Warning! Do not buy Parallels if you want to run Linux in it with > 512MB!

Z

ZaphodX

Bit poster
Hello!

I had a hard time installing Ubuntu 7.10 with Parallels running on a MAC.
It all resulted from setting the memory of the guest system to more than 512MB.

After learning that Parallels does not support more than 512MB memory with Linux as a guest system, I was really disappointed. If I knews this restriction beforehand, I would have bought VMWare Fusion (which is even cheaper) instead of Parallels.

Reading through several forums, I learned that this problem exists for a looong time now.

Is Parallels to overcome this restriction in the near future, or should I dump it and switch to VMWare?
 
Hello ZaphodX,

Parallels does not support more than 512MB memory with some Linux Guest OS. Such is current design limitation. Our apologies.

Please avoid direct advertising of third-party software on Parallels Forum.

Best regards,
Xenos
 
Hello Xenos,

I'm sorry for my being offensive.

The reason for this post was, that I was in need for a VM on my MAC to be able to run both Windows and Linux on it, doing multi-platform development.

The datasheet for Parallels Desktop 3.0 says "Run Mac OSX, Windows, OS/2, Solaris and any distribution of Linux simultaneously - without rebooting."
And further more "Requirements: Linux Distributions - Debian, ..., Ubuntu, ...
Memory - Up to 2 GB RAM available for guest operating system"

There is no statement about a memory limitation on some Linux distros.

Since Ubuntu is becoming increasingly popular, I assumed that there would be no problems using it with Parallels. Because of Parallels popularity on OS X, I have swiched from another third-party VM to it and now I am really dissapointed, because Parallels seems to focus on running Windows as a guest system.

But: Parallels is running amazingly fast. My only complaint is this incompatibility with Linux running with more than 512 MB. I would not have been disappointed, if this limitation had been stated in the data sheet.

I hope that you will overcome this problem in the future either by giving this information to your customers before they buy this product or by making it compatible with recent Linux kernels.

Regards
Zaph
 
Zaph, I will deliver your request to our developers and to marketing department. Thank you for your report.

Best regards,
Xenos
 
I've been able to get around this limitation by installing the Ubuntu linux-virtual kernel.

sudo apt-get update
sudo apt-get linux-virtual

Once you're booting with that kernel, you should be able to set your memory 1024M without a kernel panic on boot. This should be in the FAQ.
 
Hello Patrick Torre,

Thank you for the idea. We are testing this workaround and will include it in FAQ as soon as it's reproduced in-house.

Best regards,
Xenos
 
Report?

Well, did anyone else have success with the virtual kernal? Has this been added to the FAQ? I couldn't find it.
 
512m Huh?

I've been able to run more than 512Meg on my linux partitions just fine. This is running both fedora 8 as well as on gentoo.

cat /proc/meminfo

[tgall@badhat ~]$ cat /proc/meminfo
MemTotal: 774912 kB
MemFree: 335752 kB
Buffers: 13900 kB

Regards,

Tom
 
>512Mb solution

ZaphodX said:
Hello!

I had a hard time installing Ubuntu 7.10 with Parallels running on a MAC.
It all resulted from setting the memory of the guest system to more than 512MB.

After learning that Parallels does not support more than 512MB memory with Linux as a guest system, I was really disappointed. If I knews this restriction beforehand, I would have bought VMWare Fusion (which is even cheaper) instead of Parallels.

Reading through several forums, I learned that this problem exists for a looong time now.

Is Parallels to overcome this restriction in the near future, or should I dump it and switch to VMWare?
Click to expand...

This problem was solved here.
 
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