Marcus Kazmierczak

Parallels: Ubuntu on Macbook Pro

I haven't done too much with Linux in a while, so had fallen behind on what the hot new hyped Linux distro is. I hadn't even seen or played with ubuntu, I felt especially out of the loop after seeing a billboard on 101 about it.

Now all I have is a little Macbook Pro, no extra hardware, and really don't want to spend too much time and effort setting up and installing Linux for the 1,000th time [probably not an exaggeration]. So in comes Parallels, I'm already using Parallels to do IE6 and IE7 testing with two different XP environments [see here]. So I figured it would be easy enough to use to setup a virtual Linux enviornment.

Ubuntu has a Live CD ISO, which allows you to run the whole OS off the CD. What is really cool with Parallels, you don't even need to burn the CD to use it. You can setup Parallels to mount the ISO image as the CD-ROM drive and it will run off that. So all I had to do is download the Ubuntu (Intel x86) Desktop ISO, setup a new VM in Parallels and configure the CD-Rom to use the Image file. Start VM and I'm up and running Ubuntu.

I'll have to see how Ubuntu is, seems like a good community version of Redhat, who I'm not a fan since they started doing all their Enterprise version crap, but that's another whole post. These days it doesn't matter much since I'm an IT department of one, I'll run whatever my hosting company provides. Unfortunately, they all seem to offer RHEL-4 which feels real out of date with MySQL 4.x and PHP 4.x.

For now, Ubuntu gives me another option to satiate my Freecell fix.