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Parallels Desktop for OS X Reviewed
phaedo00 writes "Ars Technica has put up a great review of the first full release of Parallels' virtualization software for OS X, Parallels Desktop 1.0. From the article: 'Move over emulation, virtualization is in and it's hotter than two Jessica Albas wresting the devil himself in a pit of molten steel. It's no contest, virtualization has it all: multiple operating systems running on the same machine at nearly the full speed of the host's processor with each system seamlessly networking with the next. Add to that the fact that it's cheaper than getting a new machine and you have the guaranteed latest craze. Not even the Hula Hoop can stop this one.'"
Wake me up when someone runs OS X seamlessly on a stock PC!
-Shaunak
Well, maybe people are reading the full arti...oh, right, Slashdot. Never mind.
So Taco, when did Harry Knowles join the editorial staff?
Rich And Stupid is not so bad as Working For Rich And Stupid.
The promise of the HURD microkernel with OS 'personalities' is coming to our desktops in a slightly updated fashion. But I still love the idea as long as my Linux and Windows can run beside each other and behave, it makes development much nicer.
Kindness is the language which the deaf can hear and the blind can see. - Mark Twain
"..and it's hotter than two Jessica Albas wresting the devil himself in a pit of molten steel. It's no contest, virtualization has it all.."
Umm i hate to be the one pointing this out, but i for one can think of some very hot things about Jessica Albas that virtualization doesn't have.
Really.., can't compare
Here's a reprint from my Slashdot journal
Yes, I am joking. Parallels is awesome. The claims of "near native performance" are indeed correct - in my experience. Parallels is what allowed me to finally make the 'switch' because my office is tied heavily to Outlook (and Business Contact Manager and therefore SQL Server).
Parallels works as advertised and is recommended from one slashdotter to another.
My only pet peeve is the way that the virtual machine mount USB drives only allows 1 OS to have access to the device at a time. So if you are on the Windows side and insert a drive, Mac does not see it, and vice versa. I am not sure if there is a way around that or not. But that really is the only annoyance that prevents me for managing the this seamlessly.
I hate sounding like such a fanboy, but this really is a great piece of software.
on my Gateway laptop and when combined with OSX, its pretty damn slick. If you plan on playing games or video, you should forget about it and just use Boot Camp, but if you're not using very demanding apps, its a godsend. AutoCAD runs really well, and its nice not having to reboot. If you are contemplating a virtualization app, be aware that you will need memory for both operating systems. 512 is painful, 1 gb can get slow at times, and 2gb is the sweet spot. If you are going to virtualize XP, try SP1 instead of 2. SP2 is a lot slower in virtualization (this was the case when using Virtual PC or VMWare).
I bought a MacBook Pro recently, with the intention of having a single machine for home (OS X) and office (WinXP). I tried out Parallels and there's no doubt that it is a very useful piece of software. Waving my hand over my Macbook (accomplished with Shadowbook + Virtuedesktops), caused my screen to rotate into either Windows XP or OS X at will. The processor speed, because the Core Duo is simply being virtualized, is pretty much full speed. On the other hand, the Mobility Radeon X1600 GPU (with its 256MB of VRAM goodness) cannot be virtualized, so Parallels must emulate an 8meg SVGA card. This makes the graphics of Windows XP seem sluggish. Since I am transitioning from a 4-year old Dell Inspiron that is very peppy and snappy in the GPU department, I refused to tolerate any sluggishness whatsoever in my new ($2K+) computer. I installed Boot Camp yesterday and then installed Windows XP. After you install the Apple-provided drivers for the MacBook (including Radeon drivers), the system runs incredibly smooth under XP. The only special thing I had to do was install Windows 2003 Server Resource Kit (free from MS) to re-map my right Command key as a delete key so that I could use ctl-alt-delete to login to my domain.
If you need to use Windows XP all day as your work OS (as I do), you will find Boot Camp to be the superior solution, if only for the snappiness of the system. I don't need to use OS X at work for any reason, so dual-booting works for me. If you only use a few Windows apps irregularly and will primarily use OS X all day, then Parallels is the way to go. Keep in mind that Boot Camp is free, while Parallels costs $.
Bill Clinton: Pimp we can believe in. - The Shirt!!!
