For reasons that are too tedious to explain, occasionally I need to run an old version of the DTP application I loathe – hence the title of this post. It needs MacOS10·5, but Iggy runs 10·6 and 10·7.

I had 10·5 on my XServe but that’s horribly noisy when its working and now the power-supply seems to be dying, so he won’t stay alive long enough to finish booting most of the time. I had picked up an old TiBook which will run MacOS9, 10·4 and 10·5. This was OK but a little slow, and the screensharing image on Iggy was fuzzy.

I had read that VirtualBox won’t fly versions of MacOS earlier than 10·6 server or 10·7 client. I’m very pleased to say this in not true. Installation is a little tedious and not perfect – no VB guest additions, scary verbose boot but it can be done quite easily.

1. Put your 10·5 installer disk in your host intel mac and start up VB.
2. Create a blank virtual machine, telling VB you’re going to install MacOS Server.
3. I’d suggest giving your new vm 4GB of RAM.
4. Create a new HD – at least 20 GB. VDI format seems to work, so stick with it. The same goes for dynamic allocation.
5. When you first run your new VM, there will be a very verbose and scary-looking startup. Stick with it!
6. Eventually you will get to the traditional ‘select language’ first screen of MacOS install. Go through the process as normal until you are asked where to install OSX. There will be no available hard disks, even though you created one in step 4.
7. At this point, choose DiskUtility from the installer menu. You’ll find that no partitions/volumes have been created on the HD you created. So use partition, remembering to set format as GUID in the options pane.
8. Once the partitioning is done, close DU. This will take you back to the main installer, so install away!
9. When the installation is finished, shut down your vm and eject the installer disk from your host mac. Otherwise you’ll just be taken through the installation process again.
10. Reboot your new VM, sit through the verbose boot and lo and behold you’ll get to the normal personalisation screens as if you were installing MacOS on a real mac.
11. You won’t be able to install VB guest additions, but you’re not left without being able to share stuff between host and guest. InVB, under the devices menu, set your vm to use a ‘bridged adaptor’. Then in the VM, under system prefs, set up sharing as normal. Then your host mac will be able to see the guest and the guest will be able to see the host.

You are stuck with 1024 by 768 screen area but there are speed advantages over the 1GHz TiBook I was using – a 10·5 system running at over 2·5 GHz. I’m very pleased!