Slashdot Mirror
Parallels Beta Adds Boot Camp, Desktop
Verunks writes "Parallels has released a new beta of its virtualization product for Mac OS X. This new release includes one major new feature, something Parallels calls Coherency: "Shows Windows applications as if they were Mac ones. Try it and enjoy best of both worlds truly at the same time. No more switching between Windows to Mac OS." Check out this Screenshot"
More interesting to me is the Boot Camp support so you can have a single partition to run IE7 in Parallels to test compatibility of a website but reboot to play video games that need a little more juice.
Wine is not the same thing as parallels - parallels is a virtualization environment that runs the full windows xp operating system concurrently with mac os x. Wine is a from-scratch implementation of the windows API. There is a wine-derivative package for mac (crossover from codeweavers), so people can pick-and-choose the best solution for them.
MacBooks and MacBookPro's do support right mouse buttons. Tap one finger on the touch pad for left click, tap two fingers for right click (and drag two fingers around the trackpad for scrolling, or zooming with Control pressed).
I installed this as soon as it came out, as did many other Mac users. My Mac (mini DP Intel 1.67GHz, 2GB RAM) slowed to a crawl as soon as I launched it. I had to yank the power cable. I uninstalled it and all was well. This is a common experience. If you're just going to try out a new version, cool, go for it, maybe it'll go well. But please understand that it's a beta -- don't plan on getting any work done with this.
This is a very early beta. Essentially the way they allow one to boot from the "Boot Camp" partition is by adding an extra field in the Boot.ini file and by creating a new hardware profile (mainly used on docked notebooks)
The beta is far from complete, I just tried it on my boot camp partition and the mouse/keyboard were unresponsive. (Even after installing the given tools)
Moreover each time you switch between parallels and boot camp Windows is deactivated Thus I have to go through the reactivation procedure each time !!! i've done this about three times already and I'm afraid it'll just stop allowing me to reactivate it (even though it's a legitimate license)
Nature journal lied in Britannica vs Wikipedia Ask to retrac
This is under development by major virtualization companies. VMWare supports it for windows as guest (in beta), and Parallels has said that it was under development for a future release. This is harder than it looks though, since you have to develop a full blown 3d driver for windows and Linux (used inside your virtualized environment) that will send the calls to the host operating systems, in the case of windows transferring DirectX calls to the OpenGL API. If you want to stay generic (to work on both hardware nvidia and ati), you have to limits the possibilities of the card, or else you'll have to make a driver for each type of card you want to support. That's the theory.
Of Code And Men
Emulation is slow. E.g. a PowerPC executing x86 code by emulation will be much slower than a native x86. There are tricks, like profiling the application and translating, rather than emulating the frequently used bits, but it in general there will always be a hefty penalty. And modern performance critical code will use multimedia instructions which don't have 1:1 mappings to a different instruction set.
But on an Intel Mac none of this is an issue, since the Windows app and a mac one run on exactly the same instruction set. Of course, the API the applications use will be completely different. Virtualisation is about running two kernels simultaneously on the same hardware. Now this is tricky, because OS kernels want to be in sole control of the hardware. The x86 isn't completely self virtualisable, i.e. you can't trap and emulate all the instructions you need to fool the kernel, so you go back to profiling and translating, at least for kernel mode code. Or you can trap many more instructions than you need to. But recent intel chips have a technology called VT which plugs the holes and allows self virtualisation.
So you can run the guest kernel code at full speed, and trap and emulate just enough to keep the guest OS under control of the hypervisor.
echo -e 'global _start\n _start:\n mov eax, 2\n int 80h\n jmp _start' > a.asm; nasm a.asm -f elf; ld a.o -o a;
It's driver dependent. Support for it is built right into OS X, the latest Boot Camp beta adds a trackpad driver so you can do it in Windows as well. As for Linux, I have no idea-- there are certainly no Apple-provided drivers.
~Philly
what do you mean?
This is the default with Wine... and I believe it's also the way crossover office works. You have to go in and specify that you want a "desktop" to get one. Also... the window borders with wine are actually drawn using your window manager in linux... so you don't even get the ugly XP titlebar and stuff.
So what "feature" is it that is missing from Wine that you see here?
Friedmud
Native hardware drivers available doesn't mean it's a piece of cake to get it working in virtualization. It might be if you, say, was ready to give up the iSight completely in OS X, and only expose it to Parallels (then you could "simply" forward the specific hardware access, instead of providing virtualized hardware), but to get it working properly, where any app, no matter what OS it's running on, can access any piece of hardware, you need much more tinkering with the hardware on the guest and/or host side than just proper native drivers for that piece of hardware in the two environments.
IIRC the only version with the "don't run this in a VM" clause was Home Basic, all of the higher versions can run in a VM perfectly legally. And it's purely a licensing restriction, Vista Home Basic will still install in the VM just as well as the other versions.
Check out Oxygen, its a cross platform XML editor.
http://www.oxygenxml.com/
Essentially what Parallels does in Coherency mode is creates a borderless OS X window with the Parallels desktop in it, then hide any visible desktop pixels. All the windows are on the same layer, so you can't have Notepad under Text Edit under Safari under IE, for instance. Clicking inside one window in Parallels brings every Windows application to the foreground. It's just one window as far as OS X is concerned.