Quo usque tandem abutere, Nimbus, patientia nostra?
How could you write that article without addressing the games issue? The lack of games is still the number one barrier to MACS taking more of the home pc market. I keep 2 machines at home. A mac for visitors, web browsing, video editing and some educational software and a PC to run the latest games. I'd ditch the PC in a second if I could. I'll probably keep my PC laptop, though.
"Don't you know you're going to shock the monkey?"- Peter Gabriel
Vista?
I mean, it doesn't do a video card, and apparently even the lowest Vista settings need a video card (at least 64MB VRAM, right?). OR do I misunderstand things?
Move over emulation, virtualization is in
Err, emulation (at least of winders on the mac) was always for running software designed for a completely different architecture. While the switch to Intel has changed the landscape for the Mac (at least on everything but their high end desktops), emulation is still the way to go when you're trying to run software designed for completely different hardware.
Anybody tried Parralels for Linux here? I assume it's just as wonderful but I'm curious if anybody's had some hands-on experience.
Anybody care to summarize the pros and cons of Parallels vs VMWare?
Stop the brainwash
Virtualization is nice, but not the dual-Jessica-Alba panacea he'd like it to be; I still can't play Windows-only games in Parallels because it doesn't have direct hardware access. Such a problem isn't easily solved, either, so if you were getting your hopes up about playing the latest games while keeping Windows in the sandbox in which it belongs, you're going to be disappointed. If someone were to port Cedega to OS X, then we'd start making progress....
OMG! Wau!
Is it just me, or do the screenshots of Parallels look nearly identical to VMWare? I realize both applications do the same thing, but if you wouldn't have told me it wasn't VMWare I wouldn't have noticed a difference.
So Intel can finally do what IBM developed back in the 1960's. LPAR anyone?
I visited the site and didn't see an answer to my question. How is Parallels different from VMWare Workstation? Or is it the same thing at a different price point?
STOP . AMERICA . NOW
Like Baldur's Gate, or Icewind Dale, or Planescape (Any Bioware Infinity Engine Titles really). How do games of this nature run under Parallels? Is DirectX handled acceptably for everything other than 3D acceleration? If so, I'll probably have to speed up my plans to upgrade to an Intel based Mac. I'm a recent switcher, and this is the only thing that's been really hurting me. I use my Gamecube for new games, but to relive older titles it would be awesome if parallels would fill the gap.
It's impossible
this is exactly what the tagging system is here for, folks. Two weeks from now when you wonder "what was that thing? About wrestling? I think it was with the devil? Or maybe devils?" slashdot tagging beta will be there to bail you out.
there is no need to sign your posts. this isn't usenet. your username is right there above your post. stop it.
I really don't understand the point, for most Mac users. I have it sitting on my computer with XP, but after the initial WOW! factor wore off, I really never touched it again. I've been using a Mac for roughly 4 years now, and have discovered alternatives to all my old Windows apps, bought all the "need-to-have" cross platform apps (Photoshop and Word), and completely adapted my work style to my Mac (running a computer without Quicksilver is painful). I really don't see the point outside of advertising and a very small amount of niche users.
I guess I could play Windows Solitare now... On the bright side.
I do wish I could install Ubuntu on it though, but it seems that Parallels doesn't yet support it, I still don't quite understand the point, but it would prolong the WOW! factor a bit.
It seems that most people are OS purists, if you really need to be doing something in Linux, then you generally use mostly linux to do that, ditto with XP and OS X. Now when the let me run a single Windows or Linux app in a window, without calling the whole of the OS into play (like the windows desktop) then I'll be happy, even if it will be an interface nightmare (ugly XP GUI with my OS X goodness!). Right now it seems a big hastle, since there is only one Windows app I actually ever need to run, though there might be a Mac alternative (which I haven't found), SPSS.
A patriot must always be ready to defend his country against his government. -edward abbey
I do definitely think this is cool, but I think the next logical step... and I know this would be very tricky... would be to figure out how to run programs in the Parallels operating system in a sort of "rootless" windowed way. I guess this would be pretty much impossible without modifying the hosted operating system, but if it could be figured out, it would be fantastic. Imagine having Windows windows and Gnome windows running on top of OS X seemlessly, without seeing their respective desktop backgrounds.
