A review of the new Parallels Desktop for Mac. “Parallels Desktop for Mac has come along very nicely in only a short of amount of time. The software runs very smoothly and is priced reasonably at USD 79.99. Parallels has stated that in their next version, they will finally include 3D acceleration. Although the lack of 3D acceleration did not bother me, I did wish that they would have included more features for alternative operating systems like Linux.”
…better Linux support in the form of the “Parallels Tools” driver set. I would very much like to be able to run e.g. Ubuntu in the same way I can run Windows. AS far as I’m concerned, the whole deal of 3D accelerated graphics is very secondary in comparison.
Now, I fully acknowledge that developing a universal set of “Parallels Tools for Linux” might be problematic, but at least I’d like to see “Parallels Tools for Ubuntu” and maybe a few other distros*.
* Actually, I don’t. I for one would happily see the Linux world to rally behind a single distro, preferably Ubuntu, but that is another discussion.
Parallels is sweet.
After the trial, I bought it. I’m running XP/Pro on it… I ‘only’ have 1GB of RAM, but by giving XP/Pro 384MB Ram in the VM I found that everything runs the best for my purposes.
“* Actually, I don’t. I for one would happily see the Linux world to rally behind a single distro <snip>”
Yes… OpenSuSe :o)
Also… even though you *can* , I can’t imagine why someone (who is not a developer) would want to install Vista in a VM and not XP…
Edited 2007-03-28 09:41
“Parallels is sweet.”
No argument there! 🙂
“After the trial, I bought it. I’m running XP/Pro on it… I ‘only’ have 1GB of RAM, but by giving XP/Pro 384MB Ram in the VM I found that everything runs the best for my purposes.”
Yes, about 400MB RAM in the VM is quite sufficient to get a working XP environment.
“Also… even though you *can* , I can’t imagine why someone (who is not a developer) would want to install Vista in a VM and not XP…”
A redundant question since I cannot imagine why anyone (who isn’t a developer) would want to install Vista on anything. 😛
Scratch that, I can’t imagine any developers *wanting* to install Vista although quite a few probably are *forced* to do so. 🙂
I bought it pre-order, $49.99. With 1.5G Ram MBP, run XP with 512M very nice. But still can’t play game in windows that requires video acceleration. I didn’t expect Parallels is able to, since other VM can’t do that either
.
Linux development is so-so I think. Ubuntu installation on the latest version of Parallels stuck, after 3rd retry, I didn’t bother to try again. I think If I’ve already had MacOSX, why should I run Linux?
VMWare claims to have DirectX 8 acceleration enabled in Fusion. Anyone tried that yet?
It’s enabled in VMWare Fusion Beta 2 but I haven’t tried it yet. I use Parallels+Bootcamp and an eagerly awaiting being able to use 3D apps in Parallels. Currently it won’t even run Tiberian Sun (A game that needs a P166) as it only has 8MB VRAM.
Yes, I have an it runs fine, so long as it’s DirectX 8 or earlier.
3D acceleration will be an issue for a lot of people. Vista’s interface uses 3D acceleration for its GUI, just as the Mac it.
There are gaps in the Mac software footprint. There is one of two decent CAD programs, no CAM programs that I am aware of. Something like Rhino 3D is unequaled in any software for Mac.
Most of the 2D “desktop” programs, and little helper apps exist on both platforms, anyway. You can get word processors, spreadsheets, calculators, but 3D design software is little better for the Mac than Linux.
For some reason, using your tax Dollars, science applications like Worldwind were written Windows-only.
Parallels is very good at doing what most users want; run their Windows apps on a Mac. I personally love the app and it works well. It isn’t a virtual machine solution in the same way VMWare’s Workstation is.
Parallels doesn’t support snapshots, rollbacks and inpersistant disk images (whereby the disk image stays static and all changes are saved as a diff), allowing you to setup a machine that discards all changes once shut down (perfect for testing software installs)
Parallels also doesn’t have the driver support as VMWare. There is little to no Linux support with Parallels, where VMWare provides full drivers.
In this respect I think VMWare is a different product all together and much more aimed at the enterprise ‘consolodation’ market.
Is there an option to boot the OS installed in Parallels separately (without OSX running in parallel).
I don’t think so. My understanding of a virtual machine is a software environment, running on top of an OS, that lets you emulate a hardware setup. I think, for what you want to do, you would need Apple’s BootCamp.
What would really be nice is if you could Install another OS on a separate partition, then access that partition with Parallels. I don’t know if that is possible but it sounds like a cool feature.
What would really be nice is if you could Install another OS on a separate partition, then access that partition with Parallels. I don’t know if that is possible but it sounds like a cool feature.
