Bill Clementson's Blog

 Bits and pieces (mostly Lisp-related) that I collect from the ether.

November 2007
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Running Windows/Linux in a VM on Mac OS X

Thursday, November 29, 2007

I do most of my work on a Mac (until recently, on a PPC PowerBook laptop; but, for the past couple of weeks, I've been using an Intel Core 2 Duo MacBook Pro laptop); however, I do sometimes need to use Windows or Linux (usually for work-related things). In the past (on my PPC PowerBook), I would use Microsoft's Virtual PC for WinXP emulation. It was "ok" (for some value of "ok") for some things, but it was really, really slow. So, whenever possible, if I had to use WinXP, I would use Remote Desktop Connection to connect to a "real" WinXP PC from my Mac.

After moving over to the Intel Core 2 Duo processor MacBook Pro, the situation has changed quite a bit. Now, instead of only having the one emulation option, I've got three major ones:

  1. Bootcamp: Apple's own offering (which comes with OS X Leopard) allows you to dual-boot. This is useful for those people who need to work in either Windows or OS X but not both simultaneously.
  2. Parallels Desktop: Allows you to run multiple OS'es (each in their own VM) under OS X. So you can continue to use OS X applications while running a VM.
  3. VMware Fusion: Similar in capabilities to Parallels.
Having used Microsoft's Virtual PC, I was a bit wary about going the VM route. However, I decided to give it a try as I wasn't keen on the "either/or" limitation of Bootcamp and I wanted to be able to run Linux as well as WinXP. Both Parallels and VMware seemed pretty comparable but Parallels has been out a bit longer and seemed to have more Mac users (my subjective impression, not based on any data), so I decided to try out Parallels. So far, I haven't regretted the decision. The product works really well, is fast, and supports the OS'es that I need. I installed Windows XP SP2 in one VM and Ubuntu in another VM. With Windows XP, I already had a MS WinXP license and a VM image from my copy of MS Virtual PC, so I just used the Parallels Transporter utility to migrate my existing XP setup into Parallels. With Ubuntu, I initially installed the Ubuntu 7.04 (Feisty Fawn) release, created a snapsot, and then upgraded to the latest Ubuntu 7.10 (Gutsy Gibbon) release. There were a few hiccups (Gutsy Gibbon isn't officially supported by Parallels yet), but the Ubuntu forums already had the work-arounds documented.

Parallels

And, did I mention that Parallels VMs are fast? Admittedly, I am still getting used to the speed of the MacBook Pro compared to my old PowerBook, but WinXP and Ubuntu both performed much better than the older machines that I was remote-connecting to. Very nice!

Update-2007-11-30: Mark Hepburn emailed me with a link to VirtualBox, an open source virtualization product that supports quite a few guest operating systems. There is currently a fairly stable beta available for Mac OS X as well. Definitely worth checking out.

emacs Copyright © 2007 by Bill Clementson