I suppose you could do this with X by using SSH into the hosted *nix system and running OSX's X server, but I don't see how it could be done with Windows...
Basically, this is how Parallels lines up with the competition:
No usb support, no hardware acceleration, no raw partition support, no vanderpool cpu partitioning (try it, I swear, open the system monitor while it's running and watch it jump from one core to the next every few seconds and notive the 10% overhead on the other core while it's doing this), no support for some more-than-uncommon OSs (try getting solaris x86, aros, or even something as weathered as BeOS and OS/2 running on it.. will not happen.), severe memory leaks (watch it eat all your ram and dive into swap after running for more than 40 minutes), and it's not really any faster than 'emulators' such as qemu (call me crazy if you like but i've ran it side by side with Q, an osx port of qemu, and there is virtually (excuse the pun) no speed difference at all).
If you want to run the latest xp game, use bootcamp. If you want to be able to access your EXISTING operating systems on other partitions, look elsewhere.
Don't get me wrong, Parallels is heading in the right direction. Just stop thinking it's a godsend at this extremely early stage. It's not, it still has quite some ways to go yet.
This is little off topic but I would like to know - if there is Intel VT (Virtualization technology) enabled CPU available for purchase? Or they are still under development? What about AMD CPUs? Regards,
The important thing is not to stop questioning --Albert Einstein.
One thing that bugs me is tht you have to carve out a dedicated amount of RAM to each guest OS, even if you aren't using all of it. Since I don't intend to do much with XP I've been able to get by by dedicating only 128MB out of the 1GB on my Mac Mini. I wish there was a way for both OSes to see my 1GB of RAM and use only what's needed, but I guess the OS would need Xen-like additions, no?
A sentence you'll never see on an Internet discussion board: "You know what? You're right."
As someone with an existing install of XP (Bootcamp), it seems like a shame to have to two copies of windows to be able to dual boot (primarily for games).
-c
"If you are an idealist it doesn't matter what you do or what goes on around you, because it isn't real anyway."-R.P.W.
Ubuntu runs great in Parallels. The only difference is that it captures your cursor so you have to press ctrl-option to release the cursor.
Yes, Dell, these things do make a difference!
"It's the height of ridiculousness to say for those 9 lines you get hundreds of millions."
http://www.maconlinux.org/overview.html
Mac-on-Linux is a linux/ppc program which makes it possible to run Mac OS in parallel with Linux.
MOL is primarily intended to be used by those who run linux/ppc as their main operating system but still want to be able to run that occasional Mac OS application.
The US free market: two halves of a government-granted duopoly are free to set the market price.
It doesn't handle 3D card emulation/virtualization so no games. If you want to do that you need to use bootcamp and boot natively to Windows. In that case, games will run as well as they'd run on any other system with the same hardware.
There's nothing special about Mac hardware anymore, it's just normal commodity hardware. Since it's x86 you can run Windows on it. When you do, it runs just as it would on an equivilant non-Mac PC. The only thing special about a Mac, internally, is the "I'm a Mac" identifier that tells OS-X it's allowed to run on that platform.
As far as games in virtualization, have to see if and when 3D happens. VMWare 5.5.1 does have experimental Direct3D support but as the name implies it's incomplete and buggy, and VMWare is Windows/Linux only for host OSes, doesn't run on OS-X at this point.
It means you need to buy a new Mac, too.
Here will be an old abusing of God's patience and the king's English.
Sorry, but by definition nothing can be hotter than virtualization as any powerful enough virtualization system can allow you to have N simultaneous copies of the thing you are claiming is hotter.
Thus a proper virtualization system would allow you to have two simultaneous Jessica Albas, which I think was being hinted at in the "wrestling the devil" portion of the post. The devil I guess was a methaphor for memory consumption, while the molten steel plainly referred to the processor load and resulting core temperatures.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
I was wondering what type of support Parallels would have for Directx, and it looks like it's not much better than Vmware. Software rendering is a good start, but it's pretty much unusable for any modern games. I'll be excited when I can run an XP session in Linux with decent hardware acceleration. Then I can dump my NTFS partition forever.
Blowing your cache every 5 whole seconds is just killing your seti@home ranking, isn't it.
