The Asahi project has now released a first alpha version, so I tried that on a MacBookPro. Asahi is a full linux distribution that can be installed on mac with an M1 processor, it installs alongside your current macOS. It’s an alpha release so many things are missing for now, including 3D hardware acceleration, but on the other hand, for an alpha release, many things are already working, and working fine!
After a (quite) long installation process, I got linux running on that mac. Note that I add to restart the installation process, as the mac went to sleep mode during “root expension” and that actually froze the installation. I needed to break, remove all the create partitions (a risky process) to be able to start again.
Now, the M1 processor is very fast ARM64 processor, but it only supports 64bits operations. No ARM32 there, so no box86. Also, the Asahi readme mentions that the Pagesize is 16K, instead of the standard 4K. That breaks a few things on the way. Fortunatly, I had already encountered a system with 16K pagesize (Loongarch64 systems), so there is some supporting code on box64 already for it. And after enabling it (plus some compilation options), box64, with dynarec, was running!
To try things, I wanted to install a simple linux game. Remember that there is no Hardware acceleration yet, so I choose WorldOfGoo, with its simple graphics (it’s still an OpenGL game). Launching the install didn’t work, as by default, the setup tries to run x86 code (32bits, so needing box86 not available here). To work around that, I created a simple uname script that spoofs the setup into thinking this is an x86_64 system:
the file simply contains
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#!/bin/bash if [ "$1" == "-m" ];then echo x86_64 exit 0 fi /bin/uname "$@" |
And I created an x86_64 folder in my home directory to put some pc stuffs (and that uname script)
Then I launched the setup as PATH=~/x86_64:$PATH ./WorldOfGoo.Linux.153.sh et voilà, the setup launched… But as text only… Ok, gtk2 libs are not installed. So sudo pacman -S gtk2 and try again…