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Minimal linux "distro" primarily for running SheepShaver
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Claude e81d27dc70 switch from grub-mkstandalone to grub-install for EFI setup 
grub-mkstandalone produces an invalid PE/COFF binary inside Alpine's chroot
(likely because /usr/lib/grub/x86_64-efi/ isn't populated as expected),
causing a "Load Error" when the EFI shell or firmware tries to launch it.

grub-install --target=x86_64-efi correctly collects modules, produces a
valid EFI binary, and is the standard mechanism Alpine uses for EFI setups.
--removable installs to EFI/BOOT/BOOTX64.EFI; --no-nvram skips the NVRAM
update that can't be done from inside a chroot.

Co-Authored-By: Claude Sonnet 4.6 <noreply@anthropic.com>
2026-03-30 18:30:00 +00:00
.gitignore ignore all qcow2s 2026-03-30 11:41:44 -06:00
build-chroot-efi.sh switch from grub-mkstandalone to grub-install for EFI setup 2026-03-30 18:30:00 +00:00
build-chroot.sh defer disk image decompression to avoid filling the filesystem 2026-03-30 04:12:23 +00:00
macos9.img.gz add an installation of OS 9 2026-03-29 14:42:59 -06:00
Makefile install GRUB EFI binary so image boots on physical UEFI hardware 2026-03-30 18:13:38 +00:00
newworld86.rom add ROM, will add disk image later 2026-03-29 13:01:45 -06:00
README.md remove setup.sh, only supporting VM image builds, and improve README.md using Claude 2026-03-30 11:20:18 -06:00

README.md

Mac OS 9 Appliance

An Alpine Linux-based VM appliance that boots directly into Mac OS 9 via SheepShaver. On boot, the system autologs in and launches SheepShaver full-screen. When SheepShaver exits, a menu lets you shut down, restart the emulator, or drop to a shell.

Building the VM image

The Makefile produces a bootable QCOW2 image using alpine-make-vm-image. Building requires sudo, wget, qemu-img, and a working QEMU user-static setup if cross-compiling.

make

This will:

  1. Download alpine-make-vm-image from the Alpine Linux project.
  2. Copy the ROM and compressed disk image into a skeleton directory.
  3. Invoke alpine-make-vm-image (with sudo) to create an 8 GB QCOW2 image, installing packages and building SheepShaver from source inside a chroot.

The output is macos9-appliance.qcow2.

Build options

Variable Default Description
ARCH x86_64 Target architecture (x86_64 or aarch64)
IMAGE macos9-appliance.qcow2 Output image filename
IMAGE_SIZE 8G Size of the output disk image

Example — build an aarch64 image:

make ARCH=aarch64

Clean up

make clean

This removes the output image, the skeleton directory, and the downloaded alpine-make-vm-image script.

Running the image

The image can be run with QEMU. Example for x86_64:

qemu-system-x86_64 \
  -enable-kvm \
  -m 512 \
  -drive file=macos9-appliance.qcow2,format=qcow2 \
  -vga std \
  -display sdl

For aarch64, use qemu-system-aarch64 with an appropriate machine type (e.g. -machine virt -cpu cortex-a57).

How it works

  • SheepShaver is compiled from source inside the chroot to ensure compatibility with the Alpine musl libc environment.
  • Autologin is configured on tty1 via /etc/inittab.
  • /root/.profile detects tty1 and starts startx, which runs SheepShaver via /root/.xinitrc.
  • Sound uses OSS emulation (snd-pcm-oss, snd-mixer-oss) loaded at boot via /etc/local.d/oss.start.
  • Networking uses SheepShaver's built-in slirp (user-mode networking, no host bridging required).
  • RAM allocated to the Mac environment is 128 MB (configurable in ~/.sheepshaver_prefs).