[KDE/Mac] kde-mac Digest, Vol 76, Issue 7

[René J.V. Bertin]

On Tuesday April 12 2016 11:24:31 Jonathan Schultz wrote:

Hi Jonathan,

Whew, good news! Thanks for putting up with me and allowing me to get a few more kinks out of a couple more cables, so to speak!

I'm not really surprised that I was right (cough cough). That virtual hardware you assumed is only partly provided by the host VirtualBox application (e.g. the sound, S/ATA and internet chipsets). The video driver is provided through the guest additions, and with Qt5's approach to use OpenGL wherever possible I'm almost surprised that most things do display correctly.

I'm not sure what's keeping Oracle from providing guest additions for OS X. Well, maybe I do: they'd have to be signed with a valid key ... but then again they surely must already be hiring a code-signing key from Apple. And it may also have to do with the fact it was never possible to put in just any aftermarket video board in a Mac (with AGP slots); it's possible that the APIs required to write a video driver just aren't public/free.
BTW, googling around for this I found this post which might be of interest to you:
https://forums.virtualbox.org/viewtopic.php?p=344689#p344689

Either way, the important thing is that you can test your software, and it doesn't really matter if that requires using the xcb QPA for some tests.
It might not be a bad idea to look into setting up a "Hackintosh" on an external disk though. Or finding a 2nd hand Mac Mini on eBay (I almost got myself a 2012 model with an i7 for about 600€ a couple weeks back, I had to cancel because I needed the money for something more urgent :-/)

Cheers,
René

>Hi René,
>
>OK I think we can almost put this thread away, and start a new one. :)
>
>With your latest fixes I am now able to build kf5-okular-devel and run 
>it both natively and using X11. As you predicted, the PDF rendering 
>worked fine when using xcb but not when running natively. I have to 
>confess this does surprise me - I was under the impression that 
>Virtualbox provided OSX with virtual hardware that was indistinguishable 
>from real hardware. But when I get a chance I'll do some experimentation 
>with display settings and see what I come up with.
>
>Best,
>Jonathan