Thursday, December 28, 2006

VMWare for Mac in beta

It's about time VMWare got their act together and released a version of their software on Mac (even if it's only in beta release)! Of course, I didn't care about this before I actually bought a Mac.

Previously, there were only 2 ways of running Windows on a Mac:
  1. Using Apple's boot camp (which installs Windows natively on the machine)
  2. Using Parallels Desktop for Mac, which is a VMWare competitor and beat them to the punch in stitching up Mac users who wanted to run a virtualised environment.
Why am I posting about this? Because running a virtualised environment is much easier than installing an OS from scratch natively - not because it's hard to install but because it's annoying having to reboot to change operating systems. In a virtualised environment, it's as simple as firing up the virtualisation software (if you can't tell yet, I'm a long time VMWare user).

Oh, the other thing is that you have to pay for Parallels. VMWare has a free version of their product, and we all LOVE free (although I'm not sure if VMWare intend on charging for the Mac version once it's out of beta).

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