Four OSes, One Mac Redux

Seems the Theora version really didn’t want to play outside of Quicktime. Courtesy of ffmpeg, here’s a DivX version that works in VLC on Gutsy out of the box, at least (just checked it)… poorer quality and the aspect ratio’s gone a bit squiffy, but what the heck. I don’t really function properly before 10am, and it’s really not that exciting anyway 🙂

EDIT: Thanks to Arek for pointing out the blindingly obvious, here’s a proper Linux and Solaris-friendly OGG version. Yay 🙂

Four gigabytes, four OSes, one Mac

Upgraded my MacBook Pro to 4Gb yesterday, and was eager to play around and see how much it would help. What better way than to fire up all my virtual machines at once and see how it performed? Here’s the video… sorry it’s a nasty .mov file, but in my defence, it really is encoded as a Theora movie (a plugin for which you may need to install from here, if you’re viewing on OSX or Windows).

I haven’t tried to see if I can trick it into playing in Totem et al. yet on Solaris / Linux– let me know if you have any joy. For the record, the OSes are OS X 10.4.11, Solaris Nevada b77, Ubuntu Gutsy, and Win XP, all running in VMware Fusion 1.1.

VMware 1, Parallels 0

I’d been using Parallels 3.0 for the past few weeks to run SXDE 2 on my MacBook Pro, but started having problems when I upgraded to Solaris Nevada build 69– the X server wouldn’t start any more, and I just couldn’t get it going at all.I took the opportunity to try out the VMware Fusion Beta instead, and so far it’s the clear winner.

It does feel a trifle slower than Parallels (even with debugging turned off), and its snapshots aren’t as flexible, only allowing one per VM. But its VM tools for Solaris are way ahead of Parallels’ non-existent offering– clock sync, on-the-fly desktop resize, copy/paste/drag+drop from Solaris <-> OS X… nice. (Haven’t figured out if shared folders are supposed to work on Solaris yet or not– the settings are available which suggest they should, but the folders I’ve nominated don’t show up anywhere obvious, so I’m guessing they don’t.)

Assuming it’s just as happy at full screen on my Sun 24″ display when I get into the office, I’ll be sticking in the VMware camp for now.

Edit: Oh, and did I mention that Solaris sound and networking work out-of-the-box on VMware too…?