Parallels has released a new beta of its virtualisation 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.” Screenshot.
This “coherence” feature combined with the integration features of Virtual PC (Windows applications are shown in the Dock, Start Menu is accessible from the Dock) would totally rock!
I’ll admit, this is DAMN impressive.
I believe they’re planning 3D acceleration at some time. That should allow playing games at (near?) native speed while will finally be what brings me over in favor of boot camp.
It would still be only on one core, and with reduced RAM. So It wouldn’t be /ideal/ gaming, but fine if you’re running a game that doesn’t require you to kill all your processes and explorer just to maintain 25 fps.
Hardware acceleration would bring more efficency in running normal apps, as well as support for Aero in Vista.
For years tried to use virtualization in linux with VMware and copying files and cut/paste still are so unintuitive, and performance still sucks.
This will bring virtualization to a whole new level. I think that apple must buy this product and add to OSX 10.6, with a nice pc –> mac converter.
BTW, booting the boot camp partition inside parallels is a great feature!
It looks like all they’re doing is either not rendering the root window (for lack of a better term) or making it transparent. I’ll bet money you can’t interleave native windows with windows in the VM.
That said, it’s a neat hack.
You mean like this?
http://flickr.com/photos/yesno/311726811/
That’s very cool. Is that in the current Parallels?
They’re not interleaved. All of the VM windows are behind the others on a single plane.
Ah, you are right. This otherwise impressive screencast shows that clicking an XP window brings them all to the top;
http://michaelverdi.com/index.php/2006/12/02/parallels-screencast/
They don’t look intermingled to me… I think all OS-X windows there are on top of all XP windows. As raji said, the hack is having a transparent root/desktop window for XP and showing it exactly overlapping the OS-X desktop. I haven’t tried it yet, but I guess they put some extra care in click passing so that it looks like you can focus windows “as if” they were all on a single desktop.
I’m not sure I appreciate this kind of “cosmetic” coherence over true per-application remoting (a la RDP) or hosted execution (a la WINE), but I suppose it’s a practical quick fix for things like drag-and-drop.
While you may be right, that’s a total assumption. You don’t know that to be the case, and nothing suggests it is except the screenshots you’ve seen.
Also, even if that’s the case, who cares? Isn’t it still really really cool?
I second raji’s thesis, as in parallels’ own forum you can read about people noticing artifacts when moving windows really quickly or in some cases minimizing them: the desktop root window was not erased quickly enough, basically showing chunks of the XP desktop background.
I’m sure at parallels they’ll work to minimize such glitches, but for now there’s no such thing as a general functional integration of the two desktops. Actually “shows Windows applications as if they were Mac ones” is a bit misleading here
More like a smart overlapping plus some hooks from the VM to host via the parallel tools you have to install under XP.
Still, if that’s what you need, I suppose that’s excellent.
Edit: typos
Edited 2006-12-02 21:59
It’s so incredible… I could nearly say it’s fake but… damn, if it’s true, what more could you ask for? Btw, nothing can stop Parrallels from doing for Linux as the kernel is totaly open, so why not do it? Maybe they had to sign some paper at Redmond so they could do this with Windows somehow legaly? Putting this on linux would simply sign the end of MS monopoly.
It’s so incredible… I could nearly say it’s fake but… damn, if it’s true, what more could you ask for? Btw, nothing can stop Parrallels from doing for Linux as the kernel is totaly open, so why not do it? Maybe they had to sign some paper at Redmond so they could do this with Windows somehow legaly? Putting this on linux would simply sign the end of MS monopoly.
1. Linux market share only .4%.
2. From that .4%, how many of them who:
a. Buy the product? (probably very small fraction)
b. Ask to GPL the source code?
c. Make a clone?
There’s already a version of Parallels Workstation available[1] so you both look like fools.
http://www.parallels.com/en/download/workstation/
I’m amazed that a grandparent comment score goes up even after the paret comment
0.4% market share or Desktop share?
