questions about installing mountain lion in virtual machine

By alex wallis, 20 December, 2012

Forum
macOS and Mac Apps
Hi, I am considering switching away from windows to a mac when my pc finally gives up the ghost, the ability to reinstall the OS without help and trouble shoot issues, along with very good quality hardware sound like good advantages to me. I don't have ready access to a mac, and have never used one before, I thought as a first step I would like to try using mountain lion running in a vmware virtual machine under windows just so I can try the interface out etc. Now, I realise that as I wouldn't be running the OS on a proper mac I wouldn't have access to all the macs features, so this is where my question comes in. Has anyone on hear tried installing mountain lion in a virtual machine? I know the general steps for creating a virtual machine, but am not at all sure of the steps needed for installing the OS, and also I understand that VoiceOver can be used during the OS installation. So, does anyone know how I would launch VoiceOver without having a proper mac keyboard? thanks so much for any help and guidance, Alex.

Options

Comments

By Dave Nason on Tuesday, December 25, 2012 - 07:37

Member of the AppleVis Editorial Team
Is it even possible? I've never heard of running Mac OS as a VM on a Windows machine before. Curious to hear how you get on with this.
Hi all, just thought I would post an update and say I got mountain lion running as a virtual machine in vmware. I downloaded an already prepared virtual machine of mountain lion, and it was as simple as opening the machine in vmware, powering it on and then figuring out how to start VoiceOver. As it turned out, I have to use my control, alt and f5 keys. I did have some trouble with the VoiceOver tutorial, and a bit of trouble with setting up the mac, but I got there in the end. I didn't have to use the guest unlocker provided with the virtual machine, I have no idea what that actually does. I must say I feel a bit tired now after having finished the setup, I found it quite uncomfortable having to hold about 3 or 4 different keys just to interact with most elements, of course I know that I am using mountain lion on a windows machine so its probably a bit different to a real mac, but VoiceOver does feel a bit clunky to me, having to use 3 keys just to interact with popup menus, tables radio buttons etc. Still, I will continue to experiment with this, and see how I find it.