Thought I’d throw this out to the lazyweb for advice. I’ve been running OS X as my primary desktop OS since I got my macbook pro around May 2006 or so. I installed Parallels as soon as I found it, and it was great. I still have it installed. However, I’ve found two issues with Parallels in the past two years:
1. There’s no kind of easy upgrade path for existing parallels users that I can find. Their web site is a mess, (like most software vendors, oddly) and there’s no upgrade license that I could find.
2. It’s non-trivial to install of versions of linux that are released after the version of parallels you’re trying to install to, for whatever reason.
I remember having issues with installing an Ubuntu version, and a CentOS version, both newer than the parallels I had installed. Then I upgraded parallels, and they installed fine.
So today I tried to do the impossible: install CentOS 5.2 on a build of Parallels from March 2007. I get a kernel panic, which I remembered a hack for (add “linux kernel agp=off” to the boot: line), but even that didn’t have any effect. Guess I just pushed the limit too far this time.
So, since there’s no upgrade license to make it cheaper for me to stay with Parallels, I have no particular reason to stay loyal to them. However, I cannot find a single mention of Linux on VMWare Fusion’s web site (?!), so….
What’s everyone doing about virtualization on the OS X (Leopard) Desktop?