05.07.08

MacBook Air + VM Fusion = Crazy Delicious!

Posted in Apple, Technology, Coding, OS X at 12:35 am by keynesiandreamer

Having been the proud owner of a MacBook Air for a couple weeks now, I am really starting to use it for all of my everyday tasks and have only cracked open my old MacBook Pro once to do a bit of FFMpegX (I needed a render machine!). Life with the Air is good, and the portability is a godsend (if you into that type of thing). I have managed to take it to work everyday since I purchased it and use it in new and novel ways such as reading PDFs in the lounge today instead of being cloistered at my desk.

One of my projects for the year is to do more automated testing at work. After researching numerous open source solutions: SwingUnit, Instruments (Dtrace), Abbot, I decided to try and work with the industry standard SilkTest. While this was fine at work with several Windoze machines to choose from, I was dreading the thought about running a virtualized environment on the Air. This all stems from the fact that I have been using Parallels at work for about a year and it feels just like turing on that PC from about 7 years ago. Press the power button, and go make it a sandwich, it will let you know when its ready with that lovely chime. Mind you this is with 3GB of RAM and a 2.16 Core2Duo processor. How was the Air gonna stand up?

So after a bit of research I decided to try VM Fusion after about a 16 month hiatus during their beta release. Recent news on the site said that several bugs with the Air had been fixed and it was good to go, so I downloaded the .dmg and proceeded to install. Things are rolling smoothe up to this point.

I am whipping right through the installer and then it comes to the part to use the Remote Disc. I setup the Remote Disc software on my iMac at work (P.S. Apple you should have this available as a download from you site, not everyone carries around their system disks!). After double-checking the sharing permissions on both computers voilá XP SP2 disk shows up in my Air Finder. So I proceed to select in in the installer….. and no dice.

Houston we have a problem…

What to do? So I looked on the VM Fusion site, no dice, everyone seemed to suggest that you had to have the niffty $99 Superdrive. While a nice product not exactly what I was looking to do. VM Ware does a have a very nifty application to convert a previous Parallels VM to a VM Ware VM, I tried transfering the Paralles Vm to the Air via Airport and it gave me an estimate 8 hours, errrr not so happening. Then I figured the best idea would be to get a disk image of XP.

I found several sites describing ways to do this. The first site had a nice succint command line solution:

$ dd if=/dev/disk1 of=file.iso bs=2048

So I tried this after figuring out out which disk to substitute in, disk2 in my case. It took about 5 minutes to complete the copy and then I tried to mount the resulting image. Not so much. ARGHHHHH!

Then I remembered one of the most under appreciated applications in OS X, the mighty Disk Utility! I opened up Disk Utility and selected the XP volume and selected “Create Disk Image”, the key here is to use select the CD/DVD Master option. In about 4 minutes I had a shiny new .cdr disk image of Windoze XP.

Useful Tip: .cdr can be replaced with .ISO via the Get Info command with no repercussions.

While I haven’t validated this for sure, I think it a necessary change for Fusion to see the OS disk image correctly. The wireless transfer of the full XP ISO took 8 minutes instead of 8 hours now we are talking!

The rest of the installation went normal if not exceedingly fast.

The disk image route is way faster than the CD. One restart of the VM later after the automated install of the VW Ware tools and I was up and running. First impressions are “Wow VM Ware really did their homework!”, Fusion is very fast to startup and shutdown, much faster than my iMac with Parallels. The UI and Unity mode (Coherence mode in Parallels) and much easier on the eyes. I haven’t tested the graphics acceleration, which is still experimental after a year, but if the progress in this area is like the rest of the app I expect good things.

 

I hope this short review of the pitfalls of installing XP on the Air might help some decide between whether to use a virtualized environment on their feather-weight Macs, and to consider a VM Fusion a very well developed product. As for myself, its time to get down to some 4Test coding.

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