OK, so last night, I got home & upgraded Zen's mac to 10.5.1, the latest shizzle for Macs.. she ordered the DVD and it was there waiting for me... upgrade went smoothly, she's happily maccing away on here G4 titanium lappie, which runs the new version faster than the 10.3.9 she was running previously.
So tonight... I get home.. like any geek, the idea hits me.. "I should get a boot of that running on my PC", so I fiddle about for a while.. find this linux application in development/released betas.. "Mac on Linux".
Sweeet, I think to myself.. jump on the linux box, resolve a huge amount of dependency issues successfully.. installing zlib, build-essential, all sorts of c libs then finally the ncurses environment.. I should have lost most of you by now, but as you can see, the box was trying to lose me, too.. but I was winning.. I managed to get it through the .configure, it happily finished preparing with the message "the next step is make".
So I run make.. the box totally spits it.. stacks of really firm looking error messages relating to the CPU. Computer Says No.. those sorta messages.
So I google..
Turns out.. for the second, embarassing time, I was dealing with a kinda huge problem that was staring me right in the face - at the bottom of the article where I found this, it seems, was another person in my predicament - http://ubuntuforums.org/archive/index.php/t-700969.html.
Mac on Linux requires, said linux, installed on a MAC.
This happened to me from the other side once before .. trying to get Windows XP running on a non-intel Mac using a program called crossover, which requires an Intel CPU.
It leaves you feeling so stupid, and takes hours of being really brilliant to realize... kinda sums up the human condition.