SEQ and M1 macbook

[kefferch]

I've had showeq running under various flavors of Linux on Intel Macs for years. I recently started using a Mac Studio and finally got showeq 3.6.1 running after a little frustration.

I'm using Parallels to run both an Arm version of Windows-11 (for Evequest) and an Ubuntu 20.04.2 (for ShowEQ). To compile ShowEQ just takes doggedly following the necessity to use apt to install things that don't come on the slim-configuration vm you download from Parallels. You can get it to compile using QT5. It will warn you that support is experimental, but it works (so far). The major pita you have to work around is that the showeq distribution doesn't come with files that will configure the build appropriately for arm (aarch64). I got it to work by downloading the recent GNU config.guess and config.sub files and placing them into the showeq directory before running makefile and ./configure.

You will make it through that cycle of build and install (using apt) the next missing thing without too much irritation (frankly wasn't as troublesome as some installs have been for me over the years). The next problem you'll run into is a change Apple made to the default network bridge support in MacOS. It requires you to use ifconfig to make a couple of changes so that the vm running showeq also gets the packets bound for the windows vm.

I run my VMs in shared networking mode. This means that they are in a local area net of their own and get out to the internet through a logical bridge device named bridge100. After booting both your VMs and connecting them to the network, first enable promiscuous mode on the ubuntu/showeq vm using the following command in a terminal window on the Ubuntu vm:

sudo ifconfig eth0 promisc

Next, you have to work around Apple's change. Use ifconfig to turn off the learn option on the logical network connection for the ubuntu/showeq vm (it will be named something like vmenet2) and then to flush what the bridge has already learned. Assuming the ubuntu vm is connected through vmenet2, the commands you would issue in terminal window on MacOS are:

sudo ifconfig bridge100 -learn vmenet2
sudo ifconfig bridge100 flushall

I managed to do a very similar setup as you, I'm on a Studio Mac (M2 Chip) and I'm running EQ in Win 11 VM via Parallels. I also installed SEQ on an Ubuntu 22.04.2 ARM64 on a VM. I disabled the windows firewalls so I'm able to ping the boxes to/from each other. I'm struggling with the promisc mode, you mentioned you're doing this on the Ubuntu VM but it's not eth0 for me. I see it as enp0s5...I'll also add in parallels I also have them both as Shared Network in the configuration.

should I run sudo ifconfig enp0s5 promisc on Ubuntu box?

and

sudo ifconfig bridge100 -learn vmenet2
sudo ifconfig bridge100 flushall

on MacOS in the terminal?


What am I missing?



****UPDATE: I was able to get it fully functioning, thanks for your posts about the MacOS network changes****