SEQ and M1 macbook

[e@tme1]

Hi Folks,

Has anyone had any joy getting together a stable linux VM (parallels), and able to get SEQ up and running?

If you have:

What ARM based linux flavor did you use?
Where did you find qt4?
Any other package dependencies you came across?

Would love some help getting this working - not even sure its possible to share network traffic between VM's under parallels...

Cheers!

[cn187]

I don't have a proper answer for you, as I haven't used a mac since the early OS X (G4/G5) days.

That said, I do have some comments on your questions:

Several forum members are using SEQ on Raspberry Pi, so I know SEQ works on ARM. Which distro you use is probably more up to what's available for M1 as well as personal preference.

SEQ will build and run with Qt5, so if you have trouble finding Qt4, you may be better off using Qt5. There may still be some UI related bugs lingering, but the feedback I've received (as well as my own personal usage) leads me to believe that using Qt5 for SEQ is working pretty well. (Qt6 is another matter - there's still more work to be done there)

I think there are some dependencies that aren't documented in the INSTALL files, but if they're missing they should be caught when running configure, rather than waiting to get some obscure compiler/linker error. So if configure reports something missing, just install the development package for whatever it says is missing. Beyond that, if you discover a dependency that isn't checked/caught by configure, please let me know and I'll add checks for it.

I expect the most difficult part will be figuring out how to share the traffic. Unfortunately I don't know enough about modern Macs or Parallels to offer much guidance there. There may be a feature to allow you to mirror traffic between virtual interfaces. Otherwise, you may be able to cobble something together with bridging.

Good luck, and please let us know how it goes.

[xerxes]

Hi Folks,

Has anyone had any joy getting together a stable linux VM (parallels), and able to get SEQ up and running?

If you have:

What ARM based linux flavor did you use?
Where did you find qt4?
Any other package dependencies you came across?

Would love some help getting this working - not even sure its possible to share network traffic between VM's under parallels...

Cheers!

Are you also playing EQ on the Mac? I did not have much luck doing so. It works, but gets extremely hot to the touch.

[splooge]

Are you also playing EQ on the Mac? I did not have much luck doing so. It works, but gets extremely hot to the touch.

I'm playing EQ on a 2021 M1 Pro using Crossover. Works great; no overheating.

[xerxes]

I'm on a 2019 Intel Mac with Crossover and the CPU is pegged at 100% the entire time eqgame is running, even with edits to the eqclient.ini to spread the CPU affinity and allow it to use all cores.

[magicgnome]

Hi Folks,

Has anyone had any joy getting together a stable linux VM (parallels), and able to get SEQ up and running?

If you have:

What ARM based linux flavor did you use?
Where did you find qt4?
Any other package dependencies you came across?

Would love some help getting this working - not even sure its possible to share network traffic between VM's under parallels...

Cheers!

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

[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****