The sticky wicket is the driver profile. As you said, the VM creates all it’s own devices, so trying to boot a VM image on the bare hardware is akin to pulling a drive out of a physical machine and booting it in a different physical machine.
That being said, I can think of a way to do it with Linux using a distinct initrd and kernel for each mode, but it wouldn’t be trival. I suspect Windows would fail with ‘inaccessable boot device’. If you did get it to boot, it would complain about activation.
(Replying to myself)
I suspect Windows would fail with ‘inaccessable boot device’. If you did get it to boot, it would complain about activation.
Apparently Paralells has worked it out, that’s pretty slick.
Kinda. The new version of Parallels can boot off a bootcamp partition. Create a bootcamp partition, install your OS into it. You now have a dual boot system. Now when you run Parallels in MacOSX you should be able to boot off that partition.
Not tried this myself as Windows doesn’t deserve a dedicated partition on my Mac! 😉
Seriously though. Bootcamp + Parallels allows you to start Windows under MacOSX and to boot the machine straight into Windows for 3D stuff or anything else that requires the full use of the hardware.
See the bootcamp section of the Parallels manual for more details. http://backend.parallels.com/files/upload/Parallels%20Desktop~*…
Edited 2007-03-28 12:46
Lol! Well said! 😉
Seriously, it’s nice to know you can do that though.
Is there an option to boot the OS installed in Parallels separately (without OSX running in parallel).
Yes, but it works the other way around:
1. First, use BootCamp to create a partition for XP (no need to reformat) and install it.
2. Then, tell Parallels to use XP from that partition too.
That way, you can boot to XP with BootCamp (for instance to run a game that requires 3D acceleration) or run it inside Parallels without leaving OS X.
edit: uh… I took too long to click Submit again :/
Anyway, since there is no “delete post” button: Parallels doesn’t support diffs?! I loved that feature on VirtualPC (the original, Mac version). I seriously hope that has a higher priority than 3D acceleration.
Edited 2007-03-28 13:02
Yes, but it works the other way around:
1. First, use BootCamp to create a partition for XP (no need to reformat) and install it.
2. Then, tell Parallels to use XP from that partition too.
Do you know if this work with the windows/linux version as well if I have a dual boot setup?
Parallels is expensive. Seems like a waste of money to me. I think I read an article here about VirtualBox (www.virtualbox.org) — they supposedly have some preliminary MacOS X support so I imagine you’ll be able to run Windows or Linux on top of MacOS X “real soon now.”
Parallels is expensive
Say what?! $79 is expensive? And I think the Linux version is only $49 or $59. This is crazy. Shoot, I paid $50 for OpenBSD (bought a CD) when I didn’t even have to, just so I could help the project out. People don’t want to pay for anything anymore!
The Windows/Linux version does not come with Parallels Compressor (+$50) which is included with Parallels Desktop for Mac.
Parallels: Tried and tested software that works well. Integration with Bootcamp, Coherence, Parallels Tools and Parallels Compressor being useful included features.
VirtualBox: Initial MacOSX version not yet available, currently in development.
No, $79.99 doesn’t seem like a bad deal at all.
By expensive you mean you actually have to pay for it instead of it being free/open source. If you want free use Qemu, Virtual Box, KVM, Xen or VMWare Server/Player on the OS of your choice otherwise stop being cheap and pay the developers wages. Parallels and VMWare have sunk huge amounts of money into developing these virtual machine and their supporting software ecosystems, the least we can do is pay them $79.99 to thank them for that. I bought my fiance Parallels for Chrestmas and thought it was quite cheap, particularly with a years free downloads of updated.
I bought it. I use it extensively.
For what is promised it’s cheap. For what works correctly, it’s expensive.
It’s improving at a decent pace though. And the last free update was appreciated on my end. Given said free update is wasn’t a bad deal at all, but you don’t get a guarantee of free releases (or if I did I totally missed it).
They were running a special offer around Christmas for free updates for a year which presumably means only those serial numbers broughtd uring this period (as well as the ones bought after the vnew version launches, obviously) will work in the new version as they give a free,fully functional trial download on their site that you can use your serial number to activate so you don’t need your serial number to download the software.
I found the review to be well-written and quite comprehensive. Thumbs up for that alone.
Been using XP with parallels. Runs very smooth.
I like how I can cut and paste between XP and OS X,even drag and drop a file.
Also run Linux and it seems to work fine. It connects to my wireless setup with no trouble as does XP.
Parallels is very good.
My only complaint so far is that there’s no support for Firewire devices.
It would have been better if it had have mentioned bootcamp, but I think even with that their “score” of 8 seems about right. As a VM solution it has mostly targetted Windows, and I personally would have liked to see more support for Linux or other OSes (BeOS for example) so losing 2 for that seems about right.
