Pear PC - Getting Ready
Filed By: Robert Moir
Pear PC - Getting Ready
Before you start -
A thorny problem
Before we go any further, I'm going to mention one thing you need which I cannot link to, and that is the OS X install media, converted into .iso files so PearPC can read them directly off your PC hard drive. If you've got a Mac then you can use a program such as Alcohol 120% to create .iso images of your install disks quite easily.
If you don't have a Mac then I don't know what to suggest because there is no legal way to provide you with the OS X install media, other than going to the Apple store and buying a copy of course. I'm sure if you poke around for a bit, a torrent of ideas will turn up, possibly on ebay or if you look around at what your peers might suggest. I'm sorry, but I do not condone software piracy and therefore cannot give you copies of my install media or allow people to swap links to them on this website.
If you can't get OS X at all then you can still test the concept of running the Pear PC emulator by using either Darwin or one of the multitude of Linux distros that ship for the Power PC platform used by Apple.
Downloads
Before you can install Pear PC there are several things you will need to download, which I'm going to helpfully list below. None of them are too big so this shouldn't be a big problem.
Lets start with the real basics - A copy of PearPC itself, which is an open source project available from SourceForge. The download page lists several options, and you are looking for the win32-sdl-jitc version of PearPC, and be sure to grab the most recent version (3.1 at the time of writing).
Next up, to connect your PearPC virtual machine to your network you'll need to install the TAP-32 virtual network adapter, which is available as part of the Open Source OpenVPN project. You'll obviously want the Windows version which hides out over here.
Of course, to install an OS you need a disk to install it onto, so I've included a downloadable image of a Virtual Disk image that will work with Pear PC on this site. This image is very heavily compressed (4k download which opens to a 6Gb file!) and requires a decent archiving program such as RARLabs' WinRAR to decompress it.
Not a requirement as such, but I strongly suggest using one of the many automated PearPC configuration file generators / managers that are out there in order to make configuring PearPC much easier. I quite like the Pear PC Control Panel which is downloadable here. The rest of this article assumes that you downloaded this tool.
Other requirements
A PC, ideally a fast one with a fast hard disk. My current Pear PC computer is a Pentium 4 @ 3.8Ghz, 1Gb of ram, and a fast dedicated SATA hard drive for virtual machines such as Pear PC.
Some patience and spare free time, as it will take a while to get this done. If everything goes to plan and you have a very fast machine, I'd still expect this process to last about two and a half hours minimum as that's how long it took me to do the "test" install for this article on the machine mentioned above.
A "Guest" operating system. See my comments at the start of this page about obtaining OS X. If you can't get a copy of this then download Darwin or Open Darwin from opendarwin.org.
Sorry to labour this point but you really won't see much without a guest OS ;-)
