Windows Virtualization on Intel Macs

[tomax7]

Wow, that's a lot of space

Interesting, Apple and Apps takes 22 gigs! Egad, thought Vista was a hog with 10gig...

Before the flames start, please excuse my ignorance with Apple, I'm learning Apple as we speak. Hopefully Apple users here aren't like the Linux propellerheads who bash Windows at every turn and thereby weaken their arguement to change over.

Where can one find specs on installation sizes? I went to Apple's site and it just says 3gig for OSX Tiger, so that is a lot of space chewed up by what, iLife?

btw. I do have a Core Solo Mini Mac available but I can't try because I only have a 60 gig harddisk, 22 gigs are occupied by OS X and the standard apps. Which leaves me 38 to work with. As this is a production machine, I need that space and can't afford to waste it on an additional XP installation that I wouldn't be needing much anyway.

 

[tomax7]

put money where mouth is...

Well I put my money where my mouth is, went out and bought a few Apple (AAPL) shares.

I just dropped three dollars at opening market today. Yesterday it went up 4 with the news of Bootcamp, something must have spooked investors. Wasn't there a warning on the Apple site that installing BootCamp voids your warrenty? Can't seem to find it, so it must have gotten pulled, nevertheless if it was up, that would spook a lot of people, like me also in not trying Boot, let alone OSX.

Side note question, I ordered Office 2004 with XP, is that like a mini XP virtual window in OSX?

cheers
tom

So unless some people start shelling out some cash I wonder how long this will all last? Enjoy it while you can!

 

[vamp07]

Thanks, appreciate the feedback as I want to be able to tell my class to go out and get mini's as it is more affordable for them than the imacs.

But once you do the bios update on the minis it becomes a non issue?

 

[tomax7]

bios update?

I haven't gotten my Mini yet, will be here next week, takes 3 working days from Apple. So I have to flash my BIOS then eh?

But once you do the bios update on the minis it becomes a non issue?

 

[LosJackal]

Argh, yes that answers it... in the negative. Maybe I will hold off until I hear some confirmation of it working.

(You are trying to ping the Windows IP address from the OS X terminal right?)

Not sure what you guys are trying to do, but in my test, WinXP got a different DHCP address than Mac OS X. They can ping each other. However, I was unable to get them to mount SMB shares to/from each other.

Instead, what seems to work is enabling personal FTP sharing on Mac OS X and accessing that from WinXP using your username and password. NB: The beta is buggy, as I encountered a number of Mac grey screen crashes when playing too much with networking between the two. So I don't think this is a workable solution yet for real, stable work....but it should in theory.

-Carlos
www.prodedgy.com

 

[BillyShears]

Not sure what you guys are trying to do, but in my test, WinXP got a different DHCP address than Mac OS X. They can ping each other. However, I was unable to get them to mount SMB shares to/from each other.

Instead, what seems to work is enabling personal FTP sharing on Mac OS X and accessing that from WinXP using your username and password. NB: The beta is buggy, as I encountered a number of Mac grey screen crashes when playing too much with networking between the two. So I don't think this is a workable solution yet for real, stable work....but it should in theory.

-Carlos
www.prodedgy.com

What, so now it does work? Either I keep misunderstanding people or something else is at play. But it sounds like you've got it working how I need it to, if you can FTP.

Thanks so much

 

[LosJackal]

New video showing speed

Some people were thinking the video was accelerated, so I made another one that shows a system clock:

http://www.prodedgy.com/article/52

-Carlos
www.prodedgy.com

 

[hayesk]

Interesting, Apple and Apps takes 22 gigs! Egad, thought Vista was a hog with 10gig...

Before the flames start, please excuse my ignorance with Apple, I'm learning Apple as we speak. Hopefully Apple users here aren't like the Linux propellerheads who bash Windows at every turn and thereby weaken their arguement to change over.

Where can one find specs on installation sizes? I went to Apple's site and it just says 3gig for OSX Tiger, so that is a lot of space chewed up by what, iLife?

Yes, new Macs come with lots of extra software. iLife comes with lots of sound loops for Garage Band, DVD templates, iMovie samples, etc.

Not to mention the Developer Tools, MS Office demo, and other bundled apps. My wife runs MacOS X 10.4.6 on an old iBook with a 10G hard disk. The OS takes less than half of that.

 

[plinden]

Compiling apache2 took:
./configure took 3:09 minutes compared to 0:34 on Linux standalone.
make took 4:05 minutes compared to 1:06 on Linux standalone.

Sorry for quoting myself, but I just tested compiling apache2 on the iMac:
./configure took 3:02 minutes
make took 3:32 minutes

So it is very close to native speeds.

Sorry QEMU, but I'm leaving you for Parallels ... $50 is money well spent, even if Apple do add similar virtualization for free to Leopard. I'll have this for a year.

 

[plinden]

Not sure what you guys are trying to do, but in my test, WinXP got a different DHCP address than Mac OS X.

