One of the first things I did after installing the new version of Parallels (3.0) on my Macintosh this week was to uninstall OpenOffice. I’d been running Office for Macintosh in the host operating system and OpenOffice (the Windows version) in the virtual machine so I can get to my documents no matter which OS they happen to live in.
There are two new features of Parallels that free you from having to have two versions of the same application: 1) you can drag/drop files to and from the host OS to the virtual machine now, and 2) you can associate a file type in the virtual machine OS with an application that lives in the host OS. That means you can double-click on a .xls file in the VM and it will launch in Excel for Mac if you want.
Uninstalling OpenOffice was a no-brainer once I made sure that this all worked for me. And it does work splendidly. Double-clicking on a file associated with the host OS causes Parallels to create a little turd in the file system (which I assume is its own kind of file lock? Not sure) but that’s a minor nit.
Even though I have several unused copies of Office 2003 for Windows lying around the office and I could have installed Office in my VM, I wanted to kick the tires on OpenOffice again. I also assumed that Office 2003 would require more disk space than OpenOffice, which may or may not be true, but disk space is at such a premium on a virtual machine that I didn’t want to mess around with it.
One way or another my VM is now happy with a half-gig of virtual disk space free, and I get to use one set of polished applications to do my work, which is nice.
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Those are some cool features. Thank you for pointing them out. It makes me wonder if at some point in the future … maybe we can all run a bare-bones “host” OS which links our stuff between OS environments in whatever manner suits us best. That would be pretty slick.
My frustration with Parallels is it is hard to use as an experimental test bed for OS testing–it wants to make things so easy and user-friendly that I can never bootstrap Ubuntu because the question of setting the right hardware emulation for CD-ROM and stuff is abstracted (hidden) behind “OS” version choices. NYUGH!
When I want to get serious about this stuff, I’ll have to set up a new PC with some RAM and disk and multicore CPUs on it and use a *nix host OS and run Xen or such. That will be mucho fun …
But, yeah, thanks for the tip. -danny