How is this flamebait? It's merely an opinion from someone who's been running it since day 1. It's a very valid one at that. The only people who would think parallels is better than mediocre are those who haven't yet used anything else.
I would have expected the software to mount the device in both environments.
I wouldn't have expected that as it's perilous letting two operating systems access the drive at the same time - just as hooking an external USB drive into two PC's at the same time wouldn't work either.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
I'm using Bootcamp, and it works all great. Wouldn't it be great to share the same Windows installation between Parallels and Bootcamp?
I was using Q on my Intel MacBook(Qemu for OSX - http://www.kberg.ch/q/ ) and decided to try Parallels... dog-slow disk access made me switch back to Q. Q is GPL'd, and though it does not currently have virtualization, they are working on porting the Qemu accelerator and/or qvm86.
Wow! This must be a PERSONAL letter, just for me!
I fail to see the problem since if you want to run games you simply use Bootcamp instead.
In fact that gives you a better setup since you have what is essentially a dedicated system for gaming that can be tweaked out and then a seperate windows system setup for productivity apps that you don't optmiize nearly so much. It's the ultimate setup because a rogue game (or more like a rogue game deinstaller) cannot then wipe out your REAL data.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
-b.
Imagine having Windows windows and Gnome windows running on top of OS X seemlessly, without seeing their respective desktop backgrounds.
Codeweaver's CrossOver Mac will do exactly what you suggest, run some applications standalone and indeed even without a copy of Windows.
The biggest drawback with it is that it does not support Photoshop CS yet, which would be a major boon to those waiting for the Intel Photoshop to arrive (not out for about another year).
Some of the more popular PC games however are slated to be supported, including Half Life 2.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
Of course it's hard to imagine MS and Linus agreeing on such an API. But this isn't a zero sum game. People might choose to install Windows because with virtualization they know they will still be able to run Linux easily. Bill Gates will still have sold you a Windows license even though you're spending most of your time running Linux. So it's in the interest of MS and Linux to figure out how to interoperate between virtual machines.
Doesn't it make you feel good to know that our freedoms are protected by politicans, lawyers and journalists.
The article is a bit misleading I think: "It is a great prospect and now even Apple is recommending running Parallels on their Get A Mac site:" I read the article, and it seems to be misleading. Apple doesn't recommend using Parallels over Bootcamp. In fact they don't even mention Parallels on their "Get a Mac site". Or did I miss something?
The good news about it for me is that I could run things like a full-fledged outlook locally to hook into calendaring, and use IE to access those pesky internal websites that require IE.
It means it's practical to bring a Macbook to work anywhere now.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
Also, desipte your using Google as a source of reference Google itself clearly disputes your own findings.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
oh sweet so now i can have multiple copy of windows crash on me at the same time and i don't even need a second computer to do it!
-b.
I don't know about any of those titles, but StarCraft runs reasonably well, except for occasional problems with the sound cutting out.
In general, anything that doesn't require any hardware accelerated graphics should run fine, so games that have a software rendering option should be playable under Parallels. However, YMMV.
Ping me in about a week. I plan to test Planescape this weekend if I get the time.
"Live Free or Die." Don't like it? Then keep out of the USA
I'm playing Planescape:Torment under parallels on my iMac. Works great. You'll have to fiddle with the graphic settings in the VM to allow it to change resolutions if you want to run it in its fullscreen glory. The speed is quite acceptable. There are a few graphical "turdlets" when you are moving the mouse around, but these are easily ignored (at least for me).
Based on my experiences, it looks like the reason you can't use a USB device on Mac and PC simultaneously has to do with the low level access being granted.
For example:
I have some NTFS formatted USB Drives. Mac OS X can only READ them, it can't write or delete files.
If I give W2K in Parallels control of the USB drive, I can suddenly use it to delete files, move files and so on.
I normally attach these USB Drives to the Parallels W2K, and map it as a network drive on the Mac. That gives me full control of the NTFS volume from both Oses..
I suspect Parallels just doesn't want to deal with the headaches of managing simultaneous access at a level low enough for W2K to have full control to the point where it can write a file system that OS X can't.