If approximately half of the sites on the web run on some subset of that 0.4% of the market as you claimed and the remainder of the Linux boxes are Desktops what are the other 99.6% of the computers in the world doing?
Obviously, at least to me, this can’t be the case.
Well, considering we are talking about a product specifically designed for workstations and desktops, he probably figured anyone reading his comment would have the intelligence required to figure out what he means. Obviously features like Coherance are not required on a server.
Linux has at 3-5% of the desktop at last count. If it really was merely .4% as you claim the odds of linux user groups forming, or linux users knowing any other linux users would be pretty small.
except that this isnt a windows replacement, its merely another way to run winblows..
1) They probably sell more copies of Parallels Desktop for Mac in a day than they sell Workstation for Linux in a month. VMWare for Linux is free, whereas Parallels is the only reliable VM solution for Mac. Parallels is focussing on where the money is.
2) Parallels doesn’t need Microsoft’s permission to make a VM product and add these kinds of features, they simply need to write a driver. Where did you get the ludicrous idea that writing a driver requires permission from Microsoft? All Parallels Tools is, is a package of drivers that interfaces with the VM. Furthermore, that would be a violation of Antitrust laws with little to no advantage to Microsoft.
3) Putting this on Linux would do little to nothing. It would waste more resources due to having 2 OS’ running, there are no compelling Linux apps that aren’t available on Windows as well anyways and you would still need to buy a copy of Windows to even use Parallels, hence it wouldn’t hurt Microsoft’s sales one bit. I also highly doubt that people would run Windows on-top of Linux instead of just running Windows normally. A whole lot of added complexity with little to no actual benefits to any non-geek user.
Your logic is flawed beyond belief. Did you even think before you posted?
There’s actually a better way to implement the coherency feature using seamless RDP. Instead of rendering everything to a emulated frame buffer, the display could be exported for each application through the RDP protocol.
I’m currently doing this with Windows in qemu running headless as a daemon.
I wonder where the promised beta of VMWare is!
Just tried this out with my boot camp install and could not get coherence to work.
Everything works but when I click on the button for the Coherence option it doesn’t do anything.
Gonna try with a fresh install of Windows in Parallels.
You need to install Parallels Tools:
Parallels Desktop > Actions > Install Parallels Tools
Do you install that on the Mac or in the Windows session? I installed those in Windows (The Boot Camp)
?
>Do you install that on the Mac or in the Windows session? I installed those in Windows (The Boot Camp)<
You have to boot into windows and install it, then boot back into osx and install it through parallels as well, then it will work.
I downloaded and installed this beta and use it with my bootcamp partition and it works fine, a little buggy but nothing that shouldn’t be easy to fix by the parallels team. Really a nice app, can’t wait for this to be officially released so i can buy it.
Yea, tried it and it doesn’t work. But it’s a beta, maybe they will get it worked out later.
I tried this on a new 24 inch Imac Core Duo 2. So I know my computer is up to the task.
Scratch that. I figured it out.
At least in my config I didn’t understand how the tools are installed.
You go to Paralles / actions / install tools
Then you have to go into my computer on your Windows desktop and then run the tools application (It puts it there as if you have a CD rom in the Windows image)
Then you can use the Coherency.
It works sweet, set your taskbar to auto hide and off to the site and you almost cant tell you have Windows running.
Sweet!
I plan to use something like this. My next computer will most certainly have Windows Vista pre-installed. Yet I want GNU/Linux to be my primary OS, so I’ll be uninstalling it. However, I won’t mind running Vista virtualized inside of GNU/Linux.
The site claims that their Parallels Workstation product allows GNU/Linux to be the host operating system while many other operating systems, such as Windows Vista, can serve as guests.
Great!
Maybe they’ll add the coherency feature to their workstation product?
I’ll have to weigh in the other alternatives like VMWare and Xen before I decide to buy anything.
