Shiny!

[mdlbear]

Power and internet finally came back at work at about 11:30, by which time the flower_cat and I had managed to assemble an early lunch of Pon-Pon Chicken (basically shredded cold chicken, cucumber strips, and peanut sauce).

Sometime around 2pm our sysadmin came back from his Fry's run with my

Comments

Parallels

[andyheninger]

I've started playing with Parallels a little on my Mac Mini. Only with Windows, so far. It seems to work, the installation of XP was completely smooth, but mouse tracking and vanilla 2d video response are below what I would really prefer. I'm very happy NOT to have to partition the disk.

For Linux under Parallels, it might be interesting to try using the native Mac X server, which should avoid pushing everything through semi-brain-dead virtualized video hardware.

Audio software for Intel Macs seems to be in an sort of mixed state right now.

• Audacity has no universal binary, and the PPC binary crashes on launch.
• Cubase LE (came bundled with a Presonus Firebox external audio box) fails on install.
• The Presonus driver seems to have occasional stability problems that require a reboot
  to clear. The symptom is no audio after waking a sleeping system.
• SoundEdit (bundled with some Macs, but not with the Mini) seems to be very reliable for recording.
• Garage Band works, but I haven't had the time to really understand everything it does. It's approach to editing is different from what I'm used to - once captured in an initial recording, the audio file is never altered. Instead, all edits or effects are kept symbolically and applied dynamically when playing or exporting.

I'm sure that you are right in thinking that boot camp will be the only way to do reliable audio work under Linux on the Mac.

Re: Parallels

[mdlbear]

I've heard that Audacity is unstable on Macs. The way Garage Band works sounds very Audacity-like -- it breaks the audio into 1MB chunks and puts all the edits into an XML file.

Using Mac X instead the virtualized device sounds like the way to go on Parallels, but I'll start with Boot Camp and Debian if I want to use it for Debian.

Re: Parallels

[andyheninger]

Curiosity got me, so I had to try it ...

This message is posted through Konqueror running in Knoppix running in Parallels on my Mac.

The whole thing was completely uneventful. It takes about 15 seconds of accepting defaults to create a new VM in parallels, then an old Knoppix 3.8 disk that I had lying around booted without incident.

Mouse motion is a bit jerky. Keyboard response is fine.