I have Parallels working pretty good now. I do have a few complaints that will be hopefully resolved in the next release. If Parallels needs a beta tester, I would be willing to do it. System is Dell Inspiron 8500 w/2.2 GHz P4-M processor and Nvidia Geforce 4 GO Video card with 1 GB memory running Suse 10.0 as host operating system and WinXP sp1 as guest operating system. (I also ran Windows update on XP to get the latest updates except for SP2. I think the Etrust firewall, or any firewall for that matter, is better than the SP2 firewall. I did have to call up MS though to get XP revalidated. I had updated the harddrive to a larger, 7200 rpm drive about a year ago, then the laptop died and I sent it back to Dell where they replaced the system board. Was a pain to recertify the XP. Glad I don't have to do that often. The WinXP CD was the OEM version that came with the machine. Just another reason to get away from Windows as much as possible. 1. When I installed some software that uses flexlm from Globetrotter, It crashed WinXP. (Flexlm goes to the network card and gets its MAC address for comparing to the license file) Rebooting caused crashes as soon as the network was connected. Solution was to switch Acceleration from High to Normal. This slows down WinXP tremendously, especially with CA Etrust firewall and virus scanner. Removed these programs and switched network to Host Only networking as I only occasionally need to access the internet from WinXP, but can get by without it. (Don't like to go on the internet with Windows without firewall, eventhough I have firewall built into the router) I sent some 30 bug reports of the crashes to reports@parallels.com. The two programs with use the flexlm function operate now when I change the MAC address to the license file MAC address, which is actually the MAC address of the docking station which is what WinXP used before. Why I do not know. Had to manually edit the .pvs file for the VM to accomplish that however. If I want to change anything there with the gui, I have to change it back, otherwise, it comes up that the MAC address does not start with 00 and won't change anything. One of my docking stations starts with a 02 and the other with 74. This should also be fixed. 2. I cannot connect to USB hardrives or Printer. This is apparently a known problem. I have the laptop on a docking station with USB keyboard and mouse and they work. Tried removing from the docking station and not using USB keyboard and mouse, same problem. Work around is to share the USB drives from Linux with Samba Server. This works quite well other than being rather slow. I notice that Parallels only supports USB 1.1. They should support USB 2.0 as most everything these days is USB 2.0. Also, why is it being limited to two devices? I can plug in 5 devices to my docking station + two into the keyboard. I have not ever used that many, but have used 4 at times in addition to the keyboard and mouse. 3. When I installed the parallelstools in WinXP, it crashed it. After rebooting it crashed again, so rebooted again and it worked. Then reinstalling parallelstools worked. Parallelstools is a drastic improvement for the mouse actions and copy/paste, etc. 4. When in WinXP, if I do a alt+PrintScrn, I can paste it into OOo Writer on XP but not OOo Writer in Linux. This is really inconvenient. I have MS Office installed also, but I only use it when I have file compatibility problems with OOo. 5. Would also like to see 1920 X 1200 resolution capability for the video also as that is the screen resolution of my display. If that is not possible, then at least the 1600 X1050 resolution to get a better screen aspect ratio than the 1400 X 1050. (especially important for doing crossprobing between a schematic and PC layout program) Otherwise, Parallels is a great program. Even with its present problems, it lets me use Linux for everything except these two programs that only run in Windows and I am happy enough with it that I bought a license for it. Art
Your comments are highly appreciated Hello Art, Thank you very much for a detailed report on your experience with Parallels Workstation. We definitely want to make the product which will suit all your needs. Your problems and wishes have been filed and our development team is working hard to implement that. For now I invite you to visit our homepage and to subscribe to our mailing list in order to be aware of latest releases. Stay tuned. We're looking forward to deliver an improved product to you. Best Regards, Nick
