virtual raspberry pi emulate raspberry pi mac

Leave the network stuff the same, keeping the default hostname as-is and the domain name empty.

Using the graphical desktop, the recommended RAM is 1GB and hard drive space is 10GB.Ĭhoose the ISO file you downloaded earlier and install in VirtualBox, keeping all the defaults.

Set the settings according to the minimum requirements, which should pretty closely mirror the Pi. Type the name “Debian” and it should auto-select type Linux and version Debian (64-bit) – if not, select them. Go to and download the 64-bit PC netinst iso.Ĭreate a new VirtualBox instance. Raspbian is based off of Debian though, so let’s use Debian. Whatever the reason, all I could get was a black screen with the message: “FATAL: No bootable medium found! System halted.” From what I could find, it’s apparently because the Pi runs on an ARM processor, but VirtualBox is designed to emulate OS’s that support X86 processors. Unfortunately, although Raspbian images are available for download, you can’t use them to create a VM in VirtualBox. I already use VirtualBox for emulating Windows and Ubuntu on a Mac, so I wanted to stick with that if possible. (Even better, reader kriss seems to have gotten QEMU to work, and left a helpful comment below.) Install VirtualBox It looked a little complicated to tackle, so I’m holding off for now, but I’d like to revisit it.

If you’re interested in trying to emulate the processor, check out QEMU. Just wanted to state this upfront though – this solution is not a complete virtual Pi.Īlso, this is an attempt to closely emulate Raspbian, not the ARM processor found on the Pi. It’ll complain loudly that you can only run your code on an actual Pi. If you’re not on the Pi, you can’t execute code that directly accesses them. Limitations: The RPi.GPIO library expects the GPIO pins to be available. Install Python and other libraries and installers, so I can code solutions that can be migrated to the Pi.

Goal: Setup a virtual machine with Debian (from which Raspbian is derived). I’ve been playing around a lot on the Pi itself, but it’d be convenient to have an environment setup where I could experiment with code even when I don’t have access to the Pi. At the time he wrote his article, I don’t think the Pi was even really available to the public yet. I recently started flipping through The MagPi back-issues, and came across an article where someone talked about setting up a virtual Raspberry Pi environment.

Virtual raspberry pi emulate raspberry pi mac