Curious. This is the second time this week this question has come across my screen. Here is a summary of my experience:
1) For several years I have been happily running WinXP in a VMWare Workstation 4.0 virtual machine on top of Linux. No problems with any of the morphometrics software. Also, there is no significant performance reduction running in a virtual machine for the data sets with which I regularly work. 2) For a while, I tried VirtualPC on a powerbook and, if I recall correctly, there were no problems running the morphometrics packages. However, since VirtualPC had to emulate an Intel chip on a Motorola architecture, performance was slow. That should not be such a problem now since the newer Apples run Intel chips. 3) Out of curiosity, I installed a number of OSs on VirtualBox virtual machines the other week: WinXP, openSuse 10.2, ubuntu 7.?, DOS (I have to try GRF-ND now). There were some initial stability problems, but the seem to have worked themselves out after a few reboots and things were running well enough for me to install and test the new Morpheus under each Linux OS without problem. 4) I know nothing of Parallels. For me, I decided the stability and a feature that allows the virtual machine's screen to expand to fill my laptop display made it worth the small educational investment in VMWare. The latter is important for my lectures. VirtualBox does not do this, but looked like a good (and free) option otherwise. What does this Linux stuff have to do with Apples? At its heart, the Apple OS is a version of Unix. So the observations above should apply to Apples. I would recommend the student try VirtualBox first since it is a freebie. For more info: VMWARE http://www.vmware.com (current workstation version 6.0, very stable, Mac version is Fusion) VIRTUALBOX http://www.virtualbox.org open-source freebie. Here's a pic running on a Mac: http://http://www.virtualbox.org/attachment/wiki/Screenshots/VirtualBox_OSX_beta_255c.png VirtualPC http://www.connectix.com/ Haven't tried this in a long time. Parallels http://www.parallels.com/ No experience. -dslice morphmet wrote: > In order to follow the (green) book by Zelditch et al. closely, a > student new to geometric morphometrics would like to try a Windows > emulator --VMware or Parallels--to use the Windows software on her Mac. > > Can anyone comment on either of these emulators and their use with this > software? Are there any incompatibilities or glitches we should be alert > to? (I understand that the emulators are being upgraded with new > versions on a very frequent basis, so it's possible that problems are > actively being remedied.) > -- Dennis E. Slice Department of Anthropology University of Vienna ======================================================== -- Replies will be sent to the list. For more information visit http://www.morphometrics.org
