Jonas, many thanks for your immediate and really helpful reply!

(please follow up to fpc-other, that is the list specifically intended for everything that's off-topic for the other lists)

Sorry - did'nt remember that there's a list for that, too. Subscribed that list now.

No - illegally is not an option. Emulating would only be possible if there's a apple-supported way...

Note that hardware released after a particular version of Mac OS X has been released will only work with that version or higher. If you want to run older OS releases, this is useful to keep in mind.

Ahh - that's an important information.

What about FPC? When developing on a 10.5-System, does it need special care to support older 10.x ones?

Thanks
Lukas

Lukas Gradl wrote

No - illegally is not an option. Emulating would only be possible if there's a apple-supported way...

Apple currently only allows virtualising Mac OS X Server on top of Mac OS X Server, afaik.

What about FPC? When developing on a 10.5-System, does it need special care to support older 10.x ones?

Either use the Xcode IDE and have it take care of everything (after you tell it what the earliest Mac OS X release is that you wish to support), or manually use
1) -XR/Developer/SDKs/MacOSX10.4u.sdk (or similar) to specify the SDK to link against
2) -k"-macosx_version_min 10.4" (or similar) to tell the linker with which earliest major OS release the binaries should be compatible (they're then also compatible with later OS releases, but e.g. x86 and all 64 bit binaries using some 10.5 features do not run on 10.4)

Jonas

Lukas Gradl wrote

1.) Do I really need to buy a Mac? Or is there a good solution to emulate one on an x86 Linux box? Just crosscompiling without the possibility to do serious tests in house is not an option, as my app has to integrate in some hardware-subsystems (printing, networking).

There are emulators out there, but they are horrible. I tryed PearPC which is a free software one, and Free Pascal didn't work there. Not to mention that it does not connect the CD-ROM driver and network didn't work, so my emulated software was a black box without any communication with the outter world except some hacks to mount the HD image file.

My advice would be: Yes, buy a Mac. If you are out of money, you can buy an used one. Don't buy a too old thougth, because I think it's besser to have an Intel Mac, because this is the new architecture, and FPC cannot cross-compile yet from PPC to x86, but can do the other way around.

If you intend to use Lazarus you need Mac OS X 10.4 or superior as far as I remember.

I have had very good success in the opposite direction for emulation. I bougth Parallels Desktops and it emulates Windows wonderfully, with mouse integration, reads cdrom, networking works, even managed to get images from my phone! It also emulates Linux reasonably well, but not as good.

If you intend to use Lazarus you need Mac OS X 10.4 or superior as far as I remember.

Now, thats really important as I use Lazarus as editor...

I'm mainly on linux - we use windows only for accounting, as the used software is available for windows only.
The linux machines will stay the main ones - the MacOS-Box will be just for compiling and testing an app - main development will occur still on the linux boxes.

Thanks for your answer!

Lukas