Parallels Beta Adds Boot Camp, Desktop

Verunks writes "Parallels has released a new beta of its virtualization product for Mac OS X. This new release includes one major new feature, something Parallels calls Coherency: "Shows Windows applications as if they were Mac ones. Try it and enjoy best of both worlds truly at the same time. No more switching between Windows to Mac OS." Check out this Screenshot" More interesting to me is the Boot Camp support so you can have a single partition to run IE7 in Parallels to test compatibility of a website but reboot to play video games that need a little more juice.

Incidentally...

I've been wondering why a Linux distro doesn't do this automagically with WINE. It seems like such an obvious feature to implement, and would be great for people new to Linux or even those whose who don't know how to use it if it just ran as if native...

Re:Incidentally...

Wine is not the same thing as parallels - parallels is a virtualization environment that runs the full windows xp operating system concurrently with mac os x. Wine is a from-scratch implementation of the windows API. There is a wine-derivative package for mac (crossover from codeweavers), so people can pick-and-choose the best solution for them.

Re:Wine, CrossOver, and VMs

Check out Oxygen, its a cross platform XML editor.

http://www.oxygenxml.com/ [oxygenxml.com]

Re:Incidentally...

This is a very early beta. Essentially the way they allow one to boot from the "Boot Camp" partition is by adding an extra field in the Boot.ini file and by creating a new hardware profile (mainly used on docked notebooks)

The beta is far from complete, I just tried it on my boot camp partition and the mouse/keyboard were unresponsive. (Even after installing the given tools)

Moreover each time you switch between parallels and boot camp Windows is deactivated Thus I have to go through the reactivation procedure each time !!! i've done this about three times already and I'm afraid it'll just stop allowing me to reactivate it (even though it's a legitimate license)

Re:Incidentally...

i've done this about three times already and I'm afraid it'll just stop allowing me to reactivate it (even though it's a legitimate license)

So you have a bought and paid for copy of Windows and they've made you afraid to use it. Seems like there's a moral in there somewhere.

Re:Incidentally...

what do you mean?

This is the default with Wine... and I believe it's also the way crossover office works. You have to go in and specify that you want a "desktop" to get one. Also... the window borders with wine are actually drawn using your window manager in linux... so you don't even get the ugly XP titlebar and stuff.

So what "feature" is it that is missing from Wine that you see here?

Friedmud

DRM Angle?

Are these guys in Microsoft's pocket with some kind of authorization for the WindowsOS itself, or can I just go on exploiting the fruits of Swedish piracy?

Also, does it come in different colours? Because I know some girls who use Macs. They like their GUI to match their purses.

Parallels Desktop simply kicks ass

The constant improvement that this product has seen in its short existence is astounding. When you consider that it costs only $80 and has no competition at this time, it almost seems like they're working too hard on it.

If Parallels was publicly traded, I'd be buying up a lot of their stock. These features are too damned useful for Apple to not add to OS X at some point, and the best way would be for them to just whip out the checkbook and buy the company.

I Should Write Native Mac Apps...Why?

For charity?
Out of good will?
Because of indignant responses from hardcore Mac fans?

Maintaining a separate Cocoa code base for a product, buy and support expensive Mac hardware, maintain Mac software engineers

or let Mac users run our app from Parallels...

Re:I Should Write Native Mac Apps...Why?

or let Mac users run our app from Parallels...

Not this Mac user. I bought a Mac because I like the way a Mac works. To use your app, I'd have buy a copy of Windows and a copy of Parallels, and then run them - and some people think the Java VM is bloated! And I'd have to deal with the Windows app not being well integrated with the rest of the system. The only way this will work is if there is no serious competition in your market segment.

Re:I Should Write Native Mac Apps...Why?

The Objective-C-to-Java bridge is being abandoned because it really didn't make things easier for Java developers and because it was a pain in the ass to write code with for everyone and to maintain for Apple. (However, RubyCocoa will ship with the next version of Mac OS X because it's a lesser pain in the ass on all accounts.)

You may know more people who have VPC or Parallels than not (I do too), but how sure are you that those people will be representative to the entire Mac market? To the market you want to aim your product at? (Unless it's "technologically competent user who has ever heard of Slashdot", fat chance.)

