Boot Camp

Every news site on the internet is talking about Boot Camp. It is an awesome idea. It really is, but since I am very picky I will be honest when I say it is not what I wanted! Really. I think having Windows on a Mac is a necessary evil. I just don’t want to have to dual boot. I have 2 Windows XP desktops at work (as of today, that number does change week by week) to augment my Powerbook for things like MS Access, Visio, Active Directory tools (when I am lazy and don’t want to use remote desktop), and other Windows only software. I honestly don’t use those machines very often. The main reason I use Windows at work is to run Vmware admin tools for my ESX and GSX servers, and Workstation to test desktop software installs. For home use I use Windows for 1 thing (not counting my dvr) and that is Quicken. I can’t stand quicken for the Mac. To dual boot for one or two applications would be a pain.

What would really be fantastic is a virtual machine running in OS X that would load up Windows. Lets face it, you own a mac for reason. I don’t want to deal with Windows if I have to, but I don’t want to run it all the time. Having a virtual machine that you can turn on and do one or two things with, and then turn off would be better to me than rebooting into XP. I tried virtual PC 5, 6, & 7 on the PowerPC, and it was so slow. Now that Apple has an Intel chip a virtual machine could be a viable option. Don’t get me wrong, Boot Camp is a great idea. I just think there are better things to come, I hope!

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Mac Linux Tools

Yesterday’s issues did have one positive (well sort of) piece to it. I had the need to install a bunch of network monitoring tools on my powerbook. I know that allot of software from Linux/Unix has been ported over to the mac. I have used a bunch of it, but when you actually go looking for stuff and almost everything you try to find has been compiled to work on the mac you have to think, cool!

Some of the new tools on my Powerbook are now: NMAP, XNMAP, Etherreal, MTR, and more. I of course have the Darwin Ports install on the computer, but I honestly haven’t even cracked the surface of what I can run on it.

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