Mighty Morphin’ Macs (and virtualization)

The big news this week in the computer world was on the Intel Mac’s Boot Camp, which lets you run Windows on a Mac natively for the first time, if you don’t mind repartitioning your computer.

The behind-the-scenes news is virtualization. Microsoft is giving away for free their Virtual Server (which is really their repackaged versionof VirtualPC). To top that, also for free, I ran VMWare Player and the Red Hat Enterprise AS 5 virtual appliance on Windows XP. You need like 6 GB of space on your hard drive, and the more memory, the better, but I got about 3400 bogomips on a 1.5 GHZ Pentium 4, which isn’t fantastic, but it’s way more than enough to get the GUI fully operational and browing the X Windows version of Firefox without hesitation, without messing up my partitions, and with full sound support. This is the new frontier in computing!