Edited 2006-12-03 00:20
This is Windows booting off it’s own partition, then, without any emulator shenanigans like VM or qemu, correct?
So now you’re paying for an OS X and an extra Windows license. Hmmm.
They should really just market this for gamers, since I can’t think of any other programs that are Windows only.
They should really just market this for gamers, since I can’t think of any other programs that are Windows only.
You should think a bit more
Well, games performance is absolutely horrible in Parallels. On the other hand, there really is a TON of software that is available for Windows only and not available for Macs at all. You really should look at non-Apple websites more often and you’ll find a lot of stuff all over the place. For example, medical software, insurance software, lots of educational software, etc. all does not have Mac versions available. Be realistic.
I was really going for the consumer style software, not really the one-off business apps out there. But ok, I suppose I could run our .NET laser welder program off a Mac in parallels. Why I’d want to do that, I don’t know, but apparently I could.
Thanks for clearing that up.
Office 2007?
“Office 2007?”
Why, what is wrong with Office 2004 (for Mac)?
Personally I use NeoOffice.
I used Office 2004, it was a bit unreliable (crash wise) and had some quirks (Especially character encoding issues, but I guess that they’re generic max problems), but apart from that… I really appreciated the print to PDF feature that has only just arrived in Office 12.
They should really just market this for gamers, since I can’t think of any other programs that are Windows only.
Let’s see …
The sofware to sinc my (very old) Handspring is not OS X native.
The software to sync my eBook1150 is not OS X native.
The software allowing me to put my own content (not purchased ebooks) on the eBook is windows only.
The latest versions of Windows Media Player are windows only.
All of those are reasons I’m keeping a Windows partition on my Dell e1405. (Which will have either Ubuntu or Suse on it — as soon as I can figure out how to make Parted work. [I have been having no luck getting it to format the 45 gigs of “free space” I carve out of my Windows partition.])
He should rephrase that to “I can’t think of any Windows programs there isn’t an OS X Alternative.”
Because a lot of the programs, if they aren’t written for Mac, have an alternative, albeit not all, but there’s quite a few.
I would be betting we’ll be seeing something like this in Leopard, if not the next version for sure.
The promised VMware beta is available to beta testers.
Parallels (the new beta) still makes my macbook reboot whenever I try to boot off the haiku buildfactory image. I resize it to 4 gigs after renaming it from haiku.image to haiku.hdd, and then setup a machine using windows/windows xp, 512 megs ram, and everything else default. When I try to boot, the machine reboots.
Just tried with the dec1 build of Haiku. Anyboy else seeing this?
Oh yeah, and Parallel’s staff won’t respond to my support requests/emails. I’m pretty ticked off about that. I paid for the product, they claim email/online support within a few days, and I’ve been waiting weeks with multiple mails, and no response. Not good CS, and no phone to complain.
Edited 2006-12-03 03:14
Yep, I tried Haiku a couple of weeks ago on BOTH Parallels (PC/Mac) and VMware (PC) and ALL those runs made OSX or Windows crash and reboot.
I am wondering what the Haiku kernel is doing…..
Not sure what it’s doing, but no matter *what* it’s doing, it should *not* be able to crash OSX from within a virtual machine. That’s a bug.
I’m running Haiku in qemu on iMac G5. It’s running impressive. So there’s nothing wrong with haiku kernel!
Now that Apple has fixed the glaring security hole that Parallels previously exploited, anybody care to test if the new installation of Parallels follows normal guidelines? That is, since Parallels installs Kernel Extensions, does the Installer now actually ASK YOU FOR YOUR ADMIN PASSWORD before proceeding?
I just tried installing the very first release of Parallels that I happen to have on CD on my other Intel Mac, and it asked for my password. Can I have some of what you are smoking?
