Today is going to be a short post. I’m having too much fun on my Linux laptop to do much on my Mac. It’s not like the Linux laptop is a total replacement. It’s still Linux and a little clunky under the hood in terms of usability. If I had a choice between a Linux box or an Apple box on an island, I’d take the Apple hands down. In the meantime, it’s always fun to explore new things. Today’s lesson is connecting across a network to my Mac and doing printing.
Both Vista and Linux have picked up the shared printer on the Mac and printed to it immediately, a welcome development from previous incarnations of the Mac OS where print sharing was often difficult, undependable and prone to breaking.
One attribute of Macs that goes unremarked in the general media: Macs can now run virtual machines of any caliber, Vista, XP, Linux and possibly others. These systems run concurrently with OS X and their performance is excellent, especially when compared to the emulators of the PPC days.
The difference is that Intel-based Macs run the same hardware on the chipset as PC’s running Vista and Linux. For all intents and purposes, the computer is a PC. Apple provides a free environment called Boot Camp which allows the user to boot up just like a typical PC in Windows or Linux. The virtual machine packages allow the alternative OS to run at the same time as OS X inside of its own window or in a manner that lets the other OS place windows in and among OS X windows. It’s quite the trick.
Practically speaking, virtual machine technology means any fervent Apple user can run Windows applications in their native environment so that they run perfectly. The speed of virtual environments is great. One can hardly tell the application is in a virtual environment as things just move along like they would on a native PC. If you have that Windows software you have to run for a business application, you can do it easily. The virtual machines have complete access to the hardware and see USB devices, printers, and other external hardware and services the same as if the OS were on its own box.
The older emulation packages ran an emulation of an Intel chipset on a Power PC microchip. Because the instruction sets had to go through the interpreter, they were greatly slowed down. Emulation software never really made a big dent in the market due to the slowness of the programs running on it on even the fastest Macs.
Another excellent development is the free virtual machine application created by Sun. Instead of having to fork over dollars for Parallels, you can download Virtual Box from Sun, install Windows and be up and running in no time.
