Mr Kleen wrote:
Parallels and VMware Fusion both sound great, however neither is free. VMware offers their software at a discount for students so I could get a buddy to order it for me but it's still $40.
Download VirtualBox from Sun (as in beer). I use it on our MacPro and it works like a charm. I run Vista Ultimate i386 (I use Vista and Office 12 for "productivity" stuff like project, visio, and outlook), about nine million flavors of Linux (prototyping for work), Solaris, and 2003 Server R2 (also for work).
Oh, and I think Sandy gets Fusion for free, I may be able to hook you up with a copy. Also, if you like, I can bring a vdi (VirtualBox's virtual disk format) on a firewire hard disk and just let you copy it onto your machine (it's 33gb, but is really nicely prepared, and would save you the trouble of doing the install).
I'm going to play around with dual booting for a while before I invest any money. the idea of using a VM is more appealing then restarting every time I want to change OS's.
anybody out there doing anything similar?
I have a titanium powerbook that can netboot into the various operating systems I want to run on it. Personally, I think netbooting is nirvana with respect to running multiple operating systems. You don't gotta change the client machine(s), just reboot and let it slurp its kernel off the network. Netbooting is built into OSX Server, but you can netboot with anything that's got a tftp server and a shared filesystem (again, Linux is pretty swell here). On the older (non-intel) Macs, all you had to do was boot into Open Firmware and type "boot net" and it would DTRT.
PS - Time Machine is hella-cool, why doesn't Windows do something similar?
Yeah, Time Machine is good stuff. For what it's worth, Sandy doesn't trust it (and you do know who she works for). However, I use it on the same Mac I mentioned above, and we've got about a terabyte of TM backups. We've restored from TM a number of times, and it's always worked perfectly (to the extent that it even restored the prefpanes from one of our laptops into the tower (so our tower thinks it has a battery, for example). I think the important thing regarding TM is to realize that backups are only helpful if you stick to the regimen, and you should never just rely on any piece of software – especially backup software – to function flawlessly. Before the 640gb drive went TU, I made a point of plugging my Air into it and running TM, eh, weekly I guess. Now that I'm down a drive for TM, I keep everything on the tower in subversion and "check out" the stuff I want onto my laptop before taking it anywhere. It's kind of tedious, but I very much doubt it's going to fail in addition to TM. Our root volume and "photos" volume are both mirrors; the massive storage we have is raid 5, and we've got a few 1TB 1394b drives that are backed up onto the raid 5. You may not know that in MacOS you can boot off a mirrored volume (although this is kind of silly for a MacBook).
Oh, and I think HP has a network appliance that does pretty much what TM does.
So we have three different OS images on the tower, we have Leopard Server on two volumes (so if the mirror or the R5 fail, we can still boot and attempt repairs) and Leopard (client) on an external ruggedized drive (along with a few other images, like Tiger and various configurations only Sandy really needs to pay attention to).
Did you know about holding down option during boot? It will let you choose which volume you'd like to boot off of. That's how we pick which image we boot into, although admittedly it doesn't reboot a whole lot (it's both Sandy's and my desktop, as well as our media server, as well as my RCS machine, my webserver and VPN server... so we can't really afford to let it go down). We've had very (very!) good results with Leopard Server.
Were you planning to slice up the internal volume and dual-boot from that? You may be surprised how snappy it is booting off an external drive, and you don't have to worry about your machine getting hozed if one of your operating system messes up the machine. Oh, and it may actually be easier to slice up the drive into 3 partitions, install Windows, MacOS, and Linux (say, Ubuntu), then use grub to select which slice to boot off of (this is what I did when I was booting Ubuntu/Vista/2003R2/XP). I would, however, call that a pretty advanced configuration, and it's a pain in the ass to set up (it involves a lot of imaging of partitions)
A peek at the desktop:
http://3.bp.blogspot.com/_iem9WgoEor4/S ... /disks.png
I was planning on making a 20GB partition on the macbook's hard drive and using boot camp to install Win7 on it. i've only have the macbook for a month and it isn't my main machine so I don't have a lot to loose (and it's backed up now).