Same here - my Debian install shows up on my router as 192.168.0.4 and the iMac as 192.168.0.3

They can ping each other. However, I was unable to get them to mount SMB shares to/from each other.

Probably user error. Are you familiar with setting up SMB shares? They have to use the same WORKGROUP, for one thing. Sorry I can't help any more, I haven't done this for ages.

 

[tomax7]

Silly question, delete files

Silly question then, can one delete files from Garage Band as I won't be doing a lot of that. Same with anyone who would use it in an business office setting. I'm sure one can, just found out if I click on the nice arrow beside a shortcut drive to another computer in Mac Hard Drive, it "ejects" it...how does one keep the drive shortcut when rebooting?

Yes, new Macs come with lots of extra software. iLife comes with lots of sound loops for Garage Band, DVD templates, iMovie samples, etc.

Not to mention the Developer Tools, MS Office demo, and other bundled apps. My wife runs MacOS X 10.4.6 on an old iBook with a 10G hard disk. The OS takes less than half of that.

 

[Photorun]

I used "Dr.Hardware 2006" to perform a benchmark test with Windows 98.

See the attached files for the result...

HOLY MOLY!

Those are INCREDIBLE scores considering it's virtualization! The iMac held it's own and was only bested by Xeon and that one P4. That's great news!

 

[speelurker]

Accelerated 3D for gaming

Um, like all virtualization, this has no 3D support. (While 3D support is technically possible via various means, this is not generally a feature or a target for virtualization.) This is NOT a solution for gaming or any 3D application.

But *minus* the 3D video, this solution is near-native performance, period. There's a lot more things people need and want to do with Windows (and other x86 OSes) than games.

It looks like accelerated 3D gaming should be possible with systems with an extra video card:

http://www.parallels.com/en/news/id,8562

Apparently, "Intel Virtualization Technology for Directed I/O (VT-d)" will provide the ability to turn the second video card completely over to the virtual machine. Thus full speed gaming.

 

[Billy Boo Bob]

Side note question, I ordered Office 2004 with XP, is that like a mini XP virtual window in OSX?

No, it's a native Mac application suite (not just a port of the Windows version). Microsoft has a Mac Business Unit (MBU) that sits in their little corner of MS-Land and writes Mac versions of their software (some of the apps, anyway).

Many people (not all) find the Mac versions of Office (Word and Excel, anyway) are much nicer than the Windows versions. And they can read/write documents directly between the two versions (platforms), too. You probably won't be disappointed.

Myself, I like the Mac versions much better. Maybe just because I'm working in OS X instead of XP, so it "feels" like a Mac app. Not real impressed with the fading palettes, though.

 

[LagunaSol]

Well I put my money where my mouth is, went out and bought a few Apple (AAPL) shares.

I just dropped three dollars at opening market today. Yesterday it went up 4 with the news of Bootcamp, something must have spooked investors.

Nah, I think it's just typical profit-taking. The stock was up 15% in 2 days. There are always investors who don't care about the big picture and are going to bail out with the quick gain.

I originally planned on selling my stock when it hit $60. Then when Apple announced the Intel switch last summer, I realized the huge potential and decided my stock was now a longer-term investment. I think things are really going to accelerate in 2007 and beyond, so personally I'm not going to worry (or I'll try not to) about the daily fluctuations. I see big market share gains in Apple's future. Hence a big upside to the stock. Perhaps in 2015 I can retire on it.

(I only wish I had bought more AAPL way back when. A lot more.)

 

[piracy]

Well I put my money where my mouth is, went out and bought a few Apple (AAPL) shares.

I just dropped three dollars at opening market today. Yesterday it went up 4 with the news of Bootcamp, something must have spooked investors. Wasn't there a warning on the Apple site that installing BootCamp voids your warrenty? Can't seem to find it, so it must have gotten pulled, nevertheless if it was up, that would spook a lot of people, like me also in not trying Boot, let alone OSX.

Side note question, I ordered Office 2004 with XP, is that like a mini XP virtual window in OSX?

cheers
tom

Um, no, no one got spooked by anything. It's called "profit taking".

Also, no, there was NEVER any notice that installing Boot Camp voids your warranty (wtf?). There was never anything like that up there, and nothing got pulled, because it was never there in the first place.

 

[alec]

Aghhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhh! Anyone else sufficiently freaking out? There are a lot of thoughts going through my head about the future of Apple... and I thought the 30th anniversary was going to be docile! I'm sufficiently worried that development of games and other software will be neutred because of this. But on the same token, I'm secretly hoping for another 'Rosetta' that will allow near-native running of Windows applications.

PS Where is my 10 inch iPod with bluetooth?

 

[SkipNewarkDE]

Use at your own risk

I installed this thing this morning. To call it a Beta is being kind.

I have a 2.16 GHz MacBook Pro with 2 gigs of RAM. I installed the Parallels virtualization system this morning. It is quite simple to get up and running. A simple assistant gets you set up with a new virtual machine; this runs pretty flawlessly, save for some display artifacts with window updating here and there.

