Dear Parallels:

[lwood]

I realize that it's only by the grace of your programmers that your product supports putting a notional Linux workstation on a virtual machine at all, and that as such, there is no real money in it.

But damn.

This whole thing where the Linux "hard drive" of the virtual machine and the Mac hard drive that wholly encompasses it can only talk to each other by using network file protocols between them? Like, y'know, rsync and ftp and all that? That's lame as well as stupid. Sheesh.

--- Lorrie

Comments

[blackcoat.livejournal.com]

Out of curiosity, why is that stupid? The point of VM's is that they are real machines, at least as far as they, and anyone that talks to them, are concerned.

How would *you* mount the filesystem on the VM in any other way? Also? Not parallels fault. With Xen, you can mount the volumes under the linux host, but that's because they are just ext3 (or whatever) volumes.

[lwood.livejournal.com]

If this were an XP VM, the drives would be able to see each other, and the XP and Mac desktops for the currently logged-in user would be the same.

However, what's even more annoying than the "can't see each other's drives" part is that the parallels/Linux session hangs randomly. >.<

-- Lorrie

[dasubergeek.livejournal.com]

Except for the part where the drives can see each other, you're right. Default out-of-the-box Parallels mounts the Mac disk as an XP disk -- you're right about that -- but if you've only partitioned N gigabytes of data for the Parallels VM, anything you want outside of those N gigabytes you have to fetch using a network protocol.

Also, it may be a Parallels problem, that hanging bit -- I've found that my Mac running XP-under-Parallels has to be rebooted a helluvalot more than a box with XP running on it.