The reason I held off buying a PowerBook months go were the rumors of dual OS capability on the upcoming MacIntels. I figured if I could carry one single laptop around which could run multiple OS’s then I could take the 3 laptops out of my backback and save myself some back pain. I wanted OSX as my primary OS, with the ability to run Windows for those horrible times I have to use Visio or MS Project. I also like to have Linux around for the times I want to get really UNIX-y (I am still getting familiar with the Darwin-isms inside OS X). I realize this was already possible with VirtualPC on OS X, but thats emulation of the instruction set, dog slow and expensive. No thanks.
Then this week Apple released BootCamp and we all rejoiced. Contrary to my initial belief, BootCamp itself is not some compatibility layer for MacIntel hardware and Windows. Rather the upgraded firmware released at the same time is the compatibility layer adding some level of BIOS in EFI support or some such trickery to allow the technologically challenged XP to bootstrap itself on this modern platform. BootCamp is really a disk partitioning and driver CD burning utility. Anyway, I installed Windows XP on my Macbook Pro (BTW: you do need an SP2 CD to do this, I tried with SP1 and it didn’t work completely. You can use NLite to make one for you) and it was great. Windows runs REALLY fast on my MBP and even Bluetooth and AirPort work. Nice. BUT, you have to reboot into the Windows, then reboot into OSX. Nice start, but no thanks.
Then later this week, Parallels released their OS X beta. I downloaded it and tested it out. I found some weirdnesses, like it would not recognize the superdrive in my MacbookPro for some reason (have to use on-disk .isos for the OS loads), but overall this is exactly what I was waiting for. This is computing Nirvana. I have OS X booted, I have the ability to boot up Windows XP on demand, switch between them, the instruction set is not emulated (because it’s Intel underneath) and most any x86 OS can be booted in Parallels. In fact, it is possible to run multiple OSs at the same time. A few minutes ago I had Windows XP and Kanotix booted at the same time (screenshot below). Admittedly, this did impact the overall system performance considerably, but it was usable (1.83 Ghz Core Duo, 1GB RAM).
Things I have discovered so far about Parallels: A 4GB “partition” and 300MB of RAM is all that is needed to install Windows XP Pro, Office XP, Visio 2002, MS Project 2002, Remedy ARS and the Cisco VPN client. Each guest OS actuallty obtains its own DHCP lease (I initially thought that the host OS would NAT it’s own connection somehow or something) and if connected to the Cisco VPN client in the host OS, then all the guest OSs lose their network connectivity (The Cisco client gets all Pol Pot about access to the network connection I guess)
Summary: I will be buying Parallels for OS X as soon as it becomes available to buy, provided it is priced well of course.
