Rubénerd Blog :)

My Applications folder is one full beast!

Since I first picked up my first copies of Connectix Virtual PC for my Blueberry iMac DV I’ve been awestruck by the elegance of virtual machines and have had a ridiculous amount of fun tinkering with operating systems and software I probably would not have otherwise been able to use. Some like FreeBSD have even "graduated" and become primary operating systems on machines I use, others like DOS and earlier versions of Windows get to stick around for bouts of electronic nostalgia.

Given I’ve been so busy with other projects and studying I thought the long Easter weekend would be a great time to look into some lesser known virtual machine programs for Mac: Q and VirtualBox. I’ll be posting my full reviews in the next day or so, but suffice to say they both fill their intended rolls amazingly well and could give the commercial Mac virtualisation solutions a run for their money. They’re free and open source, so you can download them and give them a shot right now!

For the sake of completeness, I talked about Parallels Desktop a lot back in 2006 when I was first messing around with FreeBSD on my then-new Intel MacBook Pro, then switched to VMware Fusion in 2007 because of it’s superior support for Unix-like clients. It’s kind of fun to look back at those posts for me, at the time I thought such experimentation was fun but essentially pointless; I had no idea how much I was actually learning.

If you love tinkering with obscure and/or old operating systems, it’s a great time to be alive! Now all I need is time…

A couple of days ago I finally gave in and purchased a copy of VMware Fusion. Having used the demo versions of Parallels Desktop and Fusion on my MacBook Pro I decided VMware’s product was much more suited to my needs. Parallels seems to be great for running Windows, but my main use is for FreeBSD and other Unix-like development which Fusion has better native support for (official additions for FreeBSD and Solaris anyone?). And with a special offer of $39.00 for first time beta purchases before the final version came out I figured it was the best choice. I should have taken a PR course at university instead.

So now I have the final, official retail release of VMware Fusion running on my MacBook Pro, and I’m loving it. Having a dual core processor with VT support really kicks some serious virtual arse.

Below is a screenshot of fresh virtual machines running OpenBSD 4.1 sitting at the shell, NetBSD 3.1 with a basic OpenBox window manager session, ReactOS and an installation of Windows 2000 Professional humming along:

I do admit I do run a purchased, fully licenced copy of Windows 2000 as a virtual machine to run a few apps that don’t work so well on Wine, and for testing of my websites using Internet Explorer 6. Windows XP and Vista just add useless features and require more system resources, so 2000 works just nice. Well, as nice as Windows can.

Below is a screenshot of AutoPatcher running under Windows 2000 using the Unity feature of Fusion which makes it look as though Windows applications are running on the Mac OS X desktop. I much prefer to use AutoPatcher than Windows Update because it means I don’t have to run Internet Explorer to use it, and I don’t call home to Microsoft.

And here it is running in it’s own window. I actually think I prefer having it this way:

I just love having virtual machines. I can tinker away with really fascinating operating systems and learn so much, without stuffing up anything when I do something wrong. It’s great for sand boxing, and it also allows me to run a scaled down FreeBSD machine with just the bare basics so I can study without distractions. Not to mention compiling applications for different platforms… the possibilities are so exciting!

Or maybe I’m just easily excited ;).

With my ongoing efforts to learn about BSD (as opposed to Linux) and adapt it for use as a low cost workstation OS (which I have been very impressed with so far!), I’ve been using Parallels Desktop on my MacBook Pro to test various releases, including the flag, the DragonFly and the Pufferfish which as far as I can tell so far work flawlessly and just as fast as they do on a regular PC, which I guess is largely what the latest Intel macs are ;).

Been having some issues running FreeBSD 6.1 and the FreeBSD 6.2 release candidates though which is a real bummer :(. Upon booting FreeBSD from either a full CD ISO image, from the Boot ISO image or even from the hard disk (virtual machines I had set up in the 1970 build of Parallels previously) I receive the same string of errors:

Again this seems to be isolated to the FreeBSD (and the FreeBSD based PC-BSD distro) 6.x series on the Parallels 3036 Beta build. The official 1970 release still works fine.

Fortunately after a few minutes looking around the Parallels Forum many others have had the same problem, so it’s not just my machine stuffing up. Then again, had the error been on my machine I could have fixed it I guess.

Parallels Forum postings:

• Problems with FreeBSD VM on Build 3036
• FreeBSD 6 and Build 3036
• 3036 broke FreeBSD 6.1 completely

Hope Parallels addresses this issues ASAP; in the meantime I’ll have to stick with build 1970. Bummer :(