Parallels, my favourite virtualization software, yesterday released their first beta of the next version for Mac. The changes are many and some of them of great importance. After I installed Microsoft Vista on my PC, I basically stopped dual-booting, and I cannot dual-boot Windows on my MacBook Pro, cause our Campus agreement doesn’t allow me to install Windows on Macs. These two things basically led to Parallels virtualization software being one of the most used application for me, both under MacOS X and Windows. Under Windows I basically run the latest Ubuntu, PC-BSD and Haiku. On the Mac, I have images for Windows, Ubuntu and Haiku.

I don’t use any distro from the BeOS platform to much, but I am having an eye on the open source alternative Haiku. Haiku was the first OS that I tried to run under Parallels Desktop (build 3036). First of all, Haiku is not an officially supported guest OS, but I had already reported a serious bug in Parallels Desktop 1.0.x. Pressing SPACE at the begin of Haiku’s boot up to get access to it’s boot menu, caused the Mac to crash seriously and I risked loosing all unsaved data in other applications. Of course, this was to be the first thing I wanted to check if they had fixed! I am sorry to say that with the current beta of Parallels Desktop, I cannot even boot Haiku. The mac doesn’t crash any more, but Parallels does, and a bug report is created. Well, I sent this one in, and I hope that they will take the time to fix this problem before the final release.

Well, now over to the happy stuff. What is new in the coming version? The first thing you will notice is that the user interface is new and even more simplefied. Part of the new interface is also a virtual machines catalogue listing of all the client OSes you have, a kind of boot loader. Virtualization software cannot get much easier to use then this! Another thing that I noticed the first time I booted Ubuntu Edgy Eft was that the window it was running in, now was resizable as more or less for any other Mac application. Parallels will even auto-adjust the screen resolution of the client OS to the actual Main Window size. A nice touch.

Working on Windows on the Mac got a lot easier in this version. The first improvement is drag and drop of files and folders, and of cource it goes both ways. Just as important, you can now virtualize the BootCamp partition! Many Parallels Desktop users have till now been “forced” to have two Windows installtions on their Macs, one for BootCamp and another one for Parallels. A waste of space if you ask me! Just note that only the 32 bit version of Windows is supported in the current beta, and that for the full use of it, the Parallels Tools for Boot Camp package must be installed under Windows.

And halleluja, Parallels is now releasing their first beta of Parallels Transporter, a tool that lets you migrate VMware images to Parallels virtual machines. This could before be done in a far more time consuming way, by first converting the VMware images to QEMU images, and then to Parallels images.

Well, there is one more thing … that is at least how Steve Jobs would be putting it … Parallels is introducing Coherency. A tool that lets you run Windows applications as if they were Mac ones. Wine any one, no, no, of course this is a moment for celebration, but I was thinking of the Wine emulator and the commercial CrossOver Mac from Codeweavers. I just saved some money, as you are far better off with Parallels Desktop then with CrossOver Mac! Try it and enjoy the best of both worlds truly at the same time. No more switching between Windows to Mac OS.

There is of course lots of bug fixes and improvements. The graphic performance is up with up to 50 % on different applications. The connecting and disconnecting USB devices schema is improved. You can now have up to five virtual network interfaces, which is important news for those of us who often run more then one guest OS at the time. And here is another great feature for me, enhanced shared networking mode, I can finally run Cisco VPN on the Windows virtual machine. And there is still a lot, lot more, that I could have been writing about …

According to TUAW there is even some more great features to come, support for USB 2.0 and 3D acceleration support were not ready for this first beta, imagine having full 3D support in Vista and hopefully also Ubuntu. YAY!!!

Well, I normally don’t do commercials or advertisement for applications, other then writing postively about them, but today i am to do so … . Yesterday I got two e-mails from Parallels. The first one telling me that Parallels is having a holiday offer, fi you decide to buy Parallels Workstation 2.2 for Windows and Linux, you now get one year of free upgrades. And the second mail told me that I could save $20 on every copy of Parallels Desktop for Mac I bought for myself or my friends. Have these two great offers in mind when you are to buy a christmas gift to your beloved geek.