Comments on: Parallels in a Work Environment

By: Eric

Eric — Sat, 02 Jun 2007 16:52:31 +0000

Chester, you were pretty much on the money. I wasn’t able to make CTC work with Safari, but I changed the JRE like you suggested, downloaded Firefox, and CTC ran like a CHAMP!!!

Have started buying Mac’s for our company now, starting with some of our NOC positions.

Of course, the week after I did this, Cisco started shipping all new nodes with Rel 8.0, which won’t run well on either a PC or a MAC. I don’t know what they did differently with Rel 8.0 but it’s obviously a dramatic shift. On the Macs, have tried changing the JRE back to 5.0, using Safari and Firefox, but no luck.

I don’t care…the Macs are phenomenal. It’s AWESOME not to have to reboot several times a day, which would inevitably be in the middle of working on some kind of critical traffic.

By: Chester Rieman

Chester Rieman — Fri, 23 Mar 2007 13:35:28 +0000

CTC will work natively with safari:

Go to /Applications/Utilities/Java/J2SE 5.0/Java Preferences and change the JRE from 5.0 to 1.4.2, then relaunch safari.

By: Eric

Eric — Sun, 18 Mar 2007 23:20:50 +0000

I bought an iMac for my wife, but have been looking at whether it’s realistic for us to progressively shift to Macs at work. I work for a telecom service provider and use Cisco Transport Controller (CTC) at work on a daily basis for managing SONET nodes. On most days, CTC is slow and cumbersome on most days on a PC platform, whether I’m using IE or Firefox to launch. In theory, CTC should run like a champ on an iMac due to the Unix core and the native use of Java. However every time I’ve tried to start it up on an iMac, it gives me a fail to load error as follows: Fatal Error: The classpath is incorrect and CTC cannot relaunch itself to correct the problem. I am not a software developer by any means, merely a humble user, and through minor research understand that classpaths are apparently one of the most challenging things for Java users to configure. Should I be using Paralllels with Windows XP to try and launch CTC launcher from there? Or is there a way I can launch CTC natively within Mac OS X? The Cisco support website says nothing about OS X with CTC, but other Cisco apps like Cisco VPN run great over OS X. Several of the other open source applications we use for work like Cacti run probably close to 10 times faster over this iMac.

By: Crossover Works Really Well at The Apple Blog

Crossover Works Really Well at The Apple Blog — Fri, 29 Dec 2006 02:07:36 +0000

[...] I wrote recently about (the oft covered) Parallels, and I really liked it. But the beauty of Crossover is that you don’t need to start up an entire virtual OS. At least it’s another alternative to try. For now it’s only a 60 day trial. You’ll have to pay for Crossover when it goes prime time down the road. By Nick Santilli in Software and News. [...]

By: Andy

Andy — Tue, 12 Dec 2006 12:34:40 +0000

How odd. I think you are me. I’m a system admin who runs around with a Macbook (black, 2 gig of ram) and a Dell latitude. I have to admit that since I got parallels I haven’t touched it. wonderful.

By: weldon

weldon — Mon, 11 Dec 2006 19:34:46 +0000

Is it possible to run networking apps in promiscuous mode under Parallels so you can use packet analysis and intrusion detection tools?

By: jtw

jtw — Mon, 11 Dec 2006 04:33:43 +0000

I’ve been using Parallels at work now for XP on my Quadcore 3Ghz Xeon. Has worked beautifully. Installed Vista without a hitch just for the fun of it. Hoping to install and play around with Linux in the near future.

Strongly recommended!

By: Fred

Fred — Mon, 11 Dec 2006 00:29:05 +0000

You’re first mistake was installing a beta version of Vista. Don’t use Vista, period. Vista will make your life hell, especially in a virtual environment. XP works with everything out there NOW, and you won’t have to deal with crap like IE7.

I use XP under parallels to access our company’s ERP system and file server. I’m able to switch back and forth with zero lag, including switching between windowed and full screen mode. I have all the service packs installed but I don’t use IE7. On the rare occasion that I do surf the web on XP I use Firefox. Mostly I use OS X to surf the web. That way I don’t have to deal with all the spyware crap. Parallels makes my work life wonderful. My XP apps run faster now than they did with my brand new Dell.

I use a MacBook 2GHz Core Duo with 2GB of RAM.

Seriously, why in the world would you want to use Vista? I know it looks pretty compared to XP, but that’s why you’ve got Mac OS X. It’s the real thing.

By: Mr K

Mr K — Sun, 10 Dec 2006 22:46:57 +0000

I just started a new job where I needed both Mac and Windows – like you I decided to test with a Vista Beta I had lying around (pre-RC1).
So far I’m happy, Vista runs well – better than it did on my old HP laptop. I’m not using anything intensive under windows – really only needed it to QA projects – so web browsers are the main use – it’s just so great to be able to jump from browser to browser/platform to platform – at the wave of a hand (yeah I’ve the light sensor working with VirtueDesktop)

By: shane blyth

shane blyth — Sun, 10 Dec 2006 22:41:45 +0000

I dont think you mention what version of Parallels you used ? might of missed that but have you tried the new beta… these guys sure move quick in adding interesting features.. The better USB support in the new Beta is good though I am still waiting for full support . multi nics is also great and the improved video speed too and the coherency mode sure is a very very cool way to work and the drag and drop from ither os to the other rocks ..