However for my Windows needs Parallels works perfectly for me and I am a very satisfied customer.
My first impression of coherence mode was that it was a gimmick. That was until I had to do some work the last couple of days which involved editing some data that I could only do with the help of programs on both platforms. Cutting and pasting between the two was a breeze and it has made me a big fan of this new feature of Parallels.
3D support when it comes will be nice of course. I think however this has only been promised in a 2.x release, and I don’t think that this will be a free upgrade (as stated in the review) as this would be a major update (I believe Parallels have only said 1.x upgrades would be free – but can’t confirm this so feel free to contradict).
I admit, I like Parallels. It’s a great idea and it’s about half usable. However, it has some extremely obnoxious issues and some minor issues:
1.) (Minor) Coherence is nice, but it’s hardly coherent. It doesn’t work with expose (Windows appears as one window), it is limited to one monitor at a time. Full screen is actually a better feature, especially if you have two monitors: It actually works as it should.
2.) (Major) On my machine, if I start Parallels while iTunes is playing music it slows the machine to a crawl.
3.) (Minor) It constantly eats cycles even if the hosted OS is entirely idle.
4.) (Minor) The hosted OS seems unaware of laptop power issues.
5.) (Minor) Windows are slower to open while parallels is running, regardless of hosted OS or mode. However, applications run at normal speed, aside from slow Windows.
6.) (Major) In the last version (I’ve yet to see this in the latest release) Parallels would occasionally make Finder (and thus new windows) completely unusable.
7.) (Minor) The article stated this, but it needs to be restated: X based systems are uncomfortable to use. A mouse driver and real support for changing resolutions would go a LONG way. I don’t care about drag and drop, although it’d be nice. The FTP I run on my client OS is good enough for now.
8.) (Major) It doesn’t seem to get along well with all systems. Solaris 10, which is supported, required a strange sequence of reboots and kernel selections to get it installed and running. I gave up when the default resolution was larger than my resolution and I couldn’t get X to use the resolutions I configured it for.
Forget all of this “making Windows seemless” crap and make a good product. You’re halfway there guys, don’t stop now. Especially if you’re gonna charge $80 for it.
That said, I use Parallels almost daily because it’s so useful. It’s just that frustrating to see it almost where I need it and to have to hack the rest myself and deal with the frustration of the bugs.
The last release was an enormous gain from the one before. It’s much much nicer to use!
And for anyone reading who’s considering buying: Coherence sucks. Don’t get excited about it. It’s a really great idea, but the implementation is anything but seamless. Other than what I’ve already mentioned it’s slow, really slow. And it’s odd, you see your Windows background map under new windows before they draw. When you move them across the screen you see bits of the background draw as well. You’ll see your screen blank when you go to shut down.
However, video type things seem to work fine. It keeps up with typical drawing great. I ran an application of my own that draws a lot, quickly, and it didn’t seem significantly slower in coherence than in full screen or windows mode.
System spec: Macbook, 2GHz Core 2 Duo; 2GB RAM.
Running: Ubuntu 6.10 and Windows Vista
Hosted by: OS X ver. 10.4.9
I’ve been using Parallels for several months now. It’s one of those programs that is indispensible, but at the same time keeps you a little concerned.
On many occasions, the VM system (or something) has crapped out and I’ve gotten text files in an editor (CodeWright) scrambled (something that never happens on the PC). There are the expected (for beta) system freezes now and then, too.
I tried to install QNX 4.0 (yeah, old) for a project I have; it *installed* great, but when I tried to boot the system it BSOD’d on me. Maybe QNX 6.x would work, I don’t know.
I installed Suse 10 and was sorely disappointed that there is no connection to the Mac. I spent a couple of days figuring out how to use SAMBA to access directories and emailed them the solution. Their reply was “we don’t support this except on Linux.” Obviously their tech support responses need to be something a little better than semi-automated.
Works great on a dual-core CPU. No speed lags at all.
I (still am) a paying customer of Parallels.
When I needed support I got an automated response stating I’d get a “real” reply within three business days. That was like 2 months ago. I went to the Parallels forum and saw that I was certainly not alone. They seem to be operating without any kind of support organization in place.
I resolved the issue I had but decided to move on anyway, I have nuked Parallels Desktop from my system and am now happily using VMWare Fusion.
I am in the process of getting a refund for Parallels Desktop so there’s no hard feelings, just know that if you need help you won’t get it from Parallels.
The Parallels Forum is filled with angry paying customers who are waiting for any kind of support. On the other hand it seems to work fine for a majority of people who buy it.