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Filed under: OS, Software

Run Vista on your Intel Mac with Q


Parallels Desktop is all the rage in Mac virtualization these days, but it doesn't offer one major feature (yet): the ability to run Vista on an Intel Mac (believe it or not, this will be useful to many a Mac user). Sure, they've promised it's coming on their blog, but who wants to wait for Parallels when the open source virtualization project Q can already do it?

That's right: if you have a copy of the public beta 2 of Vista (which unfortunately closed not long ago), you can check out their documentation (which boldly welcomes Parallels switchers) with simple instructions for installing Vista as a virtual machine. However: I don't know yet what is and is not supported under Q. Parallels has had issues up until this latest beta with supporting a lot of USB devices, amongst other things. Vista requires some heavy video card support, so I don't know how well it will run depending on how much support Q (and the QEMU project it's based on) has baked in.

While I snagged a copy of Q already and installed Ubuntu in it, I'm still turning over every half-empty box in this new townhouse trying to find my Vista images. If you readers beat me to the punch, by all means, share your experience in the comments.

Filed under: Software, Universal Binary

Run Windows on your Intel Mac in OS X



Sure, you could dual boot Windows and OS X on your Intel Mac, but what if you just need to use a Windows program once and awhile? Why not read this article about using Q, an open source Windows emulator, that let's you run Windows in a window (much like Virtual PC, which doesn't work on Intel Macs yet).

Filed under: OS, Software, Universal Binary

Emulate Windows with Q

I just downloaded and installed Q on my iMac Core Duo. I tried importing my Windows 2000 Virtual PC 7 image from an old backup disk, and it imported, but keeps crashing at startup. However, this discussion over at Accelerate Your Macintosh has me hopeful that Q just may be the future of free Windows emulation on the Mac. According to the Q site, "Run Windows, Linux and a lot more Systems on your Mac. Q is a feature packed cocoa port of QEMU: Switch fast between guest PCs. Save and restart guest PCs at any stage. Easily exchange Files between Host and Guest. Q makes use of OS X most advanced technologies like openGL and coreaudio to accelerate your experience with your guest PC."

This program is still in development, but they have a Universal Binary. Later on today, when I have some free hours (ha!), I think I'll try to build an image from scratch and install XP. I'll report back after the weekend with my findings.

Tip of the Day

To get an instant map to any address, just go to your Address Book and right click on the address field of any one of your contacts and select "Map Of." The address will then be revealed in Google Maps on Safari. You can do the same if a data detector determines there is an address in an e-mail in Mail.


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