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[bjarvis]

A couple of weeks ago, Kent bought himself a new Mac Book for his birthday. He bought Parallels at that time, a utility which allows a virtual machine to execute. In effect, one can have a Mac window boot and execute some other operating system (Solaris, Linux, Windows, whatever) while still running Mac programs in parallel. (This is different from the Boot Camp utility which allows one to boot the computer into one operating system or another, but not execute them at the same time.)

One of his birthday presents this weekend was a home edition of Windows XP which he installed on the laptop to run Windows apps simultaneously with Apple apps.

Last night, he installed Vic Ceder's CSDS square dance application with WinAmp and PaceMaker in the Windows XP virtual machine. Although some minor configuration updates still need to be made, it does indeed work rather smoothly: he was able to play and control square dance MP3s via CSDS.

I was more than a little amazed at this. It's one thing to execute simple Windows applications in a virtual machine, it's quite another to implement a hardware abstraction layer which can snag the library calls for seriously ugly I/O, translate them seamlessly to MacOS calls and perform the juggling act without a significant performance impact on something as time-sensitive as music. I'm seriously impressed.

We'll still keep the HP laptop for calling as it is kept relatively pristine to avoid bizarre software conflicts which might manifest in the middle of a dance, but if we can work out the rest of the configuration we'll purchase an extra license of CSDS for the Mac Book.

Comments

computers

[ciddyguy.livejournal.com]

You know, I speculated with a fellow on Saturday that given enough time for the Mac/Intel machines to be in circulation, someone will figure out how to reverse engineer the damn things and thus Mac clones will appear, much like IBM clones did in the early 80's. True, the IBM used off the shelf parts but still.

And after reading of Kent's experience with the Parallel boot program. I can imagine this becoming a bigger part of the Apple and Windows camps with many users in the future.

[apparentparadox]

I don't know, I think that emulating I/O for sound has to be about the easiest thing -- the one end is generally a hardware card, so they have to have good specs for it. The real pain is emulating software libraries, because some people count on the bugs in them.

[otterpop58.livejournal.com]

I think CSDS licensing is per human (on as many machines as they'd like), not per machine.

[bjarvis.livejournal.com]

I'll double-check on the licensing. If we do proceed, the add-on apps are definitely a per system license.

[allanh.livejournal.com]

One of the sea changes taking place in our consulting practice is helping our clients investigate server virtualization.

A few years ago, this would have been an outrageous suggestion ... but between VMware, Parallels, and Xen, it's now possible to run almost any reasonably current OS on top of any current hardware platform.

A couple of my clients are looking into combining several Windows-based applications requiring dedicated servers, into a single physical server running the "bare metal" version of VMWare, which will in turn host three or four of these pesky "This product requires a DEDICATED server" applications.

For a couple of years now, Novell has been telegraphing its intention to stop supporting NetWare as a native OS, and after a certain date, will only support NetWare running as a virtual machine under Xen. (Possibly also under VMWare, but I haven't heard a decision on that yet.)

Since it's getting increasingly difficult to find hardware support for NetWare (Qlogic won't make an iSCSI TOE card that will boot NetWare, for example, although I happen to know they have it working in the lab), the increasingly robust support offered by virtualization suddenly makes a good deal of business sense.

I have one customer who's looking at installing an iSCSI based SAN to run legacy NetWare boxes under VMWare Infrastructure, booting VMware natively off of the iSCSI SAN, and then booting NetWare servers as virtual machines.

As ciddyguy has already pointed out ... it's only a matter of time before someone either reverse engineers the Mac BIOS or waves enough money at Apple to allow creation of a virtual machine platform that will support booting MacOS.