My mother, niece and fiancee travelled to Nowra and back today on a CityRail train. This was inexpensive however very nasty, just look at the picture of the toilet. The train was littered with garbage at 9am this morning. There was literally empty bottles and cans freely rolling around the carriage. The being a 3 hour journey the girls needed to go to the toilet. So off they trotted to the toilet hoping to take a load off their minds and were confronted with the pictured disgrace. Apparently it smelt as equally bad as it looks. It was also the only toilet on the carriage, and was unusable. Now I have seen old toilets that consisted of a deep hole in the ground that looked more sanitary than that.
Archive for February 17th, 2007
Parallels Desktop continues to amaze me and I thought I would show it at work in the picture above. This is one cool virtualisation tool that is performing beyond my dreams. I have had up to 4 virtual machines running simultaneously and have noticed no performance hit, and with the new coherence mode I am even more impressed. Coherence mode allows VM applications to appear as if they are running on the Macintosh natively. This is a very cool feature.
Well I am now at the end of the VM loads and have managed to install 4 different Operating Systems. They are:
- Ubuntu Linux 2.10
- Solaris 10 for x86
- Microsoft Windows 2003
- Microsoft Vista Ultimate
All are running side by side and doing the job.
I have also picked a common office application, OpenOffice.org 2.1. I have installed that on the Mac OS X and Vista. It is bundled with Ubuntu.
I have also set up my mobile with the Bluetooth connection. I can now synchronise my calendar and contacts once more. Further I can use the mobile as remote control, great for presentations though the MacBook ships with a remote anyway *shrugs*.
The “wow starts now” is the catch phrase of Microsoft Windows Vista. However, for me the “wow” factor is limited to “wow why did they move that to there”. The real wow is how well it runs under Parallels Desktop. You would not even know it was a virtual machine once its in full screen mode.
I have found that if you want to run the Cisco VPN client in Windows Vista you need a beta version of the product. There is no official version. Bit disappointing but bearable.
Cygwin/X also does not operate reliably. I am sure the Cygwin team will fix that shortly. I have thus moved to XMing which appears to work OK.
The Remedy AR client crashes on a search. I am not too fussed here as I do not search much.
I will continue to update as I find more problems/fixes.
With the recent launch of Microsoft Windows Vista I have found myself debating where I would like to go with my PC infrastructure at home. I currently have 5 desktops, 5 laptops, and a Sun V100 server in the house. Many unplugged, but all used at different times. I would like though to reduce this to 2 desktops, 2 laptops and the Sun V100 server as I am literally having trouble stowing so much IT gear, let alone maintaining it. I also would like to close the one platform that I currently have no solution for, Macintosh.
After performing some research I am going to embrace the introduction of a MacBook Pro to the mix. This is a brave step for me that must rival the bravery shown during Neil Armstrongs moon walk. As many people know I have always believed that Macintosh was an acronym for “Machine Always Crashes If Not The Operating System Hangs”. Well that belief has been shattered by recent reports from fellow geeks running on Macintosh systems, including the almighty revolver from (info.vilesilencer).
So which MacBook Pro am I going for? Well I have decided to go for the one with all the bells and whistles the MacBook Pro 17″ Widescreen. Although I could add disk and memory capacity I have decided to go for the standard configuration which is equipped with:
- 2.33GHz Intel Core 2 Duo Processor
- ATI Mobility Radeon X1600 graphics with 256MB SDRAM
- 8x double-layer-burning SuperDrive
- 2GB 667 DDR2 SDRAM
- 160GB Serial ATA Drive
This is a grunter of a laptop by anyones book.
Now initially this seems that I am infact increasing the power load, however the second part to this equation is that I will be embracing virtualisation to provide me a Windows Vista, Linux (Ubuntu), and Solaris 10 machine running withing virtual machines on the MacBook Pro. The product I will be using to provide this capability is Parallels Desktop for Mac. This software is powerful and allows running of each version of Windows (3.1 up), 22 seperate distributions of Linux, Free BSD (4.1 and up), OS/2 and eComStation, SOlaris 9 and 10, and even good old clunky MS-DOS 6.22 which is incredibly inexpensive at $144.95 from Disk Smith Powerhouse.
Parallels also offer a Windows/Linux virtualisation platform, Parallels Workstation 2,2 for Win/Lin which allows simultaneous execution of each version of Windows (3.1 up), 18 seperate distributions of Linux, Free BSD (4.1 and up), OS/2 and eComStation, SOlaris 9 and 10, and even good old clunky MS-DOS 6.22. This is $US49.99 direct from Parallels. In my initial design I will not be purchasing this product, however, it is a definate option down the track.
Now back to Microsoft Vista. I have decided to adopt the Microsoft Vista Ultimate to be installed on the MacBook Pro. I am currently attempting to access the “Additional licenses” page that should be available here, however it continually can not be found. The information here will determine the fate of the remaining machines. The news could be encouraging here, if the page ever load, I base this on the information from the American site that talks about being authorised to install 2 copies of Windows Vista Home Premium for $US 49.99 each.
So in the end I will end up with:
- 2 Windows based desktops
- 1 Windows based Compaq laptop
- 1 Mac OS X based MacBook Pro laptop
- 1 Sun V100 server
- and most importantly a whole lot less clutter!
With luck all the Windows based machines will be running Microsoft Vista (all are compliant). If not they shall stay with their Windows XP base until they are progressively upgraded.