There's also psychology in it. At its core, the people that are now switching to Macs are not switching *because you can run Windows on it*. They are switching *because you can run Mac OS X on it*; the ability to run Windows on it just pushed them over the edge because Mac OS X doesn't have a 90%+ market share. If they were indifferent to what software they preferred, they'd be using a different brand of computers, and run Windows, not Mac OS X.

Most Mac users, even the ones propped up with VPC or Parallels (I plead guilty), ultimately want to run Mac-native software rather than Windows software. Parallels is life-support for existing software that people need to run, and even if it was free and shipped with all Macs and took up half the memory and disk space that it does today, it doesn't make Windows software into Mac software.

You don't need to think that Mac software is superior to Windows software to concede that Mac software has an advantage over Windows software running in a Mac simply because it gets access to all system APIs to things like address books and keychains and hardware support and preferences, and because it looks like everything else you run. Windows software just think it's running on an isolated box and won't become aware of the Mac OS X side of your computer unless you as a user go to some length and the software itself supports it, at which point the developer will already need to make way in their timeplan and budget for Mac-specific testing.

Still not convinced?

1. Mac market share is currently surging. More people, not fewer, will arrive at the Mac platform in the next few years, and building a dedicated version (and almost no well-designed application will need to be rewritten entirely from scratch) is becoming more and more economically feasible.

2. Would you want to bet your entire Mac user base on a competitor not releasing a native Mac version? Unless it's a turd, people will switch to that in a heartbeat. You will lose out months of sales as you rush a native product to market, or need to pull out of a market completely.

It's *BETA* for a Reason

I installed this as soon as it came out, as did many other Mac users. My Mac (mini DP Intel 1.67GHz, 2GB RAM) slowed to a crawl as soon as I launched it. I had to yank the power cable. I uninstalled it and all was well. This is a common experience [macintouch.com]. If you're just going to try out a new version, cool, go for it, maybe it'll go well. But please understand that it's a beta -- don't plan on getting any work done with this.

Windows is the new Classic

I've installed it and it is very similar to Classic on PPC macs under OS X. As with OS 9 apps on OS X, a full copy of the operating system is running, but the windows are drawn directly to the desktop (or at least appear to, with some glitching at the moment). I have the Windows task bar running down the left hand side of my screen so it doesn't get in the way of my dock (at the bottom) and desktop icons (to the right). Running Windows with the classic theme looks better as the shaped edges of Windows apps leave a little triangle of the Windows desktop which looks a bit poor. Lighten up the theme and it works quite nicely on the OS X desktop.

Apple really needs to buy Parallels or do something similar. It would make a huge difference to people moving from Windows to the Mac and eventually, Windows could go the same way as Classic MacOS has under OS X and just fade away. I don't think MS would be very pleased with this development though :-)

Re:Windows is the new Classic

IIRC the only version with the "don't run this in a VM" clause was Home Basic, all of the higher versions can run in a VM perfectly legally. And it's purely a licensing restriction, Vista Home Basic will still install in the VM just as well as the other versions.

VMWare Fusion - Coherency?

Does anyone know if VMWare Fusion (for Mac) is going to have something like the "Coherency" feature? Also, is the Parallels Coherency feature for Windows-only, or can it be used with Linux in, say, an X/KDE or X/GNOME configuration?

updates

I'm not that happy with their charging for program updates after a year's passed since you purchase it. I understand it costs the company to generate updates, but I'm certain that Microsoft and/or Apple will produce their own updates that will break Parallels. Updates will be a necessity, and I'm hesitant to buy a product that will generate a long-term expense on my part in order to keep using it.

Windows activation?

I'm running this beta build right now - have been doing all day as I do the exciting task of catching up with my accounts (Quicken UK, Windows only). There's some graphical improvements to the interface - I like the better laid-out screen for picking the VM. There's still some interface no-nos (ok button on the left? Nope, shouldn't be the case on OS X) and I think the dock icon is trying just that bit too hard when it turns into a dancing egg timer as you save a machine's state, but overall things are better and things are fine.

I upgraded from a previous install, which means I had a disk image of Windows installed rather than a real partition. What I'm wondering is how Windows would cope with being booted for real on MacBook Pro hardware one moment, then booted again in Parallels another moment. Surely that would kick Windows activation into life?

Cheers,
Ian

Really good for Parallels

This is really good for Parallels and will be important for the company in several ways.

Obviously it is a big feature for users who might be interested in Boot Camp and Parallels. One license, keeping the same settings etc.

