Hello,
I'm on current Debian with almost no experience in VMs, and since I abandoned MacOSX long ago I used to consider virtualizing my old mac just wasn't an option.
(that would have been to retrieve old closed-source databases of various editors that now only allow pay-per-view web access, if and when they still exist, and which I won't rebuy)


But recently I have been aware of two things :
- there seems to be a clear, step-by-step manner to create an OSX VM (with more recent OS versions than mine, but OK)
- there seems to be yet another VM manager, 'Gnome Boxes' maybe only a wrapper around Qemu + various additions.


I have two questions :
- what is your opinion on Boxes (on Debian Xfce), vs the others, which are simpler to set?
- would you suggest another system than Qemu for virtualizing OSX?


While the 'foxlet' script above does download recent OSX versions, any manner to just recuperate my old system, on my old hardware, would do too...


Thank you!!
Hervé

Not sure this subforum is best for that question.

KVM has a few GUI front ends if that makes it any easier.

Qemu and KVM kind of get mixed together a bit. The example shows KVM and you'd need full hardware support I'd think for it.

Boxes is simple and has few options. Not sure I'd use it too much.

Virtualbox has more (or maybe more easy) options.

There have been some online pre-built images of OSX to just import/copy into virtualbox. I played with it for a few days a while back.

No idea on the legal part of this. Pretty sure the people who made the online image also had to make a few changes to get it to work outside of an Apple system.

1 members found this post helpful.

Thank you Jefro!
At this moment I did manage to create an OSX 'blank' machine the way described in my link above; I'm now in a more challenging attempt : to actually retrieve all of my previous OSX system, with installed (old) apps, documents etc., as the Apple 'migration assistant' does propose this option.
I expect this to be a looong action (long Time Machine backup creation, then turn the backup disk into an image that be compatible with KVM, restart the KVM with that disk image added, etc.)
But I'll come back here to report (if it works) and (probably) even earlier whenever I hit an issue ;-)
Thanks again!
H.

Computers never seem to be fast when you need them.

It should be easy to mount the image if you just want to get data off.
That is use linux to access the files.

I said I'd report. I indeed 'revived' my fossil mac, with all apps and files. I needed this rather than just disk access, because of course some significant databases are closed source, so I need to run the mac app to export the data.

Things will be going on slowly from now, but at least I see where I am going. Slowly, because I got no time yet to adjust everything needed for proper clipboard transfer from the VM, etc. (I'm really a newcomer in this VM area).
But I'll have more time in a couple of months.

Thank you all for the help!
H.