Archived posting to the Leica Users Group, 2008/05/01

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Subject: [Leica] Re:OT: Using Parallels on Mac?
From: shino at panix.com (Rei Shinozuka)
Date: Thu May 1 17:59:34 2008
References: <f091c6f20804302004j27beb878jf1d510e0e22185ab@mail.gmail.com> <F724EE43121E49828951605FF759B22D@Vista>

i'm sorry to be so opaque.

Boot Camp is a system that 1) partitions the internal disk into 2 partions
2) formats the new partition as a PC-style FAT32 or NTFS disk partition,
3) permits you to install a bona fide version of XP on the new partition
and 4) allows the option of booting from either the OSX or Windoze partition.
This permits one mac to be either Dr Jeckyl or Mr Hyde--one or the other,
never both.

parallels and vmware allow you to run a virtual machine on the mac, as 
an application over OSX, and this virtual machine
is capable of running XP (and other systems including linux).  when they
first came out, they would allocate a big file under OSX and then use this
big file as a virtual disk on which to store to guest operating system.

the newest versions of parallels and vmware allow you to use an 
already-created
boot camp partition.  this has at least 2 advantages: 1) you can run the 
"same"
PC with the same applications either natively (boot camp) or in emulation
(parallels/vmware) and 2) i have to believe (i cannot prove this) that 
running
on a native filesystem has to be more efficient than a virtual filesystem on
a humungous multi-gigabyte file.  

the only bad thing is that windows xp has to be "activated" twice since it
doesn't seem to understand that it's really running on the same computer
in boot camp mode or in emulation mode.

all this isn't really new, back in the day at least companies Virtual PC and 
SoftPC ran very ambitious programs to emulate the INTEL chip instruction set
in software on the Mac's RISC processor.  SoftPC also ran on Solaris SPARCs
as I recall.  these solutions did work, but they really took a huge 
performance
hit over running natively even on slower intel processors.  by comparison,
parallels is astonishingly fast, since the intel instructions don't need
to be emulated.

-rei




On Apr30 21:40, Bill wrote:
> Ok, now that's even more confusing.  If you are booting to windoze with 
> boot
> camp, does Parallels then run the Mac programs? I've just been using
> Parallels formatted with XP and running my windoze programs in that window
> while having the rest of the computer running Leopard.  Why do you even 
> need
> Boot Camp?
> 
> Bill in Denver
> 
> -----Original Message-----
> From: lug-bounces+bill=photobynelsch.com@leica-users.org
> [mailto:lug-bounces+bill=photobynelsch.com@leica-users.org] On Behalf Of
> Clive Moss
> Sent: Wednesday, April 30, 2008 9:04 PM
> To: Leica Users Group
> Subject: Re: [Leica] Re:OT: Using Parallels on Mac?
> 
> I am using Parallels only - but I believe that Parallels and Boot Camp can
> use the same system image. I have never done it, but see
> http://tinyurl.com/5gemxn
> 
> On Wed, Apr 30, 2008 at 10:29 PM, Christopher Williams
> <leicachris@worldnet.att.net> wrote:
> > Now I'm confused, you guys are running Boot Camp+Parallels or VMWare?
> >
> >  Chris
> ...
> 
> --
> Clive
> http://clive.moss.net/blog/
> 
> _______________________________________________
> Leica Users Group.
> See http://leica-users.org/mailman/listinfo/lug for more information
> 
> 
> 
> _______________________________________________
> Leica Users Group.
> See http://leica-users.org/mailman/listinfo/lug for more information

-- 
Rei Shinozuka shino@panix.com
Ridgewood, New Jersey


In reply to: Message from clive.moss at gmail.com (Clive Moss) ([Leica] Re:OT: Using Parallels on Mac?)
Message from bill at photobynelsch.com (Bill) ([Leica] Re:OT: Using Parallels on Mac?)