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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.
I've been wondering why a Linux distro doesn't do this automagically with WINE. It seems like such an obvious feature to implement, and would be great for people new to Linux or even those whose who don't know how to use it if it just ran as if native...
Are these guys in Microsoft's pocket with some kind of authorization for the WindowsOS itself, or can I just go on exploiting the fruits of Swedish piracy?
Also, does it come in different colours? Because I know some girls who use Macs. They like their GUI to match their purses.
These stories are free but worth money.
The constant improvement that this product has seen in its short existence is astounding. When you consider that it costs only $80 and has no competition at this time, it almost seems like they're working too hard on it.
If Parallels was publicly traded, I'd be buying up a lot of their stock. These features are too damned useful for Apple to not add to OS X at some point, and the best way would be for them to just whip out the checkbook and buy the company.
Actually, with modern multi-core processors and oodles of RAM, virtualization kicks pretty much ass. When I run parallels in fullscreen mode on my macbook, you pretty much can't tell it's virtualized. It's more responsive than the dell desktop sitting in my office at work. The only thing you really notice is that the video card doesn't support hardware acceleration, so stuff like games suck. Then again, the video card in my macbook is pretty crappy, so even with 3d support they would suck =/
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).
For charity?
Out of good will?
Because of indignant responses from hardcore Mac fans?
Maintaining a separate Cocoa code base for a product, buy and support expensive Mac hardware, maintain Mac software engineers
or let Mac users run our app from Parallels...
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.
What do you call "non-native support for Linux"?! Apple laptops run linux _as natively as it goes_ for ages and this doesn't exclude the Intel based machines. I even could setup a triple-boot on an Intel based Mac (vs. all the dual-boots I had in the past). All running "natively" of course
Now, mod me down freely. My karma can't get any worse...
I've installed it and it is very similar to Classic on PPC macs under OS X. As with OS 9 apps on OS X, a full copy of the operating system is running, but the windows are drawn directly to the desktop (or at least appear to, with some glitching at the moment). I have the Windows task bar running down the left hand side of my screen so it doesn't get in the way of my dock (at the bottom) and desktop icons (to the right). Running Windows with the classic theme looks better as the shaped edges of Windows apps leave a little triangle of the Windows desktop which looks a bit poor. Lighten up the theme and it works quite nicely on the OS X desktop.
:-)
Apple really needs to buy Parallels or do something similar. It would make a huge difference to people moving from Windows to the Mac and eventually, Windows could go the same way as Classic MacOS has under OS X and just fade away. I don't think MS would be very pleased with this development though
"I have the attention span of a strobe lit goldfish, please get to the point quickly!"
And, in addition to what MustardMan said, don't confuse virtualization with emulation.
Saying your "phone ran out of batteries" is like saying your "car ran out of gas tanks".
> I think he's referring to the fact that Intel Macs use EFI instead of BIOS,
> which makes it tricky to load anything other than MacOS.
http://elilo.sourceforge.net/
It's so small, it doesn't get in the way at all. I used the kind of adhesive that doesn't leave residue when you pull it off and you can keep sticking it on over and over. I don't know, works for me.
The soylentnews experiment has been a dismal failure.
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
I'm not that happy with their charging for program updates after a year's passed since you purchase it. I understand it costs the company to generate updates, but I'm certain that Microsoft and/or Apple will produce their own updates that will break Parallels. Updates will be a necessity, and I'm hesitant to buy a product that will generate a long-term expense on my part in order to keep using it.
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;
I'm running this beta build right now - have been doing all day as I do the exciting task of catching up with my accounts (Quicken UK, Windows only). There's some graphical improvements to the interface - I like the better laid-out screen for picking the VM. There's still some interface no-nos (ok button on the left? Nope, shouldn't be the case on OS X) and I think the dock icon is trying just that bit too hard when it turns into a dancing egg timer as you save a machine's state, but overall things are better and things are fine.
I upgraded from a previous install, which means I had a disk image of Windows installed rather than a real partition. What I'm wondering is how Windows would cope with being booted for real on MacBook Pro hardware one moment, then booted again in Parallels another moment. Surely that would kick Windows activation into life?
Cheers,
Ian
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
This is really good for Parallels and will be important for the company in several ways.
