The script is semi-automatic and requires a little user interaction. Most of the time the user simply has to press enter. There is one step where the user has to choose between [C]atalina, [M]ojave, or [H]igh Sierra, and a couple of instances where the user has to choose whether to delete or keep temporary files and previous installations.
The goal of the script is to allow for a very easy installation without any closed-source additions or extra bootloaders.
Tested on Cygwin and WSL, should work on most Linux distros and macOS.
iCloud, iMessage, and other connected Apple services require a valid device name and serial number, board ID and serial number, and other genuine (or genuine-like) Apple parameters. These parameters may be set in the script before installation, or set after installation and applied with ./macos-guest-virtualbox.sh configure_vm
The script by default assigns the minimum required storage size for the installation of Catalina. After the installation is complete, the storage size may be increased. First increase the virtual disk image size through VirtualBox Manager or VBoxManage, then in Terminal in the virtual machine run sudo diskutil repairDisk disk0, and then sudo diskutil apfs resizeContainer disk1 0 or from Disk Utility, after repairing the disk from Terminal, delete the "Free space" partition so it allows the system APFS container to take up the available space.
Developing and maintaining VirtualBox or macOS features is beyond the scope of this script. Some features may behave unexpectedly, such as USB device support, audio support, and other features.
After successfully creating a working macOS virtual machine, consider importing it into QEMU/KVM so it can run with hardware passthrough at near-native performance.
- VirtualBox≥6.0 with Extension Pack
Bash≥4 (GNU variant; run on Windows through Cygwin or WSL)coreutils(GNU variant; install through package manager)unzip(install through package manager)wget(install through package manager)dmg2img(install through package manager on Linux, macOS, or WSL; let the script download it automatically on Cygwin)