"Live Free or Die." Don't like it? Then keep out of the USA
I'm not sure what you're seeing, but something vaguely similar can happen on poorly supported video chipsets when running on Native HW. If I recall correctly, theres a setting within the game itself that can make them go away. It's one of the graphical options.
I have. They appear to be fairly equivalent, as far as I can tell. I run SuSE 10 at the office, but I am required to run a few windows-only applcations. I have been using various versions of VMWare for the past 4 years to get around that barrier. I downloaded a trial version of Parallels to see what it was like. I was initially interested because VMWare has been fairly expensive to re-purchase over the years, and Parallels is quite inexpensive by comparison.
Both install via RPM and the install is pretty straightforward. I did not find Parallels difficult to configure, but then I have been using VMWare for some time, and I am familiar with the concepts and what needs to be done. The Parallels interface is quite similar to VMWare's, so if you are familiar with one product, you should be able to use the other. In the past, I learned the hard way that VMWare was a fairly memory-intensive application. Once I added an extra gig of RAM to my workstation everything ran pretty smoothly. I don't know if Parallels runs well with less RAM or not, but I would assume that more memory is always better. I have an Athlon 1700 CPU, and it can run multiple Linux applications and a virtual windows session without tons of paging or lag.
Mind you, I only boot the windows VM once a week or so, and run it for maybe 15-20 minutes at a time. If you wanted to run something more intensive, YMMV. I have not tried to run any games via VMWare either, so I have no idea what that would be like. On the whole, I am pleased to say that both Parallels and VMWare both work really well for me. They offer similar performance and functionality, and both are quite stable applications. The next time VMWare rolls out an upgrade that I have to pay for, I will be switching to Parallels.
As other posters have stated, games are probably the holy grail of windows virtualization. I would like nothing better to have an Intel-based PowerMac with a kick-ass graphics card that could give me all the benefits of owning a Mac, with the added bonus of being able to play my favourite games without rebooting.
*** Where are we going? And what's with this handbasket?
Starcraft has an OS X native installer. You don't NEED to run it in Parallels!
Just Google for "Starcraft OS X" and pick a download site. It's not even a third party hack, Blizzard did it themselves.
Blizzard also released a Diablo II OSX Universal Binary Installer.
Gee, I wonder what Blizzard games are still selling for Mac OS X...?
"Live Free or Die." Don't like it? Then keep out of the USA
Its potential for creating a dramatic increase in Mac converts should not be overlooked. To the point, I have a particular user (a CFO of a medium-sized manufacturing company) who spends most of her day working Excel spreadsheets, creating documents, emails and using a browser (webforms, webapps, browsing). It was a constant battle to keep her PC clean of virii and spyware. A perfect candidate for switching to a Mac, except for their base accounting system, which will only run in Windows. I got her a new Mac Mini Dlx, installed and configured Parallels with WinXP Pro and she could not be happier. She's running Mac:MS Office for Word, Entourage and Excel, uses Safari/FireFox for browsers (some of her sites won't behave on one or the other) and bounces into the other PCs on the network with COTVNC. And just a note to the non-consultant folks out there... It's always a very good thing to make the CFO happy.
One of the things I like most about Parallels is their "don't let Windows out of the box" approach. Coupled with an (admittedly similar to MS VPC) easy to backup set of files, should anything go wonky with the Windows install, it's a 2 minute job to restore it completely.
I can see this becoming a much more viable alternative to computer-savvy management level types.
It's no contest, virtualization has it all: multiple operating systems running on the same machine at nearly the full speed of the host's processor with each system seamlessly networking with the next.
As Henry Blake said, "everyone who believes that stand on your head."
Never seen any emulator/virutalizer work anywhere near the full speed. Ever. On Linux or Windows or Mac. Ain't no such animal. You want speed with running one OS inside another? Get a quad SMP system with dual-core CPUs and sixteen gigs of memory.
If my grammar and spelling are off, I am [distracted/tired/careless] (take your pick)
Girard is the same guy who did the article at ARS about Aperture. And both articles sucked horribly bad. First off, he can't write. I give you this sentence from the article:
> Knowing that, it's fair to say that Windows Vista will not be blazing and I doubt you will be able to enable the advanced Direct-X 9 Aero features within Parallels and if you could, you wouldn't want to because the speed would be pretty bad.
