Installing Parallels on OSX Leopard
The first thing I did once I had Leopard installed on my new MacBook Pro was to install Parallels, a virtual machine that lets you run Windows, or any other operating system, from the Mac operating system. Parallels is a bit different than Bootcamp, which now comes included with Leopard. With Bootcamp, you create a dual boot machine. If you want to run Windows you have to shut down the Mac and reboot into the Windows side of things. With Parallels, you don’t.
Leopard Troubles
Unfortunately Parallels didn’t install on the machine fresh out of the box. The build I had was Parallels 3.0 build 4560. It crashed after trying to run the Windows install and then simply wouldn’t run at all. At this point I was pretty disappointed with my Mac. The first thing I tried failed due to a hardware problem (see the previous article). And now this. Not a great start, really.
The Fix
After a bit of digging on the Parallels site FAQ I found a mention of install problems. http://kb.parallels.com/entry/19/235/ The fix involved uninstalling the application and reinstalling it. That didn’t work. Then I hit upon a forum thread that is specific to the problems I was having with Leopard. http://forum.parallels.com/showthread.php?t=17536. It turns out that there were last-minute changes in Leopard that weren’t in the pre-release software that SWSoft had, and they’ve been scrambling since the October 26th ship date to fix things.
In a nutshell here’s what you need to do if you have Parallels and want it to run on Leopard:
1) Uninstall Parallels. Sorry, but you’ll have to start over. Luckily uninstalling Parallels doesn’t remove the actual virtual machine file according to the documentation. So anything you’ve done previously in Tiger should still be there once you reinstall. Please note that I haven’t done this, so I can’t verify that it’s true. If you have mission critical things in your Parallels virtual machine, you may want to back up the snapshots before you do this (a good idea in any case).
2) Download the latest version of Parallels (build 5160 as of this post). http://www.parallels.com/en/download/
3) Download the MACFuse Core for Leopard from http://code.google.com/p/macfuse/downloads/list
4) Install MACFuse.
5) Reboot
6) Install the latest build of Parallels.
7) Reboot
At this point, things started to work for me. Running Parallels finally asked me which version of Windows I wanted to set up. After entering the registration key and inserting the disk (I got a brand new copy of Windows XP Pro specifically for this) it did its thing and kept Windows from asking me anything by using the OSX profile as a reference for the settings.
About 30 minutes later, I heard the distinctive Windows chime and it was up and running. A fresh very tiny and unconfigured version of Windows was staring at me.
The first thing you’ll want to do is make the screen bigger. If you have a two button mouse attached, just right click on the desktop, click “Properties” and select the Settings tab. Then change the screen resolution to something much higher. I’ve got mine set to a strange 1544×1049 that seems to work pretty well on the MacBook Pro.
If you don’t have a two button mouse. You’ll want to know how to simulate a right click. CTRL+Shift+Click will pop up the context menu on anything as though you were right clicking on it.
Related articles:
Read more: Mac
Ross wrote:
I dunno if it’s a Windows specific thing, but I didn’t need to install MACFuse Core in order to install Parallels - but I am using Parallels (build 5160) to run Ubuntu.
Posted 05 Nov 2007 at 7:27 pm ¶
Ross wrote:
Uh and I should have said, this is in Leopard..
Posted 05 Nov 2007 at 7:30 pm ¶
Vladimir wrote:
Thanks for that feedback. It could be a windows specific issue. It seems that quite a number of people are having this problem. But come to think of it, I think all of the messages are about Windows.
Posted 05 Nov 2007 at 9:15 pm ¶