my name is mwd

As part of getting the gumstix set up, the dev toolkit only supports linux, and I’m currently using a MacBook most of the time at work. This seemed the excuse I’d been looking for to try Parallels, the first people to get out x86 VM software for the Mac. Here’s an Ubuntu install running in Parallels on my MacBook (click to enbiggen):

Installing Ubuntu under Parallels went very smoothly, Parallels allowing me to mount the ISO image as a CD-ROM drive. And Ubuntu seems to run quite happily. I’ve used VMWare quite a bit (I use it on my linux based Thinkpad to run Windows XP) and I have to say that VMWare is a lot slicker and feels more responsive, but no idea if that’s just a factor of the different platforms rather than the different VM software. Anyway, I’m quite happy with it at the moment.

Of course, one problem with this easy access to virtualisation is that it’s made me lazy – I’m sure with a day’s labour I could have built the gumstix tool chain on Mac OS X to start with, and cut out all this virtualisation overhead (and you should hear the MacBook spin up the fans when you do a tool chain build in a virtual machine :). Having said that, at least this way I don’t have to worry about new updates to the tool chain breaking any porting efforts.