Oooh what a beaut! That sentence is immediatley followed by this one:
> At least with the 3-D hardware support in the current version.
His poor command of English pales in comparison to the general tone of arrogance presented throughout his writing. Also, his attempts at humor are stupid and not funny. He attempts to compensate for his lack of skill by making his articles very long and including far too many screenshots.
The man is a phony. Ars can do better. (And generally does.)
whj
It's not intentionally turned off. There seems to be a firmware bug causing some issues. Apple has been working on this, and the latest firmware updates supposedly resolve the problem.
Of course a separate bug is preventing the updated firmware from showing up the Software Update for some Minis, so you have to manually hunt it down form Apple and download an installer.
Given the fact that Apple introduced the Mini largely to lure in Windows users, and the fact that they're recommending Parallels in some of there advertising, I suspect resolving this issue is a priority.
"Live Free or Die." Don't like it? Then keep out of the USA
Can you run Parallels inside of Parallels? And, if you can, can you run Parallels inside of that? Ah, the joys of recursive virtualization...
It really does look like a very pretty, user friendly, finished version of Qemu+Kqemu.
I have to admit that it looks very interesting. The company I work for is starting to port our software from Windows to the Mac and Linux. With this it would be possible for my fellow developers and our support staff to have a single Mac on each desk instead of two systems and a keyboard switch.
Very interesting.
See my blog http://ilovecookes.blogspot.com/ for light hearted technical information.
My concern is that (according to TFA) each OS takes a processor. Does that mean I can't run Linux, Windows and OS/X all at the same time? With VirtualPC (Mac or Windows), I can run several VMs at once. More importantly, I prefer to test threaded Java programs with two processors running to have a better chance of catching race conditions that won't reveal themselves on a single CPU. Moreover, OS/X is the primary environment. Windows is primarily a convenience for dumb internal web sites that require IE (and for testing on a Windows platform, but I've rarely seen issues with Java programs). So, it seems there is still room for another option. Perhaps VMWare will implement some of these things in either a more flexible or simply different manner. Think Different anyone?
Programmers in mirror are brighter than they appear
I just got my MB last week and tried Parallels this weekend. I'll definitely be buying it before the price goes up on the 15th. (From $50 to $80.)
I couldn't get W2K installed* but XP went on fine, as did RedHat 7.1. Ubuntu goes on next, followed by SmackBook.
Slower than native (AFAIK, all of Parallels runs as one thread) but still fun and very useful for what I need it for.** Each OS picks up another address on your LAN (192.168.1.105, 106, 107, etc.) and it's a lot of fun to SSH to a virtual Linux box, make a page in ~/public_html/, and view it in Safari on the same box.
XP runs fine fullscreen (1280x800) and if you have your Mac set up to right-click with the trackpad, you don't need to do anything different in Windows--a quick one-two on the trackpad and I've got a contextual menu in XP. Scrolling also works. 'Command' maps to 'Windows key' just like when you use a Mac keyboard on a regular PC, so that also behaves as expected. Overall, it's great. Definitely fast enough to be useful--it's not like I'm on a 200 MHz machine all of a sudden or anything. Feels like any reasonably peppy Windows box.
* doubly funny because that's the OS they show in the screenshots in the documentation) because no matter what I tried, I couldn't get it to see the CD--it just keeps saying "No boot device available, press Enter to continue."
** handy way to have lots of OSs with me, do testing, troubleshooting, etc. And FreeCell. There's still nothing better than Windows' FreeCell.
Dear Slashdot: next time you want to mess with the site, add a rich-text editor for comments.
It's more often than 5 seconds. And yes, this is inefficient use of the smp design, and even more so of the VT tech. Granted Parallels is a step in the right direction, but until it runs virtualised faster and more efficiently than older alternatives run emulated, it's a joke. The fact that it does not perform any better than alternatives that are meant to be MUCH slower proves how crappy this piece of software really is. I want virtualisation of course, but I do not want it to be done in such a botchy slapped together way that it actually becomes slower than doing it emulated! Thats just nonsense!
Give me REAL virtualisation, not just a piece of hack cashing in on buzzwords.
