Nathan pretty much summed it up. I've been having really excellent results with VirtualBox. Also great results with VMWare and Parallels, but VBox is free, and has been maturing really well the past year or so.
VMs are great for most functions, unless you need bare metal performance, in which case you can dual boot. The preferred method for dual booting is with Boot Camp, which is really very easy to set up. With Parallels, and possibly with the other VM tools now, you can set up to use the Boot Camp partition as a VM also, though I haven't tried that combination other than with Parallels and Windwos. If you have Guest Additions installed and set Full Screen mode, you will only be able to see the VM, and it will look and feel like you're just in Linux. Very nice, and you can do just about any Linux thing you want to do. With enough RAM, you can even set up several VMs and have your own little network inside one box. Only caveat: Bridged Mode networking won't work with WiFi, use NAT instead unless you are on a hard Ethernet. Also, some network administrators disallow more than one MAC address on a single interface -- not likely unless you're in a locked-down corporate network. --Don Ellis On Sat, Jul 10, 2010 at 8:49 PM, Nathan Nutter <[email protected]> wrote: > Mac OS X has a UNIX (BSD) underpinning so most of your scripts, etc. > would work. There may be some difference between BSD and GNU versions > of tools, etc. but for the most part they are the same. You can extend > Mac OS X significantly by installing the Developer Tools from Apple > and then MacPorts (http://www.macports.org/). MacPorts will let you > install almost any "Linux" program including things like Gnome and KDE > (I think). > > You can also run VirtualBox and run Windows/Linux (and Mac OS X > Server) in a virtual machine. > > You could also dual/triple boot. If you just do Linux then you can > dual boot like any old machine. If you want to include Windows you > may need to use BootCamp. > > I know some people are hard core Free software folks, if you are then > you may be bother by the blend of open/Free software and proprietary > software. However, OS X is very reliable and stable (far more than I > have ever enjoyed with Linux as a Desktop OS). I would highly > recommend an Apple laptop. For a desktop I would be 50/50 between OS X > and Linux and would only recommend an Apple desktop if you wanted to > dual-boot OS X and Linux. > > On Sat, Jul 10, 2010 at 8:10 PM, Tim and Lisa Beckendorf > <[email protected]> wrote: > > Greetings, > > > > Perhaps this is a silly question but as I've been using pcs for years I'm > in > > the dark. I'm contemplating purchasing a Macbook Pro 17 for my work which > up > > until now has been entirely in a linux environment. If I purchase a Mac, > can > > I run Ubuntu successfully in something akin to VBox or do I need to have > a > > dual booting machine? I've been so accustomed to free software and the > > beauty that is the Synaptic Package Manager that I'm reluctant to have to > > purchase any software. Will the scripts that I've written for rsync, > > hpodder, etc. work in the Mac environment? Is anyone using Scribus on Mac > > that can comment on its performance (I use it a lot). > > > > Sorry if these questions are not in the vein of this list but I know that > > Scott is a Mac advocate and I'd appreciate any helpful comments. > > > > Thank you, > > > > Tim > > > > -- Central West End Linux Users Group (via Google Groups) Main page: http://www.cwelug.org To post: [email protected] To subscribe: [email protected] To unsubscribe: [email protected] More options: http://groups.google.com/group/cwelug
