Parallels released beta3 of their Virtual Machine for MacOSX today. I installed it immediately and all my earlier problems were solved. Networking works perfectly, no more crashes or kernel panics, no more cpu usage during idle time, and best of all ... it's fast as hell!

One of RIFE's test suites that takes 117 seconds to run on the console in MacOSX, took 124 seconds in Ubuntu Linux inside Parallels. That's almost exactly as fast!

I'm taking out my credit card right now to pre-order Parallels Workstation for MacOSX. This is the greatest virtualization technology that I've ever seen.

After setting up Apple Boot Camp completely, I decided to give Parallels Workstation Beta a try.

I installed WindowsXP on it and almost finished setting up a fully functional environment. The first thing that strikes you is that it's amazingly fast. Apart from the occasional minor lag in screen updates, the CPU seems to run at full speed. However, when I installed TortoiseSVN, something went wrong. Windows started to spit out bad memory access errors and Explorer failed to work properly anymore. At that point I was unable to do anything with the virtual machine since I had no working shell for Windows available, I erased it.

The main reason for me to run a virtual machine is to be able to access Oracle Database 10g Release 2 under MacOSX (no, the PPC version doesn't work under Rosetta). I decided to create a virtual machine for Ubuntu Linux 5.10 next.

The Linux installation went fine and the entire Oracle database together with the creation of an initial database took only 10 minutes. That's really a proof of how fast the virtual machine is. Sadly however, for my purpose, Parallels turns out to be unusable for me. It seems that there's a bug that makes your MacOSX kernel panic when there's traffic on the bridged network interface (either from the VM or from the MacOSX primary OS). I get this crash consistently whenever I try to access the VM Oracle from MacOSX.

I'm eagerly waiting for the next beta of Parallels Workstation. I hope they'll fix the bug that crashes your entire machine soon. When that's done, I'll certainly buy a license of Parallels since the speed is simply mind blowing. Even VMware on Linux never felt this fast to me. You have a wonderful and promising product here, Parallels!

I finally finished the entire Boot Camp installation process and now have both MacOSX and WindowsXP fully configured and running on my Macbook Pro 2.16Ghz.

See my pictures of the installation process.

I installed the following software on WindowsXP and I extensively tested them. Generally, the speed and the stability is wonderful. It's a lot better even than the Acer Ferrari 4005 laptop I bought 3 months ago (anyone wants to buy it?). I'd actually go as far to say that I've never seen Windows run as well on a laptop. Who would have thought!

Graphics are fully accelerated both 2D and 3D, and even The Elder Scrolls IV : Oblivion, a game that was released last week, looks beautiful and plays very fluidly.

See a movie of Oblivion on Macbook Pro.

Setting everything up wasn't as easy as I'd hoped. These are my findings:

• When Boot Camp finished partitioning my hard drive to create a separate WindowsXP partition, the kernel of MacOSX crashed with the typical gray overlay screen.
• After rebooting manually, by keeping the power button pressed for a long time, I was able to start the WindowsXP installation process from CD by just keeping the CD inside.
• The WindowsXP installation works even when you have a Service Pack 1 installation medium. Not all the drivers that Apple burns to the driver CD work, but the wireless driver does. I was able to download Service Pack 2 from the Windows partition and apply it after the installation. With Service Pack 2 installed, all the drivers function perfectly.
• When I tried to reboot to MacOSX afterwards, this wasn't possible. After investigation with Disk Utility from the MacOSX installation DVD, I found that the Mac partition had been damaged beyond repair during the process. Make sure you backup your data!
• I erased the entire MacOSX partition and reinstalled MacOSX freshly on it, since then I haven't had a single problem.

See a movie of MacOSX rebooting into WindowsXP.

Here are some miscellaneous notes:

• You can use MacDrive 6 for basic file operations on the MacOSX partition from within WindowsXP. Sadly, when a lot of files are involved this tool doesn't seem stable and locks up WindowsXP. I was unable to compile RIFE on the Mac partition from within WindowsXP, I had to create a separate checkout.
• However, MacOSX is able to read NTFS partitions, this is great find!
• The Macbook Pro's trackpad hasn't got a second mouse button, you can simulate it by pressing Shift+F10.
• Sadly, the scrolling on the trackpad isn't working on WindowsXP, which is a real shame since I love to use gestures for scrolling, it's one of the things I prefer about the Macbook Pro.
• The function key isn't working either, which results is being unable to use the following important keys: page up, page down, home, end and delete.
• Due to the inability to press a delete key, you can't issue ctrl+alt+delete without an external keyboard.
• I'm unable to find a keyboard layout that matches the Belgian layout of the Macbook Pro, a lot of keys are thus not the same.
• Don't try the iSight with Windows camera support (USB Video Device), you'll get a blue screen of death.

On a small side-note, people have always been skeptical about Apple's Java VM, saying that it's less performant that Sun's, etc etc. Now it's possible however to test Sun's JDK 1.5.0_06 on WindowsXP and Apple's J2SE 5.0 Release 4 DP7 with the exact same hardware. The results are very interesting. I ran RIFE's web engine tests and these are the timings:

I don't know if it's the efficiency of MacOSX itself, or if the JVM implementation is better, but as it turns out Java on MacOSX is 30% faster than on WindowsXP. How's that for proof that MacOSX really is the best Java developer OS out there!

I blogged earlier today about trying out Apple Boot Camp. The installation succeeded and I have WindowsXP running in full speed.

However, when the Boot Camp partitioner wanted to start the Windows installation, the OSX kernel crashed (with the gray screen) and I had to reboot manually. I think that something went wrong there since the MacOSX partition was no longer usable. I had to completely erase it with Disk Utility from the installation DVD (repairing it wouldn't work) and am now reinstalling MacOSX.

I'll blog later about WindowsXP itself, but I just wanted to warn people already that they have to backup their Mac partition before trying Boot Camp out.

Apple releases Boot Camp as a beta preview of their upcoming Leopard version of MacOSX.

Boot Camp allows you to run WindowsXP alongside MacOSX on your Intel Mac and provides you with all the necessary drivers to do so.

Just as I was about to go through it manually ... this announcement came through. Installation started, I'll report how it goes.

Update: Apple Boot Camp trashed my Mac partition, losing all my data