Obviously it is a big feature for users who might be interested in Boot Camp and Parallels. One license, keeping the same settings etc.
The thing that will bring the real benefits to Parallels though are related to development. Working with Boot Camp means that Parallels can access the Boot Camp drivers for Windows that Apple writes. Every time Apple updates their hardware they'll update Boot Camp with new drivers. This will make it much easier for Parallels to keep up with new hardware.
Boot Camp adds a driver for the touchpad that includes Apple's right click implementation. Suddenly it's in Parallels automagically. Apple ads a driver to operate the inbuilt iSight. Parallels can start using it too.
Shared documents are potentially great. Apple should work with Parallels to ensure things like the iTunes library (and iTS purchased music) is available in the Windows partition.
Apple have already said that they are not going to include virtualisation in Leopard because they are so happy with the performance of Parallels.
If necessary they'd buy Parallels to ensure that development keeps going on. They might do it anyway to reduce the costs.
the more they over-think the plumbing the easier it is to stop up the pipe
Do you have pictures of it? I'd also like to see your desktop/setup at home, sounds "l33t" :)
Sig: I stole this sig.
It's the control key, not the Apple key, that defines a click as a righ mouse button.
And once you get use to it, you realize that chording is far better than hacking a second button onto a laptop - your hand is always resting by the key anyway, and it makes for a much larger mouse button target to hit with no confusion.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
Writing software that requires Parallels is still cutting out a large part of the market as you have to pay for Parallels AND Windows, and the extra resources a whole XP installation running requires puts more strain on a laptop which is already constrained for resources.
I use parallels to run the things that Mac that I simply cannot any other way. When looking for software I look mac specific because it interacts better with other programs, and also makes use of many key underlying operating system features (like spell checking in text boxes)
It's this last argument that is really important - going forward more and more really nice system resources are availiable to the user of any Cocoa program (or even plain Mac app). If you distribute a Windows app to sell to Mac users under Leopard they are not geing to be able to take advanatge of Time Machine. You could get some of these features with Vista but now you are talking about hundreds of doallrs extra to run your app on a Mac - and that leaves the market wide open for competition.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
Shows Windows applications as if they were Mac ones. Try it and enjoy best of both worlds truly at the same time.
Let me get this straight: First, I have to buy a copy of Windows, so that I can run Windows programs on my Mac?
Isn't this like paying Rosie O'Donell for sex when you're already dating Halle Berry?
I never even use the single button below the trackpad on a Macbook. I tap with one finger for left click, tap with two fingers for right click, and drag with two fingers for scroll. This method doesn't strike me as awkward at all (whereas holding down option while clicking the button is indeed awkward.)
Because there are plenty of people like myself that recognize that the single button has kept carpel tunnel at bay, since I can vary where I click the button.
I _love_ the two finger click on the MBP. It is an elegant solution to an inelegant problem.
I don't know why they haven't implemented it in the AlBooks that support two finger scrolling, since it is obvious that they would support this as well.
There are four features I just love about this release (well, there are more, but these are my main favourites):
All in all an utterly amazing update. I found this screencast showing some of the features.
Aha! You like trackpoints because you keep your fingers on the home row.
Good for you. That helps explain your preference.
Still, you said not having three buttons was part of the problem without explaining why. And that makes me wonder since my experience shows it works quite well, even for applications that need 2 or 3 buttons.
I am also puzzled because you confirmed my complaint about 3-button laptops - that you have to move your thumb sideways for every mouse click - and then said Apple's interface is the awkward one. Have you tried them both long enough to get used to them?
Anyway, my point is that many people who are used to three-button laptops may well find Apple's one-button approach more than adequate. Having used both for thousands of hours, I have - to my own surprise - come to prefer the single button trackpad. Not only for native OS X applications, but for Windows (under parallels and via VNC) and X11, using 2- or 3-button emulation. So much so, that I prefer using my laptop to interface with my Windows box rather than the very nice keyboard and mouse on it.
Apple's trackpad is very good. I'm not asking you to like it. But I'd like you to accept that it will be adequate (even excellent) for many users.
After all, we know what happened to the last OS which did this: by billing itself as "a better Windows than Windows", it signed its own death warrant. After all, who'd develop a native app when it runs Windows apps so well?
