Parallels Workstation (Virtualization) software (#3): 2.1b2 released; Notes from an in-house engineer

Over the weekend, a second beta version of Parallels Workstation -- software that allows the use of any version of Windows (3.1, 3.11, 95, 98, Me, 2000, NT, XP, 2003), any Linux distribution, FreeBSD, Solaris, OS/2, eComStation, or MS-DOS in secure virtual machines running alongside Mac OS X -- was released.

Among the improvements:

• Resolves kernel panic in network driver
• Resolves kernel panic when click "Report a problem" menu item
• Eliminates some WiFi networking issues
• Eliminates some real CD/DVD issues
• Avoids a Fedora 5 installation crash

For more information, see the Parallels Workstation VersionTracker product page.

Problems with AirPort networking If you are having problems with Windows XP recognizing your AirPort connection when running under Parallels, try setting the connection to en1 instead of en0 under Network adaptor section of the Windows Control panel.

Notes from in-house engineer Meanwhile, we have some installation notes from Carl McDonald, one of our in-house engineers -- with some interesting performance notes.

"Initial setup was somewhat frustrating as the option to mount a physical CD/DVD would stubbornly stay disabled until I finally discovered disabling and re-enabling the virtual device turned the radio button on. The other frustration was then having to determine the current Unix device driver for the CD/DVD drive and type it into the configuration dialog. This would be much nicer if there was a menu of available devices to choose from. Much of this is no doubt due to this being a Beta version.

"Once I did get everything working, the performance was surprisingly good. While I haven't run any benchmarking on it as yet, anecdotally I did run one of the Python based games in The Manor. While it did skip some frames in the animation, it was sporadic like you would get with other processes frequently needing time. Running less timing sensitive applications response appeared to be quite snappy.

"So far I haven't found an elegant solution for moving files between OS's. While the clipboard is passed between OS's, this does not extend to file copy. Trying to mount the physical machine from the virtual machine as a file server also failed. What would be nice is if they allowed something like designating a folder to appear as a drive in the virtual machine. Short of that fixing the network connection would work.

"Once the bugs are worked out, I'd say this is a very viable alternative for people that need to frequently switch between OS's. Especially when you consider that it isn't limited to just Windows, but can actually run many different Intel based OS's."

Feedback? Late-breakers@macfixit.com.

Previous coverage

• Parallels Virtualization software (#2): Selecting the optical drive; Using function keys; Benchmarks; more
• Parallels Virtualization software debuts: Allows simultaneous running of Windows XP and Mac OS X

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