The Unofficial Apple Weblog had a link to a slick video demo of fast operating system switching with Parallels on a new MacBook. They start off in OSX, flip over to Windows XP (where they download and install Firefox, hehe), and then bump over to Ubuntu. I can’t tell if the emulation/virtualization itself is fast or just that the MacBook is smokin’. Parallels is in beta now, but you can pre-order for a reasonable $39. Apple Boot Camp is cool (and free) but quick switching is something I’d probably pay for.
In my ongoing effort to get off of XP as my primary OS, I’ve been goofing around with QEMU on my Fedora Core 5 box. It seems to work pretty well and wasn’t too hard to set up. Unfortunately, the hardware on my test rig is pretty slow (400Mhz), so its a little too pokey to be useful. My current side project is to repartition my XP machine at home and install Fedora Core 5 and mess around with QEMU s’more on hardware that’s a lot more capable (2.8Ghz, 1Gb RAM, etc.) I also see that the Parallels folks have a version for linux, I’m downloading it now, hehe.
Update: Parallels for Linux doesn’t work on Fedora Core 5 out of the box. Nuts. Gonna have to Google around some to see if there’s a work around.
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