“there are no compelling Linux apps that aren’t available on Windows”
That’s probably true, though IMHO misleading. Many great *nix apps get ported to windows because *nix has a philosophy of freedom and sharing. That’s the beauty of open source. Eg:
* Apache
* PHP & Perl & Python
* Mono
* The GIMP
* GAIM
* ImageMagick
* Postgres & Mysql
* GCC
* OO.org
* Postfix
etc
Some of those apps are pretty compelling to me. Some others that are exclusive to nix:
* Postfix
* BIND
* Bash
* Amarok
* Open SSH
* K3B
* Evolution & Kontact
etc
I think it’s a little unfair to infer that no great apps are produced on *nix, even if that wasn’t your intention.
Getting back to the subject, I think a product like this could in fact do well on Linux if it worked reliably and in an integrated fashion. Even if linux desktops do only constitute 0.4% of desktop computers, that may still translate to millions of potential customers.
Even if linux desktops do only constitute 0.4% of desktop computers, that may still translate to millions of potential customers.
More important is, who are these 0.4% of Linux desktop users? Imagine they are students and future decision makers, writers, journalists, the more talented ICT professionals/students, teachers, scientists, etc.?
If they were (and I couldn’t tell, although I have my suspicions
) they (sorry to say) matter way more for future desktop market share development than 20% or more Windows 98 users who couldn’t care less, and probably don’t know what an operating system is (why should they have a need to).
Interesting times, anyhow.
More important is, who are these 0.4% of Linux desktop users? Imagine they are students and future decision makers, writers, journalists, the more talented ICT professionals/students, teachers, scientists, etc.?
If they were (and I couldn’t tell, although I have my suspicions
) they (sorry to say) matter way more for future desktop market share development than 20% or more Windows 98 users who couldn’t care less, and probably don’t know what an operating system is (why should they have a need to).
Interesting times, anyhow.
Hmm, I imagine different thing. After they have enough money, they will buy Mac and use Parallels Desktop to run Linux. Probably there will be coherence mode for Linux later.
I’d like to say that “Windows is current desktop technology, Mac OS X is future, and Linux is experimental”. Out of zealotry, Mac OS X is really beautiful. The SDK and the Obj-C language too.
The story is different for server; I believe in Unix.
Some others that are exclusive to nix:
Psst. Let me let you in on a little secret: all of those run on Windows and most of them (the non-KDE bits) do so entirely native to Win32 (i.e., without Cygwin or even SFU).
It a sort of reminds me of OS/2 with the WinOS/2 feature enabled, providing seamless integration of OS/2 and Windows 3.1x or Win32s applications from the same desktop.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/OS/2
It seems very nice and could provide the answer to one’s prayers should one need top use a few Windows only applications alongside Mac OS X.
Sheesh, this little company puts Microsoft to shame.
Those guys couldn’t even get VirtualPC compiled to a universal binary.
And more surprisingly, Microsoft has Kissed the Profits Goodbye.
Is it able to use iSight yet. Apple finally has a Windows iSight driver, but the last time I tried Parallels couldn’t use it due to the way it accesses USB devices or something.
Whoa! If this is legit and they continue to improve the beta (include even more native Windows abilities), I will seriously consider switching to a Mac.
Whoa! If this is legit and they continue to improve the beta (include even more native Windows abilities), I will seriously consider switching to a Mac.
I think you get the idea wrong, it’s not the same league with wine, but with vmware. You still need a legal Windows copy.
GNU/Linux has 0.4% marketshare but I wonder how many people use both Windows and Linux. Probably a whole lot more! Thanks to virtualization and dual booting, you can try different platforms without forfeiting even 1% of your existing platform, except for 3D gaming with virtualization.
Over half of the people in a Microsoft endorsed forum I visit: channel9.msdn.com run GNU/Linux and Windows. The topic is quite frequently GNU/Linux, almost as frequent as Windows Vista and Visual Studio/.NET topics. Whats better? Hearing what real Microsoft employees have to say in these threads.
Edited 2006-12-03 17:47