM then they won’t.

VirtualBox is like you say. 10.6 works pretty well, as there are VBAdditions for it. I forget about 10.5 right now. VBox 10.4 Intel Tiger is the only game in town for that VM, and it works, with some nice enhancements by a clever fellow on Github named ranma42 <https://github.com/ranma42/TigerOnVBox/>.

To use that 10.4 VM, I most often turn on screen sharing and access it from another computer using screen sharing, as for whatever reason, that works very well for me. Better than using it on the system the VM is running on.

For 10.5 - 10.14, I'm using Parallels. I bought Parallels at version 1.0 and have used it ever since. I know other VM systems work too. You need to use the MacOSX Server versions for 10.5 and 10.6 -- I'm lucky there as I've been a registered Apple Developer since the 1990s, so I have every CD and DVD Apple ever produced going back to the ancient days of MacOS 6.0.8, and older.

For 10.4 and 10.5 PPC emulation, qemu-ppc from MacPorts actually does work not totally horribly. However, it can only use one processor, so until they figure out how to enable another PPC processor, I hardly ever use it -- I have the 10 various PPC machines nearby that I use instead.

K