Parallels has been doing an amazing job with their Parallel's Desktop, and industry heavy-weight VMWare is also making waves with their Fusion client. So you might ask whether another competitor is really needed in the virtualization space. But this one, Virtual Box, comes with a twist: it's recently been open sourced, so we can presumably expect the open source community to pitch in and make it better.
Their OS X client is still at a very early stage of development, and no binary is yet available for download. But they do have instructions for anybody who would like to try building it (i.e. compiling from source code), along with a screenshot. At this point, this is more of a project to keep an eye out for, rather than anything approaching the solutions from Parallel's and VMWare. But new Open Source solutions are pretty much always good news in my book.
Needless to say, this is Intel only.
[Via The Mac Robotics Blog]
Thanks Roberto!
Reader Comments (Page 1 of 1)
1-16-2007 @ 9:22AM
Mark Fleser said...
We already have that...it's called Q. Hopefully this will work better though.
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1-16-2007 @ 10:35AM
Ian! said...
Am I the only one who wishes there was a good virtualization option for PPC Macs?
I would love to run Linux on my Powerbook via a virtual machine, but Mac on Mac (http://maconmac.bastix.net/) doesn't work with Tiger and hasn't been updated in nearly 2 years, Q and VirtualPC are both processor emulation, and therefor painfully slow (we're talking 5+ hours to install an OS).
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1-16-2007 @ 11:04AM
Macster said...
"Am I the only one who wishes there was a good virtualization option for PPC Macs?"
You can't have it, because that wouldn't be virtualization, it would be emulation; which is what VirtualPC on the PPC is.
The reason there are so many virtualization products now, is because OS X now has the same hardware as Windows. In Parallel's Desktop and VMWare it isn't emulating another platform, like it would have to to run on PPC, it is virtualizing another OS. That other OS has only a thin layer between it and the machine, unlike emulation where it runs in a completely artificial machine (and why it's so slow).
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1-16-2007 @ 12:41PM
misterbleepy said...
I think Ian! really does mean virtualisation - I think he wants to run a PPC Linux (such as Yellowdog) in a VM on a PPC Mac...
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1-16-2007 @ 1:56PM
Ian! said...
misterbleepy gets what I'm saying. I want a virtual machine so I can run a PPC Linux on my Powerbook, just like you can run a x86 Linux on a Macbook using Parallels or whatever.
I don't want processor emulation, I want a VM so I can run other PPC OSes on my PPC Macs.
And for the record, I'd go with some kind of Debian - probably Ubuntu, for the simplicity of it.
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1-30-2007 @ 10:46AM
Scoo said...
File under "Me Too" for PPC Emulation, I'd love to be able to get Ubuntu on a VM for my PowerBook. I'm kinda scratching my head about the Mac on Mac deal, you'd think there'd be a good market for such a product...
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2-03-2007 @ 2:52PM
Graham Fluet said...
"File under "Me Too" for PPC Emulation, I'd love to be able to get Ubuntu on a VM for my PowerBook. I'm kinda scratching my head about the Mac on Mac deal, you'd think there'd be a good market for such a product..."
In Q on intel, it has beta support for running PPC-based OSs. i think Q on PPC should be more stable.
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2-12-2007 @ 7:56AM
sparkles said...
you can't do virtualization with PPC because the PPC CPU doesn't have virtualization instructions...
Intel Core and Intel Core 2, and recent AMD CPUs have virtualization instructions.
That's why you will never have a soft that allows you to do virtualization with PPC...
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2-13-2007 @ 2:00PM
n8 said...
Wow, sparkles, you should let the people working on Xen for PPC know that PPC virtualization is impossible. They'll be so disappointed!
Also, be sure not to go to here:
http://www.research.ibm.com/hypervisor/
It clearly must be some sort of highly-targeted phishing site, since what they describe is clearly impossible.
Reply
2-13-2007 @ 4:37PM
n8 said...
Oh, I almost forgot! There's also Mac-On-Linux and its OS X port Mac-On-Mac:
http://mac-on-linux.sourceforge.net/
http://maconmac.bastix.net/
In short, the only thing stopping PPC virtualization is lack of interest caused by the intel transition.
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