Workaround for lack of Tools on FreeBSD 6.1

Discussion in 'Parallels Desktop for Mac' started by auratus, Sep 21, 2006.

  1. auratus

    auratus Member

    Messages:
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    Since the Parallels tools only exist for Windows installs, I came up with this workaround that may help some of the Unix users here.

    I was finding that with a GUI (KDE) the mouse would click into the VM and then you hav to hit ctrl-alt to get back out and the mouse behavior was different and a bit jumpy when going back and forth. Also, there was no shared clipboard. Setting up xorg.conf was a bit of a pain and the resolutions seem to go weird when changed on the fly from within the VM.

    So, I instead gave up on running the GUI directly and now just fire up FreeBSD 6.1 as a VM straight to a login prompt. I then use FreeNX (from ports) installed on the FreeBSD VM and the NoMachine 1.5 client on OS X(the new 2.0 one doesn't seem to work with freenx as best as I can tell). It's seems a bit convoluted but the experience is actually better. I can more easily pick resolutions from the nomachine client and the mouse moves straight across very easily and smoothly. There's no need to use special key combos to click in/out of the VM. And, I can copy and paste back and forth from/to KDE/OS X. The GUI feels just about as snappy as the full one fired up on the console of the VM. I've been using Kmail all day today and sort of forgot that I am no longer on my old machine and am on my new Mac Pro.

    It's not as good as having Parallels tools but I think that getting tools for other OSes besides Windows is probably a low ToDo item for Parallels. Linux is down there and I'm sure FreeBSD support is quite a bit lower still. So, hopefully this helps some of you out and maybe someone else has even better ideas.
     

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