MacOS renting in the cloud: Links and guide for quick setup

Development
1
MacOS cloud renting has started to proliferate with the new Apple Silicon M1 chip and it turned out to be a pretty decent way to test graphical applications on MacOS without buying apple’s pricey hardware or resorting to hackish ports and vms of questionable legality. I am reporting here the procedure to quickly get a MacOS M1 cloud service up and running for testing jmonkey applications without too much hassle. This guide focus on Apple Silicon M1 instances, but can be replicated on x86_64 ... Continue Reading...
2 Likes
3

Moved to the website: jMonkeyEngine | MacOS renting and development in the cloud

5 Likes
4

Thanks for figuring this out and providing a detailed write-up, Riccardo.

I worry that important Forum/Hub posts like this one become difficult to find after a few weeks. Perhaps this info (or a link to it) should be added to our Wiki.

5

I made a blog post

3 Likes
6

Good idea!

7

A post was merged into an existing topic: MacOS renting in the cloud

8

Today I learned that MacStadium offers Mac-in-the-cloud with 4 data centers (California USA, Nevada USA, Georgia USA, and Ireland). Their Mac Mini servers include both Gen 4 (Intel i7) and Gen 5 (Apple Silicon M1). Not cheap, but they offer discounts to open-source projects. I’ve applied to be in their Open Source Member Program.

Other cloud providers to consider include:

AWS claims to have M1 hardware in preview: Amazon EC2 Mac Instances - Amazon Web Services
When that becomes generally available, I imagine it’ll be a game changer.

2 Likes
9

MacStadium granted me a free Mac mini G5A with Monterey (macOS 12/Darwin v21)!

The install script above was very helpful to me. Note: an extra step was required to install Rosetta 2 prior to installing NoMachine: softwareupdate --install-rosetta

5 Likes
10

For VNC access, I first tried TightVNC’s client, but it didn’t support the right security types for Monterey’s VNC server. I then installed Remmina’s client (installed using flatpak), and that seems to work fine.

1 Like
11

For file transfer, I installed an FTP server using brew install pure-ftpd .

1 Like