I’m sure by now that everyone has heard of PearPC. Well I am a mac head who never got around to actually buying one (I’m saving my pennies honest mr. Jobs). PearPC to the rescue.

There are two real problems with PearPC:

• It is slow
• It brings your machine to a halt

So my main development machine is a 650MHz P3 Dell notebook, whose only saving grace is a wonderful screen 1400×1050. I also have a desktop pc running some flavor of Athlon (What kind of geek am I, I cant even remember the speed?).

It is pretty unrealistic of me to run PearPC on my notebook, due to its lack of speed. But it runs alright (of course still slowly) on my athlon pc. Of course I can’t run anything else on it while it’s running.

Why not connect the two then? My first thoughts where TightVnc which is normally excellent. It handled the display part fine, but hitting F12 to switch to the Mac mouse didn’t work no matter how hard I hit the key. I guess the friendly PearPC developers are using some lowerlevel X function for this, that vnc doesnt support.

Then I remembered my university days, when we actually used X windows as god or at least Jim Gettys intended. Remotely over a network. I’m not running a gigabit ethernet or anything, just regular 100. It runs just fine. See the included screen shots.

While it doesnt really solve the slowness of PearPC (only buying a mac will solve that) at least I can have it running without slowing me down on other things. See the above CPU meter as proof.