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I have a 2011 MacBook Pro and I'm getting really frustrated with Lion. I was a long time Linux user prior to getting my first MacBook (I wanted the hardware, not the software, but stuck with it) and I'm thinking about returning, however, I do iPhone development so I need to have OS X available.

Is there an easy solution to run Lion in a VM on Linux? It's not technically a Hackintosh because it's running on Mac hardware, but I'm afraid I'll end up having to do some Hackintoshing anyhow.

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There's no official way, since running on virtualized hardware is not the same as running directly on Apple hardware. OS X does some checks if it's run on Apple hardware and therefore it won't work without Hackintosh-like mods, which are off-topic here. – slhck♦ Aug 30 '11 at 19:01
The best shot to get this working might be to watch this VirtualBox ticket for Lion Client support. virtualbox.org/ticket/9388 The majority of people that are running Snow Leopard on virtualization are using VMware Fusion and Parallels on mac. In the mean time, you can more easily run your Linux on top of Lion even that's not what you're after in the question. – bmike Aug 30 '11 at 21:21

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The only "Apple-approved" use of Mac OS X in a VM is to run the VM on a Mac OS X host. You have to go through some kind of hacks to go beyond that.

But be careful about installing Linux on your 2011 MacBook Pro. I have seen several forum posts which said that they attempted installing Linux on a 2011 Mac and ended up with an unbootable machine - even unable to restore Mac OS X.

Maybe the best thing is to just get used to Lion. I am myself a one-month new Mac user (and 10 years Linux/BSD user) but I found I just can't go back to Ubuntu's Unity. There is simply no comparison. By the way I have Terminal open in Lion 99% of the time. That will help.

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It's not a matter of getting used to it. I have 8GB of RAM and a quad core processor but for some reason AirDropping takes 70% CPU from Finder and the kernel, each. I've been on Lion since beta 2. – wjl Aug 30 '11 at 21:51
Did you try a clean installation? I have the latest gen of Macbook Air and Lion showed no problem at all. – jeffgao Aug 31 '11 at 0:33
AirDrop is supposed to be using that much CPU because it's doing on-the-fly encryption (which is CPU-bound). If that's your only complaint, I'd suggest sucking it up, or using a different method of transferring files. – Randolph West Aug 31 '11 at 7:02
It shouldn't take 3,220,000,000 cycles per second (2.3GHz * 140%) to encrypt some data. Why doesn't it just use WPA (it is wifi after all) and be done with it? But we're getting off topic here. – wjl Aug 31 '11 at 18:49

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