Andrew Pratt

Fun with Parallels

I've been playing with Parallels on my MacBook Pro to allow me to play with Ubuntu and XP from within OS X. The software is simply amazing in how smooth it runs and how well it holds your hands while setting up the virtual worlds for the OS's to run within. Each release of the beta's add new functions and make it even more powerful with the latest giving me drag and drop support between the OS's and a coherence mode that stips away the backgrounds to overlay one OS's apps on top of OSX...meaning that I could have Office for windows sitting in my Dock for me to use even though its a windows app. There's a few downsides in that USB support is still iffy and its a little slower then when I run XP in BootCamp (allows for a true dual boot into XP or OSX) but its a lot more convientient that having to shut down OSX and reboot into XP.

Anyway at one point tonight I had OSX running with two guest OS's (XP Pro and Ununtu) so I grabbed a screen grab to show you.

Steve Tannehill

Re: Fun with Parallels

Yeah, I had real fun with Parallels. I ignored the warning against interrupting a reboot if you share a Boot Camp partition with Parallels.

That trashed system files that made it impossible to boot anymore.

Moral of the story: follow the instructions. Back to square one.

- Steve

Andrew Pratt

Re: Fun with Parallels

Mine is shared with BootCamp as well but it seems to work fine. I did have to call Microsoft to reauthenticate XP again in Parallels but that went smoothly enough.