This is a guide to running Ardupilot's Mission Planner on Mac without a virutal machine. We'll use Mono instead.

Setup Steps

• Download both the latest Mission Planner (zip file) as well as the Mono installer.

• Install Mono

• Create the required directories and set the permissions by running the following in a terminal:

sudo mkdir /usr/share/Mission\ Planner
sudo chown `whoami` /usr/share/Mission\ Planner

• Unzip the Mission Planner zip file you downloaded and in your terminal cd into this directory. For example, I ran:

cd ~/Downloads/MissionPlanner-latest/

• Run Mission Planner with this terminal command:

mono MissionPlanner.exe

Running this way in Mono works fine for most things, but I couldn't get the setup wizard to work, so be warned, some things may not work quite right on Mac. For these cases, I fallback to the Windows VM.