SMB networking is built into OS X. Very few Mac users I know even realize there's a difference between SMB shares and AFP shares, and wonder why our network volumes are showing up in "Local" and "Workgroup."
I installed Parallels on an Intel iMac recently. I created virtual machines with Ubuntu, Fedora Core, and FreeDOS (no reason, just because I can). All of them seem to work fine, except FreeDOS, but then in my experience DOS never worked well on my parents' Tandy either.
I installed Windows XP today and everything seems just fine and peppy. The IT guy who installed it commented that the installation took less time than on some of the Dells he worked with. My favorite part is the backup mechanism - I now have a fresh, no-spyware installation of Windows XP with Matlab, SPSS, and Access all installed. All of my documents will be stored on a Mac hard disk by a shared folder. So I went to the Finder and made a copy of the disk image, and when I want to revert to a fresh image, all I do is delete the working hard drive, and rename "image copy" to "image" and I'm back as good as new. 8)
I have one question for the forum - like many others, I wish there was native hardware acceleration. Wouldn't it be feasible by installing a Windows graphics driver that sends the hardware calls to Parallels, which then uses Mac native OpenGL to do hardware rendering? It doesn't seem that different from ordinary rendering in a window. This could be straightforward for PC OpenGL games, and for the DirectX games, perhaps the calls can be mapped to OpenGL functions. Perhaps with a speed penalty, but it should almost certainly be better than software rendering. You folks who know more about graphics rendering than I do - might this be possible?
I just installed Windows 2000 and the only problem I had (aside from minor problems like having to find out that they hid the registration process in the freaking Help menu) was that the device detect either locked up or was taking a long time. Two restarts later it finally skipped whatever it was stuck on and finished installing.
For those of you who didn't RTFA, really the only problems with it are:
...and also that a deleted/moved VM still shows up in the VM list. Not mentioned in the article, and which will probably be one of the first things a new user notices, is that the right mouse button is shift-ctrl-click rather than just ctrl-click. This may take a bit of getting used to, since by now you've been trained to just use ctrl-click.
#naabhaprzrag, #sverubfr-000, #agi-fcbafberq, negvpyr[pynff*=' negvpyr-ary-'] { qvfcynl: abar !vzcbegnag; }
I'd probably mod your followup also as flamebait, if I hadn't already posted on the topic. :-)
If you think it is no better than mediocre, that's a fine opinion for you to have. But for you to claim that anyone who feels otherwise could not have used anything else - that's just flaming.
I happen to be quite pleased with Parallels (in spite of the games issue). I've also owned and used multiple copies of Virtual PC and VMWare, and I've done double-boot systems (and even a few triple-boot ones with Linux, Win XP, and Win 98). THat doesn't guarantee that my evaluation is a good one, but if so, that's not because I haven't yet used anything else.
Here's a comment:
Wow, both the article and the summary are rediculously hype saturated. Wake me when Apple starts contributing to Darwine and includes it in OS-X (the Darwine crew are doing a fine job, but Apple's got a knack for sleek integration - and I'm not switching from Linux/Wine until 'sleek' and 'integrated' are in the Darwine project.)
Then I'll even spring for an OS-X of my own to hack onto my box.
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Virtualization is better than dual-booting, but you still get all the natural disadvantages that come with WinXP. To wit: high price tag, vulnerability to malware, and bad karma from supporting the Evil Empire. There are a very small number of Windows programs that I would like to run, but this price is just too high. WINE and Crossover Office represent my real hope for the future.
Some other points: I found the mouse a bit jerky, and no machine in Parallels can have close to the amount of physical RAM (e.g., on my 1.5GB iMac, I could have at most 1GB for a Parallels machine).
Nonetheless, Parallels works really, really well, and it's trememdously convenient. But the article goes overboard in its assessment of its performance.
--Marc
I like having the Windows apps in a penalty box. A couple more months in there to think about what choices they might have made differently, and they'll then be ready to come back out and rejoin civilized society.
According to Cringely Apple has a legal right to use the actual Windows XP API itself due to their 1997 cross-licencing agreement with MS. He claims that he has been told that Apple has long had running in their labs "Intel Macs running OS X while mixing Apple and XP applications."
