SheepShaver Apple Macintosh Emulator

September 16, 2008

SheepShaver is a free, open source Apple Macintosh Emulator which is distributed under the terms of the GNU General Public License (GPL). Essentially, SheepShaver is a Macintosh OS run time environment available for both BeOS and Linux. SheepShaver allows users to run classic Mac Operating System applications inside the BeOS or Linux multi – tasking environment. SheepShaver has been tested successfully on BeOS/PPC R4/R5, Linux / ppc, Linux/ia32 (AKA x86), Linux / amd64 (Opteron, Athlon 64 and Darwin / ppc. However depending on the system used, the functionality varies accordingly.

Having used it for a long time, one of the most important and by far the most useful feature of Sheep Shaver is its abilit to provide an easy file exchange with the host OS through a “Host Directory Tree” icon which is present on the Mac desktop itself. It also offers Internet as well as LAN networking through Ethernet which again is a very useful feature of Sheep shaver. SheepShaver first appeared in the market in 1998 as a commercial application which was licenced as a shareware and it has now been updated, enhanced and re-released in the market under the GNU General Public License (GPL). Looking at the success of the re-released version, the decision to release it under the GPL licence as a open source application seems to have paid off well.

Posted in Linux Applications, MAC Applications