Ceterum censeo subscriptionem esse delendam.
Check out Oxygen, its a cross platform XML editor.
http://www.oxygenxml.com/
What I want to know is whether or not this thing is slick enough to permit, for example, an entire engineering shop to switch to a PC only CAD software without ditching all their Macs. I know an engineering company that is all Mac right now but the development of Mac CAD software lags and the emerged industry standards (Autocad, Pro/E, etc) are all PC only. It would be incredibly useful for many small companies, I imagine, to be able to stick with the safe, secure, Apple OS and other Apple applications that they have standardized upon,despite also needing to run PC-only industry software in order to be compatible with the outside world. This would be a matter of how much performance is available to the PC software while working in Parallels.
I find OS X to be the most perfect desktop o/s I've used, so for me its only failing is that it won't run Windows programs. I have customers that would love to run Macs - they'd have less hassles & spend less time & money on technical support issues. But they're bound inexorably to one or two bespoke or proprietary apps, only available on Windows. That's the facts of the matter for me - the deficiencies inherent in OS X are that it isn't Windows.
Personally, I find this to be a pretty minor deficiency, but that's me - in particular I have a spare Windows PC around the place if I absolutely need to do something in Windows.
The parent might be a troll (or he might not be), but he has given me food for thought.
Stroller.
Everything old is new again. This reminds me a great deal of IBM's OS/2 Windows 3.1 emulation layer. You could run Windows applications in full screen, or in "windowed" mode. Also, you could specify that a Windows application ran in its own address space, or Windows applications could cooperatively multitask in a shared process space.
/. anyone else's pages with a deep link, so instead here is a hyperlink to a google image search on win-os/2 to illustrate what I am talking about.
I don't want to
Compare some of those images to the Parallels desktop, and you'll get my drift. Welcome to the early 90s!
The comparison to OS/2 brings up another interesting question for the future of OS X. Ignoring the eerily similar name (OS 2, OS X, ha ha) how much incentive will there be for software publishers to write native OS X applications when emulation such as this exists? Back then you could get a copy of Lotus 123 for OS/2, but running Lotus 123 for Windows under win-OS/2 ran almost as well, with copy and paste support and object embedding, and etc. How many copys of 123 did Lotus sell for the OS/2 platform?
Apple has a long history of supporting compatibility products. Users have had choices ranging from Orange PC cards to SoftWindows. However, these came with somewhat of a price or performance cost. If Windows emulation on OS X becomes ubiquitous, where does that leave OS X as an application platform?
I like OS X a lot. There is an appeal for me to be able to run unix apps along side X11 apps along side OS X apps along side Windows apps. Does OS X not run the risk, however, of following OS/2, NextStep, and Be into obscurity by emulating itself out of existence? True, Apple is a hardware vendor, and they provide a vertical solution of hardware and software. Maybe OS X will survive where OS/2 did not.
Full disclosure, I am writing this from Gentoo on a Macbook Pro.
Even better than Oxygen is nxml-mode for emacs, written by James Clark (of expat fame).
http://www.thaiopensource.com/nxml-mode/
My other car is first.
This strategy was given up in later versions. Warp Connect and OS/2 v4 both shipped only in the full pack flavor. But by this time, Windows 95 was also out and most people were only interested in 32 bit Windows applications which wouldn't run on any flavor of OS/2.
In either case, the problem with attracting developers was most likely much larger a function of the lack of click and drool development tools. IBM's Visual Age ran like a cow compared to Microsoft's Visual Studio and I don't think any other vendor was really in the visual space at the time. (This was the bad old days of Borland's 5.x compiler that sucked canal water for building GUI apps.) Then the nail in the coffin (developer-wise) were the changes to the OS/2 v4 APIs where some API calls that were somewhat common in v2 and v3 would either trigger kill the synchronos input queue (no more keyboard or mouse) or even trigger a seg fault in the kernel. IMO, IBM ought to have shipped the EMX version of GCC with every version of OS/2. If they had done that and supported XFree86 for OS/2, they might have had a chance. On the other hand, though, disk space wasn't nearly as cheap back then. But if they had done that, OS/2 would have gotten the attention of quite a few *nix programmers.