The thing that will bring the real benefits to Parallels though are related to development. Working with Boot Camp means that Parallels can access the Boot Camp drivers for Windows that Apple writes. Every time Apple updates their hardware they'll update Boot Camp with new drivers. This will make it much easier for Parallels to keep up with new hardware.

Boot Camp adds a driver for the touchpad that includes Apple's right click implementation. Suddenly it's in Parallels automagically. Apple ads a driver to operate the inbuilt iSight. Parallels can start using it too.

Shared documents are potentially great. Apple should work with Parallels to ensure things like the iTunes library (and iTS purchased music) is available in the Windows partition.

Apple have already said that they are not going to include virtualisation in Leopard because they are so happy with the performance of Parallels.

If necessary they'd buy Parallels to ensure that development keeps going on. They might do it anyway to reduce the costs.

Re:Really good for Parallels

Native hardware drivers available doesn't mean it's a piece of cake to get it working in virtualization. It might be if you, say, was ready to give up the iSight completely in OS X, and only expose it to Parallels (then you could "simply" forward the specific hardware access, instead of providing virtualized hardware), but to get it working properly, where any app, no matter what OS it's running on, can access any piece of hardware, you need much more tinkering with the hardware on the guest and/or host side than just proper native drivers for that piece of hardware in the two environments.

I don't get it...

Shows Windows applications as if they were Mac ones. Try it and enjoy best of both worlds truly at the same time.

Let me get this straight: First, I have to buy a copy of Windows, so that I can run Windows programs on my Mac?

Isn't this like paying Rosie O'Donell for sex when you're already dating Halle Berry?

Truly Amazing New Features

There are four features I just love about this release (well, there are more, but these are my main favourites):

1. You can use your BootCamp partition within Parallels (haven't tried it, dunno about any Activation issues).
2. You can "liberate" the Windows windows and make it look like you were running Windows and Mac OS at the same time, on the same screen - which looks extremely weird (here's a screenshot [watashi.ch]). I guess you could even runn more than one instance of Windows (although I have not tried that!) and mix, say, IE7 and IE6 windows. One note: All windows from a given Windows instance are in one single layer, so bringing one to the foreground brings all of them to the foreground.
3. You can use Mac OS keyboard commands in Windows (Cmd-C instead of Ctrl-C to copy, for example) - something which constantly bit me in the ass, as the Cmd-key used to call on the Windows key and open the Start menu. Cmd-L used to log you out (or something) when you want to focus the URL text field.
4. Drag-And-Drop between Windows and Mac OS. You can drag Files from a Finder window into a Windows Explorer window. Works well with the "Coherency" feature - having Windows explorers and Finder windows side-by-side and copying between them is just incredible.

All in all an utterly amazing update. I found this screencast [michaelverdi.com] showing some of the features.

Coherency is cool

But I'm afraid it doesn't do much for me until it supports Linux in liu of Windows. It's just virtualization, so Linux *can* be supported, right? And should such support be easier since we have all the source code already?

A Better Windows Than Windows?

This worries me severely. It's one thing to allow people to run Windows apps with some hassle (e.g. dual booting, or within a 'Windows' OS X window). But it's quite another thing to run Windows apps as first-class citizens.

After all, we know what happened to the last OS [wikipedia.org] which did this: by billing itself as "a better Windows than Windows", it signed its own death warrant. After all, who'd develop a native app when it runs Windows apps so well?

fast enough for things like CAD though?

What I want to know is whether or not this thing is slick enough to permit, for example, an entire engineering shop to switch to a PC only CAD software without ditching all their Macs. I know an engineering company that is all Mac right now but the development of Mac CAD software lags and the emerged industry standards (Autocad, Pro/E, etc) are all PC only. It would be incredibly useful for many small companies, I imagine, to be able to stick with the safe, secure, Apple OS and other Apple applications that they have standardized upon,despite also needing to run PC-only industry software in order to be compatible with the outside world. This would be a matter of how much performance is available to the PC software while working in Parallels.

Win-OS/2 nostalgia

Everything old is new again. This reminds me a great deal of IBM's OS/2 Windows 3.1 emulation layer. You could run Windows applications in full screen, or in "windowed" mode. Also, you could specify that a Windows application ran in its own address space, or Windows applications could cooperatively multitask in a shared process space.

