Running macOS Ventura as a VM

I tried to install the shiny new macOS Ventura beta as a VM on my M1 Mac using UTM and MacVM. However, it wouldn’t work. It never got past 0% installing on either of the apps.

Then @chilcote saved me by mentioning that he was able to get Venty to install in UTM after launching the Xcode 14 beta. So, I downloaded the Xcode 14 beta, launched it, and installed the Xcode 14 macOS and iOS components. Then I launched UTM and told it to install the Venty IPSW, and it worked!

tl;dr

  • Download Xcode 14 beta
  • Download the macOS Ventura beta IPSW
  • Install and launch the Xcode beta
  • Install the Xcode macOS and iOS components
  • Launch UTM and install Venty

Re-installing GRUB on Debian Linux

Recently I had a Debian Linux VM that wasn’t booting. It was getting a GRUB error: ‘error symbol grub_register_command_lockdown not found‘. Attempting to select any other boot option, including the listed recovery options, all took me back to this same error.

I didn’t find a lot of helpful information while searching for that error. In the end, the solution was to re-install GRUB. These steps walk through how I was able to re-install GRUB in a Debian Linux VM on DigitalOcean (DO).

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Mac to Mac Transfer Speeds

I got a shiny new M1 Max MacBook Pro this week. When I setup new computers I tend to opt for setting them up new and transferring the data over “manually”; i.e. not using Migration Assistant.

I started this migration the same way that I traditionally have, using Share Disk (formerly Target Disk Mode (TDM)) and rsync. I made a few observations and, in the end, changes to how I’ll be doing data migrations going forward.

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KEXTs and Big Sur

Recently I’ve been trying to get a KEXT to load in Big Sur on both Intel and Apple Silicon Macs without requiring an admin user to approve loading the KEXT and avoiding Apple Silicon’s “reboot into recovery to allow KEXT loading” bit.

This post will cover the MDM profile I’m deploying along with some commands that I used to help with testing KEXT deployment and approval on Big Sur.

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Nuke and Paving M1 Macs

Those of us getting the new M1 Macs quickly found out that the traditional way of wiping a Mac using Disk Utility no longer works as expected. When using this method we’ve found numerous bugs and it typically leads us to needing to DFU the M1 Mac and use Apple Configurator 2 to completely wipe and restore it.

Here is the best way that I’ve found to completely wipe and reload an M1 Mac.

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