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Saturday, April 8, 2006
What OpenOSX couldn’t do Parallels Workstation did. For months I’ve been wrestling with getting WinTel 2.x to work on my MacBook Pro and have never been able to, even though it’s got Intel inside. Oddly enough, I did get it working on the Mac mini running a PowerPC here in the SvenOnTech labs but never any luck on the chip Windows98 was designed for. I finally gave up and kissed off my $25 even after repeated e-mails from OpenOSX tech.
Yesterday I tried Parallels’ solution and I had little hopes. Heck, after being burned by OpenOSX, I didn’t think any of this would work. Well, after getting over the CD-ROM problem (good luck figuring out what your CD-ROM “name” is…I had no luck) and just sucking in an ISO I made for WinTel, I was up and running Windows98 Second Edition about an hour later! Installed the Parallel Tools and now I was running with higher resolution than my MacBook Pro even supports (on the LCD)! Sure, I can’t figure out how to get the audio to work (Device Manager can’t find any audio hardware,) but who cares at this point, I’m running Win98 at native speeds. I can now take my MBP on the road without fear of having to run a program on my desktop at the office via Remote Desktop on my Mac! All the good stuff works; networking, CD-ROM, Internet, and even file sharing all work without a hitch! It’s insane how easy this is.
Sure, got to get the sound working and figure out the stupid CD-ROM thing, but hey, those aren’t badly needed. I don’t need to hear anything at this point and files can be accessed via Network Neighborhood, so I ain’t stressing it.
In all, this program is well with worth the $50 asking price. I haven’t even scratched the surface of this yet. Wait ’til I dig out my OS/2 Warp CD-ROM!!
April 8th, 2006 at 15:25
The proper address for your DVD-R drive is: /dev/rdisk2s0
Second, I would be very careful with Parallels’ software. It injects code at the kernel level, and I found my system to be very unstable while this software was installed on my system. Incidentally, here is a script to uninstall the Parallels’ stuff in case you need it (taken from a user at MacSlash… sorry, I don’t remember who):
#!/bin/sh
sudo /Library/StartupItems/Parallels/Parallels stop
sudo rm -rf /Library/Parallels
sudo rm -rf /Library/Receipts/Parallels.pkg
sudo rm -rf /Applications/Parallels.app
sudo rm -rf /Library/StartupItems/Parallels
sudo rm -rf ~/Library/Preferences/com.parallels.Parallels.plist
sudo rm -rf ~/Library/Parallels
sudo rm -rf ~/.parallels_settings
I know that this is beta software, but again, be very careful. I have a recent backup of my entire system, and I would recommend anyone who uses this stuff to have the same.
April 9th, 2006 at 6:50
Whoa! Watch out for those shell commands in the previous message. If you make a typo such as putting a space between the / and the rest of the path then you can kiss your hard drive data goodbye.
The -r flag attempts to delete everything including directories and the -f flag does so without asking your permission.
Bad idea!
bot
April 9th, 2006 at 12:39
Yeah, none of those “rm” commands do anything about the kernel. None of those paths are kernel extensions. The closest thing is a startup item that may launch some background process. I don’t think it’s “injecting code at the kernel level” at all.
April 9th, 2006 at 13:58
Ditto the previous two comments. Also note that the given /dev/ location for one’s optical drive is a likely one, but not necessarily the correct one.
There’s a good how-to at http://www.macfixit.com/article.php?story=20060407080157849
April 9th, 2006 at 14:39
Ok, first, it’s a script, which is intended to be copied and pasted into pico (or whatever text editor you use) and run as such. If you don’t know what you’re doing, you shouldn’t be in the command line anyway.
Second, I was mistaken, it’s not “injecting” code per se. It does leverage the VT-x technology built into the Core Duo, and elevates the code to a higher “ring” in the processor. If not done correctly, this can have serious consequences (hard crashes, data loss, etc.) You can read more about it here.
April 9th, 2006 at 18:24
If you put the CD into the system and run the command:
diskutil list
It will give you a list of all of the drives that are mounted and their device name