I don't want to /. anyone else's pages with a deep link, so instead here is a hyperlink to a google image search on win-os/2 [google.com] to illustrate what I am talking about.

Compare some of those images to the Parallels desktop, and you'll get my drift. Welcome to the early 90s!

The comparison to OS/2 brings up another interesting question for the future of OS X. Ignoring the eerily similar name (OS 2, OS X, ha ha) how much incentive will there be for software publishers to write native OS X applications when emulation such as this exists? Back then you could get a copy of Lotus 123 for OS/2, but running Lotus 123 for Windows under win-OS/2 ran almost as well, with copy and paste support and object embedding, and etc. How many copys of 123 did Lotus sell for the OS/2 platform?

Apple has a long history of supporting compatibility products. Users have had choices ranging from Orange PC cards to SoftWindows. However, these came with somewhat of a price or performance cost. If Windows emulation on OS X becomes ubiquitous, where does that leave OS X as an application platform?

I like OS X a lot. There is an appeal for me to be able to run unix apps along side X11 apps along side OS X apps along side Windows apps. Does OS X not run the risk, however, of following OS/2, NextStep, and Be into obscurity by emulating itself out of existence? True, Apple is a hardware vendor, and they provide a vertical solution of hardware and software. Maybe OS X will survive where OS/2 did not.

Full disclosure, I am writing this from Gentoo on a Macbook Pro.

Implementation shows through on Windows 2000...

With Windows 2000 the taskbar and windows are scaled up with no antialiasing, and downright ugly. It seems like this is implemented by making the Windows desktop transparent and maximizing the virtual screen... and they don't have the support for a resizable virtual screen in Windows 2000. I suppose it will work without distortion if I set the VM screen size to match my macbook screen from the start.

(why Windows 2000? Because I already own a copy of Windows 2000, and see no reason to spend an extra couple of hundred dollars when I'm only using Windows as a hosted OS to run a specific application)

All "Windows" windows stack together...

Continuing on with the experiment, setting the screen size to 1680x1050 on my second screen (the laptop panel) lets "coherence" work without rescaling. It's nice, but not as useful as it seems because all the "Windows" windows are still rendered into a single layer... so selecting any of them brings them all up above all the OSX windows.

I was hoping for better. An early competitor to the Citrix technology in Windows Terminal Server, NTerprise, did real window level virtualization. It operated at the GDI level rather than screen-scraping, and you could share local and remote UNIX and Windows windows on the same desktop without any clue other then rendering speed which was which.

On the other hand having the command-X/V/C copy and paste commands work consistently is a BIG boon. Now if only they'd have an option to present a 101-key layout to the virtual machine and keep the rest of the Apple command keys in the Apple world.

Re:Slowdowns?

Actually, with modern multi-core processors and oodles of RAM, virtualization kicks pretty much ass. When I run parallels in fullscreen mode on my macbook, you pretty much can't tell it's virtualized. It's more responsive than the dell desktop sitting in my office at work. The only thing you really notice is that the video card doesn't support hardware acceleration, so stuff like games suck. Then again, the video card in my macbook is pretty crappy, so even with 3d support they would suck =/

Re:GPU access

This is under development by major virtualization companies. VMWare supports it for windows as guest (in beta), and Parallels has said that it was under development for a future release. This is harder than it looks though, since you have to develop a full blown 3d driver for windows and Linux (used inside your virtualized environment) that will send the calls to the host operating systems, in the case of windows transferring DirectX calls to the OpenGL API. If you want to stay generic (to work on both hardware nvidia and ati), you have to limits the possibilities of the card, or else you'll have to make a driver for each type of card you want to support. That's the theory.

Re:Parallels Vs. VMWare

MacBooks and MacBookPro's do support right mouse buttons. Tap one finger on the touch pad for left click, tap two fingers for right click (and drag two fingers around the trackpad for scrolling, or zooming with Control pressed).

Re:Parallels Vs. VMWare

It's driver dependent. Support for it is built right into OS X, the latest Boot Camp beta adds a trackpad driver so you can do it in Windows as well. As for Linux, I have no idea-- there are certainly no Apple-provided drivers.

~Philly

Re:Parallels Vs. VMWare

I came *THIS CLOSE* (holds fingers close together) to buying a Macbook Pro a month ago - it was the lack of a right mouse button and non-native support for Linux that killed it for me.

