This post originated from an RSS feed registered with .NET Buzz
by Peter van Ooijen.
Original Post: Things you cannot do with (Virtual PC for) the Mac (?)
Feed Title: Peter's Gekko
Feed URL: /error.htm?aspxerrorpath=/blogs/peter.van.ooijen/rss.aspx
Feed Description: My weblog cotains tips tricks and opinions on ASP.NET, tablet PC's and tech in general.
Mac users can be pretty religious about their OS. Which is nice but in the end you cannot do everything with a Mac. When you're a student and are dependent on the websites and slideshows your teachers have in store for you; you just need Powerpoint and IE on Windows. There is a way to get the best of both: Virtual PC for Mac. Which will give you a virtual PC running Windows in a window on the Mac. Recently I set up a such a creature and bumped into some issues. I'm not 100% sure about all of them, hence the (?). So feel free to chime in or light a match.
Exchanging virtual machines is (next to) impossible. A virtual PC created under Windows is one big file containing the complete machine. A virtual PC created on a Mac is a gigantic tree in which it is completely unclear what contains what. You can import a Windows created machine on a Mac; the other way round looks like an unsolvable puzzle. The Mac OS is nice because it hides all internals from the user but the disaster is that it still keeps everything hidden for the experienced user. You just get lost in files not being a file, resource forks, and differences between the display name and the name on disk. Yuck !
VirtPC for Mac cannot work with an NTFS virtual machine. When creating a new virtual PC VirtPC mac suggests a FAT or a FAT32 disk. When you create a virtual PC under Windows it's no problem to give it a NTFS disk. So far I found out that VirtPC for Mac totally crashed on every Windows created PC I gave it. I should try feeding it a FAT machine; but that's an experiment which does take some time. There is a known issue with the Mac OS X on external (USB) drives with NTFS; such disks are read-only.
Virtual PC for Mac will not run a Vista PC. Even before you run into the file system issue Virt PC trips over the Mac's bios and reports it not supporting ACPI. With new macs on Intel processors people are trying to boot Windows XP on a Mac. So far without success. It would have been hilarious to have Vista running on PowerPC hardware. Almost as hilarious as running Linux on an Xbox. Which is possible.
On the other hand, having seen Vista, who needs a Mac ?
Previous Topic
