Leopard in VMWare Fusion

Question

I have an essential PPC OS X app. I want to use Leopard (10.5) in a Virtual Machine (Fusion).

I have the ISO but when I attempt to install, it says that its not supported.

Any workaround to this?

Answer 1

for about $20 USD you can buy Mac OS X 10.6 Server from Apple. I did so just the other day ordering by phone.

This version of OS X IS allowed to be run as a Virtual Machine as long as the host is Apple hardware.

So this will allow you, for example, to run 10.6 in a virtual machine on a modern iMac running Mac OSX 10.11.

Answer 2

The Leopards are only supported by VMware if they are the server version. It's a license restriction, not compatibility, so if you can find a way to make Fusion think it's server software, you're set. Or just get a copy of Leopard Server.

Answer 3

There are two problems here.

1) The main one is VMWare Fusion and similar are virtualisation machines that means they run code using the same instruction set as the processor. So the PPC code will not run in Fusion as the processor used is Intel.

2) I think that you can only run 10.6 or higher in a virtual machine.

However you can run some PPC code under Rosetta which is available for 10.6

So I think you best chance is to install 10.6 server then install Rosetta and then see if your app works. But the best way is to get an up to date application that does the same as your app.