Something tells me your intent to buy the Macbook Pro wasnt put off by the lack of the right mouse button. Firstly the Macbook Pro doenst come with mouse because it's a notebook. Secondly, OSX supports just about any USB 2 and 3 button mice.

Re:Parallels Vs. VMWare

Just an FYI, but the new MacBook Pros have a "right-click" control panel option whereby if you put two fingers on the pad while you click the button it's interpreted as a right click. Much easier to do than say, and no more "control-click". And the Parallels/Boot Camp drivers for Windows look for this as well.

As to Linux... well, it's open source. Just change the driver yourself. ;)

Re:Parallels Vs. VMWare

What do you call "non-native support for Linux"?! Apple laptops run linux _as natively as it goes_ for ages and this doesn't exclude the Intel based machines. I even could setup a triple-boot on an Intel based Mac (vs. all the dual-boots I had in the past). All running "natively" of course

Re:Slowdowns?

And, in addition to what MustardMan said, don't confuse virtualization with emulation.

Re:Parallels Vs. VMWare

(Can you imagine IE 7 and IE6 as standalone programs on a KDE desktop?!)

You can - http://www.tatanka.com.br/ies4linux/news/ [tatanka.com.br] It's in beta now, but it does support IE6 and IE7's rendering engine.

Re:Parallels Vs. VMWare

Can you imagine IE 7 and IE6 as standalone programs on a KDE desktop?!

I did, once. Woke up sweaty and screaming.

Re:Slowdowns?

Emulation is slow. E.g. a PowerPC executing x86 code by emulation will be much slower than a native x86. There are tricks, like profiling the application and translating, rather than emulating the frequently used bits, but it in general there will always be a hefty penalty. And modern performance critical code will use multimedia instructions which don't have 1:1 mappings to a different instruction set.

But on an Intel Mac none of this is an issue, since the Windows app and a mac one run on exactly the same instruction set. Of course, the API the applications use will be completely different. Virtualisation is about running two kernels simultaneously on the same hardware. Now this is tricky, because OS kernels want to be in sole control of the hardware. The x86 isn't completely self virtualisable, i.e. you can't trap and emulate all the instructions you need to fool the kernel, so you go back to profiling and translating, at least for kernel mode code. Or you can trap many more instructions than you need to. But recent intel chips have a technology called VT which plugs the holes and allows self virtualisation.

So you can run the guest kernel code at full speed, and trap and emulate just enough to keep the guest OS under control of the hypervisor.

Re:Parallels Vs. VMWare

(Can you imagine IE 7 and IE6 as standalone programs on a KDE desktop?!)

You mean like this [imageshack.us]?

Re:Parallels Vs. VMWare

Holding the Command/Apple key while clicking is the equivalent to right-clicking. Or as others have said, you can plug in (or Bluetooth) your own mouse with 2/3/4/5/* buttons. I use both of these techniques when I remote-desktop into my Win XP machine from my PowerBook G4.

Re:Parallels Vs. VMWare

Can you imagine IE 7 and IE6 as standalone programs on a KDE desktop?!

While you can't run IE 7 in Linux yet...IE 6/Flash 9 & below is certainly possible with Wine from any desktop at the following address:
http://www.tatanka.com.br/ies4linux/downloads/ies4 linux-2.0.tar.gz [tatanka.com.br]

Re:Slowdowns?

For reference, Windows XP boots in 7 seconds under Parallels on my iMac. Funny thing is, it takes longer to restore from a snapshot!

Re:Parallels Vs. VMWare

I came *THIS CLOSE* (holds fingers close together) to buying a Macbook Pro a month ago - it was the lack of a right mouse button and non-native support for Linux that killed it for me.

I own an iBook, and the biggest concern I had when I bought it was that I might hate not having a second trackpad button. After having used it, though, I'll tell you one thing: having only one button actually works better. It's actually easier and more natural to hit a modifier key with my left hand while pointing and clicking with my right, and I don't have to look down to find the 2nd mouse button.

Re:Parallels Vs. VMWare

"I came *THIS CLOSE* (holds fingers close together) to buying a Macbook Pro a month ago - it was the lack of a right mouse button..."

You've got to be kidding. Right mouse click works perfectly fine on my MacBook Pro with Mac OS X, and on both Windows XP and Fedora Core Linux using Parallels.