EPKPhoto's Tidbits

As the quarter is nearing its end, things have been quite busy. No need to talk much about that, though. I'd rather mention that the weather forecast is finally showing some temperatures above freezing within this next week here in Rochester. We have had solid packed snow on all the walkways across campus since it has been too cold to melt anything. That may change quite soon :). Also, I am going to the hockey game tonight against Mercyhurst. It is RIT's last home hockey game of the season. Last night's game was an exciting win from what I heard, so I hope tonight's game lives up to that standard. Read on for Parallels and Linux comments.

When I last mentioned this topic, I was testing the "herd 2" release of Ubuntu's Feisty Fawn. The herd 3 release just about drove me insane as its installer continuously crashed my Parallels virtual machine. I never got a copy of it running in Parallels, but fortunately the herd 4 release that just came out installed just fine. I'll hold my judgments for the final release, but the Feisty Fawn version of Ubuntu is looking good so far.

I also have been having installation issues with the Test 1 release of Fedora 7. For some reason the installer DVD image begins to boot fine in Parallels, but the Anaconda installer fails to find a driver for the Parallels virtual optical drive. After trying many times to find an answer in IRC chat rooms, Fedora forums, and Parallels forums, I finally gave up and performed an FTP install of Fedora 7 Test 1. I set up a local FTP server on my Mac Pro with the installation files so the FTP install would not be hindered by downloading files. That worked flawlessly. I haven't had much time to test Fedora 7's new features, so I will hold judgment on it as well.

Another piece of Parallels news involves running Windows. I have Windows XP installed on a second hard drive in my Mac Pro using Apple's Boot Camp solution. With the recent couple beta releases of Parallels Desktop for Mac, I have finally been able to start up a virtual machine from my Windows XP Boot Camp install. Previously, Parallels could not handle Boot Camp configurations like mine that involved a second hard drive. Now that this has been fixed, I have access to Windows, multiple distros of Linux, and Mac OS X without any need to reboot my computer.

This entry was posted on Saturday, February 17th, 2007 at 3:29 pm and is filed under Fedora, Linux, RIT, Ubuntu, Weather. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed.