/dev/random

The Parallels WorkstationDesktop team now has an official blog.

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I find that my 2 GHz MacBook Pro (which only has 1GB of RAM) runs noticeably slower than my 1.83 GHz iMac (which has 1.5GB) when running Windows in Parallels Workstation. Activity Monitor shows only 15M of RAM free, so I just ordered another 1G of RAM for it.

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Parallels Workstation just keeps getting better. The latest version finally adds USB support and the full screen mode works nicely.

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I’ve been running beta 4 of Parallels Workstation since it was released yesterday and haven’t seen a single kernel panic. With beta 3, I would have at least two before noon. Sound works great in beta 4 and fullscreen mode works OK on my iMac, although it’s ugly on the MacBook Pro because it switches [...]

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I just had my third Kernel Panic on my iMac today, all related to using a VPN connection in Parallels Workstation. This doesn’t happen on my MacBook Pro using the same Windows VM.

Mon Apr 17 15:16:02 2006
panic(cpu 1 caller 0×0019CAEF): Unresolved kernel trap (CPU 1, Type 14=page fault), registers:
CR0: 0×8001003b, CR2: 0×2e2f1000, CR3: 0×00d3a000, CR4: [...]

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I ran some benchmarks on Windows XP running in Parallels Workstation using PassMark PerformanceTest 6.0. It completely blows away a Dell Dimension 8200. You can see the results here.

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I spent much of today installing & setting up Windows XP on my Mac with Parallels Workstation. I finally got it pretty much the way I want it, so I can use Outlook & a custom database application through a VPN connection while being able to connect to local file servers and print locally. I [...]

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Beta 2 of Parallels Workstation is available. It fixes the kernel panic I’ve seen a few times related to networking.

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I tried Parallels Workstation today and it’s exactly what I’ve been looking for: true virtualization for Intel Macs. I’m now running Windows 2000 & Debian Linux on my MacBook Pro. I ordered Windows XP Home Edition so I don’t have to use the Dell installation disk. Windows runs almost as fast in Parallels as it [...]

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I tried using Apple’s Boot Camp to install Windows XP on my iMac with mixed results. I wasted a few hours and ended up removing the Windows partition.
The only Windows installation CD I have is a Dell-specific one, which also happens to be SP1 (Boot Camp requires SP2). I was able to get Windows XP [...]

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After my first full day with my MacBook Pro, I love it. I was concerned about the “whine” some people report, but this one is absolutely silent. On the rare occasions when the fan starts up, it’s still much quieter than the PowerBook. I haven’t seen any of the other problems people mentioned and the [...]

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My MacBook Pro arrived this afternoon. The first thing that struck me was how small the box is. It’s about half as thin as the box from my PowerBook G4. The MacBook Pro itself is slightly slimmer than the PowerBook.

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Although Intel macs don’t support classic, SheepShaver may be a way to run older software. I’ve installed an x86 build and I finally found a working ROM image, but it won’t boot my 9.2 CD, which is the oldest one I can find. Tomorrow I’ll look for a 9.0 CD which it should be able [...]

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I found a pre-compiled binary of Wine for Intel Macs. It looks like they didn’t fix the problem in context_i386.c that I ran into, they just worked around it:
[mike: 7]$ winecfg
wine: Unhandled page fault on write access to 0×00000000 at address 0xffff0857 (thread 0009), starting debugger…
FIXME : get_thread_context_ptrace unimplemented
FIXME : get_thread_context_ptrace unimplemented
Can’t attach [...]

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CAUTION: extreme geekiness ahead…
I’ve been attempting to build WINE on my iMac Core Duo. I’m just using the raw wine source code, although someone has Mac patches for it. I ran into difficulty with context_i386.c, which contains functions that obtain the register contents from a process using ptrace. Unfortunately the register structure & PT_GETREGS isn’t [...]

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I just put an additional 1 GB of RAM in my Intel iMac. It makes a HUGE difference - the machine feels much faster now.

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It looks like the inability to call PowerPC code from native code is going to be a big problem. I can’t run SourceOffsite because it isn’t native but the libraries it tries to dynamically load are native. The result is:

[mike: 655] $ sos
dyld: Library not loaded: /opt/local/lib/libexpat.0.dylib
Referenced from: /usr/local/bin/sos
Reason: no suitable [...]

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There’s one very big difference between the transition from PowerPC to Intel and the transition from 68K to PowerPC, which may make it more difficult for many people. With the first transition, it was possible for code to switch between architectures, so you can use 68K plug-ins in a PPC application & vice versa. The [...]

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Intel iMac
Originally uploaded by mike3k.

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My new iMac arrived this morning! I’m using it now.

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