If he is correct, and OS X 10.5 includes this level of native Windows application support directly within OSX and without the need for virtualised hardware or reverse engineered API translators such as wine then it could actually be a real "Vista killer"
"You can't fight in here, this is the war room!"
m-w.com
Main Entry: 1wrest
Pronunciation: 'rest
Function: transitive verb
to pull, force, or move by violent wringing or twisting movements
I somehow doubt that the licensing agreement allows for that particular use. Microsoft's lawyers aren't exactly brain-dead.
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Additionally, Cringley seems to have a skewed opinion of how OS-X operates; Sure, Mach is a microkernel, but the performance issue they had with it was solved by running a monolithic HAL subsystem that is the only client to the kernel - essentially making the microkernel nature of Mach completely moot.
Though, I wouldn't be surprised if Apple switched to an L4 kernel with a componentized set of POSIX and HAL clients running on top of it (like the HURD - only, you know, implemented). Mostly I would guess this because virtualizing is relatively easy at that point, while you can somewhat easily build disparate APIs that operate cooperatively on the same framework.
It's a lot of work, but it's tedious work, not genius work.
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I'd be interested to see a few benchmarks on this one. eg. Photoshop transforms on Windows under Parallels vs the same on OS X Power PC binaries under Rosetta
My best guess would be that the Windows version would be faster because despite the virtualisation layer, it's still an x86 binary. Might make for some painful choices until Adobe can complete their glacial move to universal binaries.
One of these days I'm moving to Theory - everything works there
Here is an interesting comment from MacSlash poster who noticed what he says is a rootkit potential in the Linux client of Parallels. I'd be interested in hearing from some knowledgable people whether they think this might be a problem in the OS X client as well.
http://www.rootstrikers.org/
Did he leave the BadAnalogyPager at home?
...Miss the BadAnalogySignal?
...Get the zipper stuck on the BadAnalogySuit?
...Lose the BadAnalogyMobile in a New Jersey back alley?
If it's for-profit but free, you're not the customer -- you're the product (e.g., the Slashdot Beta's "audience").
Why not just use the OSX native versions of those game titles? That is what I am doing to play NeverWinter Nights. If you go to www.Apple.com you can search through all of the OSX native game titles, most of the time you only need to download an updated binary.
Perhaps. I was only reporting what Cringely believes.
I did say "If Cringely is correct . . . " for a reason.
"You can't fight in here, this is the war room!"
... have a beowolf all on the one Mac!
Damn, I already moderated this topic. Now I'll have to log in with my sock puppet to comment.
The one thing he forgot to include in his grips/wants list is support for the built in iSight camera. I've got a friend who also has a MacBook Pro and pointed him to Parallels just this weekend. He was pretty thrilled by it, but the first question he asked was "does the camera work?".
I hope they bring out some Parallels Tools for Linux too. Would love to have Ubuntu 6.06 running as smooth and slick as WinXP does.
Let's see, maybe because most games never see a Mac release? While a few of the titles I listed do, not even all of them do. There are a lot of other older 2D titles that were never released for Macs, much less OS X. And even for those few titles that were crossplatform, going about tracking down such releases isn't exactly easy.
By default Parallels doesn't create a fixed size disk, it allocates disk blocks on the fly as you write to unused blocks in the virtual disk... which will completely confuse Windows fragmentation logic (pitiful as that is) and basically give you a maximally fragmented Windows file system.
You know what? You're right. Or then again maybe not.:)
Wabi-Sabi
Matthew
test
I think you could in fact map some portion of the external drive to use with Parallels, and windows would be able to read it - IF the file system was something both systems could access. There's no problem with that since like you say it has to do that otherwise.
The problem comes in when you want to treat the external USB drive as removable media on both systems. Then Windows is using lower level commands to access files over the USB bus, and not really working through the system so much.
There are ways you could perhaps intercept USB traffic and do special things for storage devices that would let this work, but they would be a lot harder to manage. In the meantime just expose a removable drive to parralles and it shoudl just look like another disk on the computer, on it'll not be very about you ejecting until parallels shuts down.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
Though, I wouldn't be surprised if Apple switched to an L4 kernel
Funny you should mention that..."Made up/misattributed quote that makes me look smart. I am on
Yeah, it's "built in" using Samba.