VMWARE Fusion under Leopard

I’ve recently been issued with a new Macbook Pro (actually the old MacBookPro4,1 model), and decided that rather than dual boot Linux and Mac OS X as I was doing before, I’d take the plunge and run OS X with Linux under virtualization. Some thoughts:

• My productivity has gone through the roof because
  1. I don’t need to reboot to switch OS
  2. I can use each OS to its strengths
  3. All my files shared between three operating systems making management and backup a lot simpler

• Sharing files between the native OS and VMs is seamless. I have the same desktop and home folders in OS X, Windows XP and Linux.

• With VMware tools in the ‘guest’ operating systems, copy ‘n’ paste of text and drag ‘n’ drop of files between operating systems ‘just works’

• Audio, video, networking, bluetooth and the iSight ‘just work’ in all three operating systems, but don’t expect great performance. I can’t get hardware-accelerated graphics under Linux because the OS can only access VMWare’s emulation layer and not the underlying hardware. Audio is basic — forget doing any real-time or low-latency work.

• On the positive side, I don’t need to worry about getting drivers working for new hardware, e.g. external audio devices. if it works in OS X, it works in the guest OS. For example, firwire audio devices — previously a bit tricky under Linux — work just as well (or badly) as USB devices.

• The keyboard and touchpad basically work, but I had to add some custom xmodmap configuration. Note: this is nothing to do with VMWare per se, I get the same problem with a ‘native’ install of OS X on the MacIntel hardware.

To summarise, the switch to a heavily virtualised setup has been an epiphany in terms of productivity and convenience, but this has been at the expense of high-performance graphics and sound on the Linux side.