True to Jamiroquai’s lyrics, it seems that I’ve been on an OS installation frenzy.
Virtualization has made it so easy to test different OSes. Right now I got 2 variations of each of the three OSes – namely Windows XP, Windows Vista, and Ubuntu. Each having a working image, and an image from when I first installed them (base installation). This should make it easier for when I bollocks any of them up and need to “reformat.”
Add the default OS (OSX) and that’s seven OS variations to play with all in all. Here’s what my Parallels folder looks like as of the moment.
And here are some pictures of the OSes in action:
First is a typical XP session I like to have, no visual themes, etc. Just plain ‘ol “classic” desktop to save on resources. I have a similar setup on my main PC as well as XP 64-bit. Come to think of it, maybe I should try installing XP64 on Parallels as well, who knows.
You can also see a bunch of Office 2007 apps running. Definitely look better. Still undecided on their new menu system though, unless you have a huge montir, I’m inclined to think that those menu bars can make your experience a “crowded” one.
Below we have Vista, running the IE7 and WMP11. Shows the sidebar, and the start menu as well. The sidebar, while cool-looking still is far from Apple’s dashboard. Just try dragging the gadgets around and you’ll see what I mean. As far as the start menu is concerned, that’s it. Gone are the days of cascading start menu items. I actually like it. And of course having Spotlight, I mean LiveSearch intergrated is always a good thing for the end user.
And of course below we have the picture of an Ubuntu session, which I used for the post right before this. Only thing worth noting here is that its running on the MacBooks native resolution (1440×900), this can be achieved by a little bit of modifications after the install.
I have a bunch of notes on each photo which I don’t want to repeat in this post. Feel free to visit each image’s respective Flickr page via the link they have at the bottom of each lightbox.