The installation of XP into the newly created virtual machine went as expected. I DID run into some annoyances with the vm software at this point. It has the capability of allowing you to specify an .iso image file, and mounting it as a sort of virtual CD. This setting "sticks", so if I remove the CD, the Parallels software isn't bright enough to figure this out correctly. But what is odd is that it returns a completely inappropriate memory error.

Other problems. Sound doesn't appear to work. Full screen mode doesn't appear to work.

Then the killer... the, "I am going to wait until this is farther along" kind of bug. On the MacBook Pro, if you sleep the machine while the virtualization software is running, it will crash the machine hard on awakening. Not just the application. The. Entire. Machine.

 

[crees!]

I installed this thing this morning. To call it a Beta is being kind.

I have a 2.16 GHz MacBook Pro with 2 gigs of RAM. I installed the Parallels virtualization system this morning. It is quite simple to get up and running. A simple assistant gets you set up with a new virtual machine; this runs pretty flawlessly, save for some display artifacts with window updating here and there.

The installation of XP into the newly created virtual machine went as expected. I DID run into some annoyances with the vm software at this point. It has the capability of allowing you to specify an .iso image file, and mounting it as a sort of virtual CD. This setting "sticks", so if I remove the CD, the Parallels software isn't bright enough to figure this out correctly. But what is odd is that it returns a completely inappropriate memory error.

Other problems. Sound doesn't appear to work. Full screen mode doesn't appear to work.

Then the killer... the, "I am going to wait until this is farther along" kind of bug. On the MacBook Pro, if you sleep the machine while the virtualization software is running, it will crash the machine hard on awakening. Not just the application. The. Entire. Machine.

All points that you should leave feedback on the company's website. They're asking for these types of comments.

 

[SkipNewarkDE]

I didn't think the current Core processor (Yonah) supported virtualization, this feature was to be added with Merom.

I would have switched to the Mac sooner if I could have run Windows as a fail safe, so I think this and Boot Camp are great news for Apple and their market share, which is good for all of us - apart from the likely target of hackers if Mac OS X becomes more mainstream.

I only use Windows under Virtual PC to test web sites I am designing, so I have no need or desire to reboot into Windows (if I could)., the only caveat on my Power Mac G5 is that it's painfully slow, if I had an Intel Mac it should be almost native speed, which is very good.

Actually, this has been a common misperception. According to Parallels, it DOES support it. Other things I have read bear this out.

 

[SkipNewarkDE]

All points that you should leave feedback on the company's website. They're asking for these types of comments.

And they did hear from me!

 

[tomax7]

Buy now, sell later?

Yeah, I met a young fella (~29-30) who bought 1,000 Apple shares when it was $16. Since then he's bought a house, paid for his Computer Science degree course at a University and just putz around working at CompuSmart till he figures what he wants to do with his future.

Yes it is nice ;-)

(I only wish I had bought more AAPL way back when. A lot more.)

 

[tomax7]

Ok, glad, um, to know, um that you are a specialist on stock markets fluctuations and people don't sell on speculation, superstition or spoofs...

Also, I was told about the void issue by a salesguy at a Mac store, so guess he read it wrong because we both looked for it afterwards and he swears he saw something. Maybe it was on the Parelelle site? And he wasn't saying it to be scarey, just a side note.

But glad you are so condensending in yoru reply - gives me the warm and fuzzies for Apple types.

Um, no, no one got spooked by anything. It's called "profit taking".

Also, no, there was NEVER any notice that installing Boot Camp voids your warranty (wtf?). There was never anything like that up there, and nothing got pulled, because it was never there in the first place.

 

[milo]

Ok, glad, um, to know, um that you are a specialist on stock markets fluctuations and people don't sell on speculation, superstition or spoofs...

Also, I was told about the void issue by a salesguy at a Mac store, so guess he read it wrong because we both looked for it afterwards and he swears he saw something. Maybe it was on the Parelelle site? And he wasn't saying it to be scarey, just a side note.

You don't have to be a stock market genius to recognize profit taking. The stock has a huge runup over two days. When it drops less than two percent on day three, with no negative news, that's profit taking. Simple as that.

 

[tomax7]

Depends

Depends on what you construe as "negative news".

http://money.cnn.com/services/tickerheadlines/for5/200604061608DOWJONESDJONLINE001089_FORTUNE5.htm

http://macslash.org/article.pl?sid=06/04/06/091236&mode=thread

These two days being one of the sharpest climbs for Apple in recent times.

http://finance.yahoo.com/q/bc?s=AAPL&t=6m&l=on&z=m&q=l&c=

...but I was just speculating why maybe it dived so much in one day.

You don't have to be a stock market genius to recognize profit taking. The stock has a huge runup over two days. When it drops less than two percent on day three, with no negative news, that's profit taking. Simple as that.