Hi, my name's Jake, and I'm a Mac user. And I love it. I've been PC-Free for nearly 2 hours. Ok, so by now you can probably tell I'm a bit of a Mac fan. I bought a MacBook last October so that I could use Aperture and get used to the system that seemed to be dominant for creative work. That and the GUI is just plain freakin awesome. When I first bought it, I gave it a spot next to the keyboard on my desk and couldn't seem to make myself use it all the time for all my browsing, IM, etc. But, slowly, over time, I slowly became acquainted with the ins and outs of OS X and began using my PC less and less. My MacBook still resides next to my PC's keyboard when I'm at home, but I spend more time in front of my Mac than my PC. Recently, the only thing I've used my PC for is to run PS Elements, which I don't have for the Mac. More and more, my MacBook has become my main computing platform.
A month or two ago I started taking my laptop to work so that I'd have my music and other apps available to me- what's the point of a laptop if you're not taking it places? Now, at work we use this amazing technology known as Virtualization for most of our servers. The company VMWare makes a product that allows you go create 'virtual machines' and use them for your servers. In the old days (two or three years ago), if you wanted a webserver you would have to build or buy a computer, install an OS, install your server software, and maintain that one machine. For an entity that only has one or two servers, this isn't a big deal. But, once you've got a mail server, a web server, an eDirectory server, two eDirectory replica servers, a license server, and a bunch of other network servers it becomes expensive to maintain all those physical machines. What virtualization allows you to do is to just have one physical server and then create an environment where the OS thinks that it's installed on it's own physical machine, but it's really just sharing the hardware with a bunch of others. VMWare's server product allows us to run two physical servers and to move virtual machines on the fly from one to another. Now we've just got two super-powerful servers rather than a bunch of smaller ones. If one of the physical servers fail, we can move the virtual machines (or 'VMs' for short) to the other, with little or no disruption to the end user.
So, virtualization is impressive in the data center, but what does that have to do with Macs? Enter VMWare Fusion. Ever since Apple announced the switch to Intel CPUs in 2006, people have had the tantalizing possibility of running Windows and Mac on the same machine. Boot Camp made this a reality, but you have to reboot your machine to get to your Windows installation. VMWare, along with other virtualization companies, took a different approach and, thanks to the now common instruction set (ie, x86), created virtualization products for the Mac. They are mainly billed as ways to run Windows on your Mac and as such I didn't take a hard look at them. If I wanted to run Windows, it'd probably be for games, for which virtualization isn't very well suited (and neither is my crappy Intel 950 integrated graphics). Running Windows on my Mac just wasn't very attractive to me.
Then, one fateful day, it happened. Novell's home-study courses take advantage of virtual machines to give the student hands-on experience that is vastly more helpful than just bookwork alone. My computer at work just couldn't handle the three VMs that the course I was studying (Migrating from Netware to OES Linux) required- heck, it probably couldn't even handle a single VM! So, I went looking for alternatives. It was then that I discovered that Fusion wasn't just a program that let you run Windows on your Mac. It let you create all sorts of VMs- Linux, Windows, Netware, Solaris, etc. Suddenly my mind ran through all the possibilities. One of the biggest problems with Linux is that there are so many different distros, and choosing between them can mean a lot of time spent uninstalling one from your computer and installing another. With VMs I could just create a new VM for each distro! I downloaded the 30 day trial, and I was in geek heaven. I remember the extreme irony of seeing the heading "A totally new look and feel!" when installing WinXP for my Novell course. Sure, XP was different, but when I could look just beyond the Fusion window and see the beautiful Mac OS X environment, WinXP suddenly looks superfluous. I was geeking out all that day, no doubt about it.
The other day I realzed something: if I installed a Win98 VM, I could play Earthsiege 2 again! Earthsiege 2 was one of my favorite games in my early Windows days. Upon upgrading to WinXP, I discovered that you could no longer use the joystick to move your Herc! They'd changed the joystick libraries in Win2k/XP, and the game was no longer able to communicate with the joystick. Without the joystick, Earthsiege 2 is impossibly hard, so I shelved it. Last week I pulled out my old Win98 disk, got a VM up and running (to get sound running you have to download a certain creative soundblaster driver), and installed Earthsiege 2. I was in nostalgia heaven, and beat the game in about 5 hours (spread over 3 or 4 days). Seeing the antiquated Win98 GUI with OS X in the background was even more of a system shock. How far we've come (and yet, 10 years later, Vista hasn't departed too radically from that basic interface...).
Earthsiege 2, and the new Indiana Jones movie, got me thinking about another old game- this one nearly as old as me! The first computer I ever used was an old Epson Equity 2e- a 286 complete with Windows 2.0. We had a game called Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade: the Graphical Adventure. We (my family) were never able to beat it! Sure enough, I found a product called scummvm that would run the old files ('scumm' was the name (ok, so accronym) of the operating environment for that game, along with a couple other LucasArts classics)-- ooooooh, nested parenthesis! Should I use brackets?-- but the Mac version of scummvm wouldn't open the files. You guessed it- time to fire up the Win98 VM and launch it there! if Earthsiege 2 was a walk down memory lane, this was an adventure to the furthest reaches of memory (come on, I was like 7 or 8 at the time we had that 286!). That was back when games weren't just "go in the room, blast everyone away, go to the next room, blast everyone away, shampoo, rinse, repeat" but you actually had to think it out, you had to use trial and error methods to discover what to say to the gaurd that wouldn't draw you into a fight that he could win with his eyes closed. I havn't beat that game yet, and I'm not sure if I ever will.
So, I mentioned Linux, right? Lets see, right now there's 5 linux VMs on my machine right now- a Fedora 9 install, two openSUSE 10.3 installs (Gnome and KDE, respectively), a SLES 10 server install for the Help server at work, and a SLES 10 VM for my training course. I tried an openSUSE 11 RC1 live cd, but it wouldn't work. I got the desktop, but whenever I'd click any of the icons it would bounce for a minute and then do nothing. I don't know if it's the virtual environment it doesn't like or if it's my lack of gpu power (it uses KDE4, which has some impressive graphical effects). I'll probably post my thoughts on all these different distros someday.
So, at the end of the day, I'm geeking out created one VM after another to test different distros, totally hosing a Netware/eDirectory server, and toying around with old games all on the same hardware. When I'm done, I can go back to the beautiful simplicity/complexity of Mac OS X. Show me a PC that can do that.
VMWare Fusion: Not Just For Windows!
