Mojave on Virtualbox with Catalina host?

[vett93]

I upgraded the MacOS on my Mac Pro 6,1 to Catalina and then realized that I still want to run some 32-bit apps. I am thinking to run virtual machine, Virtualbox, on my Mac Pro with Catalina as the host OS. Then download Mojave and run it on the Virtualbox. Has anyone tried it? What are the steps to do it?

I tried to download Mojave MacOS from the App Store. Would it stop after the download? Or it woud automatically run?

 

[dotck]

You can try that, but the performance of macOS inside a virtual machine is a pain because it has no hardware GPU acceleration (regardless which virtualization product you'd like to use, it's even a pain with VMware Fusion and Parallels Desktop). You can disable some animations, but you'll still experience graphics glitches especially in Chromium based applications and/or Safari tabs.

The macOS Mojave installer would run right after the download completed, but you can quit the installer (right click the icon in the Dock, and quit it).

 

[vett93]

Thanks. How does that compare to installing Windows 10 on Virtualbox?

 

[Brian33]

I find macOS to run acceptably within a Virtualbox VM. Graphical response is definitely slower but it is usable. Finder, Firefox, and Safari seem OK. Haven't tried any Chromium application. VM sounds don't work (at least for me). My host is Mojave and the guest is currently High Sierra.

After you download the "Install macOS Mojave" app, I suggest you create a bootable ".iso" file from it. Google for instructions. Then you "insert" that .iso file into the VM's virtual CD drive and boot the VM from it. It can be a little tricky to get everything set up but it's possible.

Applying security updates is also tricky, but possible by using the EFI Boot manager menu. But you might not need to worry about that.

 

[Mick84]

Thanks. How does that compare to installing Windows 10 on Virtualbox?

Virtual box isn't that good. VMWare Fusion is better but the best would be to run Windows 10 using boot camp assistant. Also if you want Mojave you could partition your main Hard Drive if its large enough and install Mojave on that partition for 32 bit apps.

 

[hvfsl]

Older versions of Mac OS do run faster in a VM. Mountain Lion is meant to be the best version of Mac OS in a VM, so if your 32bit apps run under that, you might be better using that instead of Mojave.