So I was wondering if there's any way we can put 10.4 on Fusion or Parallels?

I ask because a staff member got a new mac, and the software they use won't work on 10.5 just yet.. Nothing majorly urgent, but would be interesting to see if it's technically possible?

It's possible, but not easy. And considered Hackintosh related (and of course against your license for OSX itself).

It's illegal? even if we have legit copies? okay.. :\



I guess the client will just have to wait till the software comes out for 10.5.. cheers

It's also very slow... as it's a hack to get it to work..

purana's right ... possible, but slow, it's a hack, and it violates the SLA.

mechy, if you can locate the installer disk for a new-as-possible pre-10.5 Intel Mac (preferably 10.4.9), and the owner is prepared to start over and repartition the hard drive (or invest in an external Firewire drive, which they can use with Time Machine later), it should be able to install 10.4.9 onto it. There's actually no reason why all of today's brand-new Macs can't run 10.4.9, as there's been little or no hardware changes since 10.5 was released.

This gives the user 10.4, it's a full install and not a hack, and as the user is only running one licenced instance of Mac OS X, it also satisfies the SLA

Oh, one other thing: if the OSX Installer DVD you find isn't for exactly the same (albeit slightly older) model, it might not let you re-install iLife and the other associated freebies, so do a custom install and just install the OS itself -- once you're booted into 10.4, you can find the bundled software .pkg on the original 10.5 install discs, and run that to add iLife etc (the bundle installer just checks the machine's gestalt ID, not which OS it should be with).


B.

We considered dumping tiger onto an 8gb usb drive and just put the software on that so they can use it whenever they're free.. but they're going to contact the software developers and enquire on the progress. Their site is talking about leopard compatibility, or lack thereof...

Not a good idea. sure you can install to a suitable USB thumbdrive, but it will kill the drive very quickly. See my other rantings elsehwere as to why running MacOS X out of a flash drive is a Very Silly Thing To Do.


Brains

So, it's not possible to run 10.4.10 straight off the restore discs that came with my macbook into a VM?

Exactly, not possible. Give it a try and you will see it don't work by default.

I direct you to have a read of "Dumb then, smart now"...in particular the line "If you overwrite the entire contents of a 100,000-cycle device only every hour.....it'll last for more than eleven years!"

Spreading old FUD about the limited write cycles of flash devices helps no-one. Yes, once upon a time it was a bad idea, but no so much now. you could at least get a year or two out of an 8gb flash drive and even if it did die after that time you would either have overcome the reason to run 10.4 or you could just buy another drive since they are cheap enough even now.

edit: I'll also add that both vmware and parallels are in talks with apple to make OS X run in a VM but only on an Apple computer. The people pushing for this are developers wanting to run sandboxed environments. With the rise in popularity of OS X and the weight of opinion from developers I'd be supprised if this doesn't happen.