What’s New for VMware Fusion Beta 4
New “Unity” feature: Say goodbye to the Windows desktop - VMware Fusion now lets you run Windows XP applications directly on your Mac desktop, providing full integration with Mac keyboard shortcuts and the Exposé feature in Mac OS X. Use the VMware Fusion Launch Palette to easily access all your Windows applications, and save your favorite Windows applications to the Mac OS X Dock.
Nice... Parallels Desktop for Mac has a similar feature they call Coherence. The new 3.0 version has a feature called SmartSelect that lets you open Windows files with Mac apps or Mac files with Windows apps. I just installed Windows Vista as a Guest OS in Parallels 3.0 this weekend. So far, it is working pretty well.
It'll be interesting to see how far VMware and Parallels can push each other in virtualization tech.
Hey Todd,
I wasn't aware that Parallels had this. Nice! I obviously need to download the latest release and play with it!
> It'll be interesting to see how far VMware and Parallels can push each other in virtualization tech. <
For sure! What I find the most interesting in all of this is that MSFT backed out of the Virtualization for Mac business a while back. I'm still trying to figure that one out, but can't help but be curious as to what the future might hold in this regard.
Just out of curiosity, how did you convert the Orcas VPC image to run in Fusion?
Hi Ashley,
> ust out of curiosity, how did you convert the Orcas VPC image to run in Fusion?
You can download a stand alone install of VS.NET Orcas as well.
http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?FamilyId=B98A61BA-99B0-40B7-AB6E-5386A2B94217&displaylang=en
This gives you an .img file of which you can mount inside OSX. You can then go into your home directory and symlink that same mounted volume using,
> ln -s /Volumes/<name_of_mounted_volume> <name_of_folder_you_want_to_use>
... from an OSX shell session. You can then launch an instance of Windows inside of Fusion and then access this same folder via "My Networks". I would personally recommend mounting your shared OSX folder (assuming that you've shared your home folder when you setup the Windows instance inside of Fusion) as a local drive inside Windows, but as far as I remember it's not mandatory, just convenient.
Hope this helps!
Thanks! Eventually got it installed in Parallels. Had to mount the downloaded disk image as a virtual DVD - I got errors using shared folders. We're moving to virtualised development environments for the .Net developers here who will be running the Orcas Beta in Virtual PC. I find it ironic that I get better integration with the virtual machine on my Mac than they do on their Windows machines!
Now I've proved it works though, I'm getting rid and going back to TextMate + Ruby :)