What Non-Windows OS's are worth it? (If any.)

C

Cralex

Junior Member
Hi. I'm running Leopard on a MacBook and am going to get XP and parallels. My question is if I should invest any time/effort/disk space on another one of the supported guest OS's as well. Since this would be easier to answer if you knew more about me...

I am, naturally, getting XP because I want compatibility with various Windows Programs and Games. I plan to use XP with Coherence most of the time, since I'm a big time Mac user. I understand this is currently unavailable with other guest OS's. I'm pretty much a jack-of-all-trades computer user, although I have very little experience with actual programming and non-mainstream OSs. I also doubt I'll do much compiling with source code since I'll have both Leopard and XP working for me. I guess what I would mainly go for is a OS with advantages/differences from Leopard and XP. I was considering freebsd because it sounded neat, but I noticed that the compatible versions are a bit out-of-date.

So, that's where I am. Let me know if I need to clarify anything. I'm new to the whole Parallels scene. Thanks!
 
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Funny you should ask, I was actually going after computer science, but I think that I'd prefer something more general, like like IT stuff, to programming. (Then again, you never know.) Heck, I would not mind setting up parallels or something on a bunch of networked computers! Well, I have a pretty solid bace on my mac os for most things I do. I'll be using XP for some games, anything that I miight encounter in the future, and other misalanious programs that I have lying around at the moment, nothing that takes up a good chunk of resources or requires specialized knowledge for now. However, this could just be because I have not had time to explore other possabilities that an OS other then mac would bring. I may just stick with Mac and XP for now, since there isn't really anything specific I am looking for in other guest OS's for the time being. If there is some cool stuff out there, then I am unaware of it.
 
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Doesn't sound like you *need* another OS. You've got XP, you've got OS X, and the whole Unix side of OS X to explore.

Things I find/have found useful:

* Windows 2000 for testing websites under pre-IE7 browsers, testing installers etc. - takes up less space than a second XP install.

* A lean, mean server-only Linux (e.g. a minimal Debian install) for developing/testing websites with Apache/PHP/MySQL/PostgreSQL. Actually, all of those will run under OSX but its sometimes more convenient to have a sandbox to work in where a config change won't upset something on your Mac.

* Ubuntu for having a look at how Linux-on-the-desktop is coming along - (ans: very nicely, however, my personal prejudice is still Linux + Apache/PHP/Postgres/MySQL = now we're cooking with gas! but Linux + KDE/Gnome = kicking a dead whale along a beach).
 
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