Free excluding the Windows license.

seanism

Will this work using mac on windows? I's using an intel processor

jharris0221

Intel Macs only (though you probably guessed that).

SamburgerHandwich

Most of us are tech savvy enough to get things that cost money for free.

John Williams

Has anybody else had issues getting past Microsoft's EULA? For some reason, the F8 key won't be accepted. I've tried a number of combinations using the shift, control, and command keys and it simply won't pick it up. Any ideas?

lehmon

@jharris0221: There are a few articles on Lifehacker & Gizmodo about creating a Hackintosh. I just picked up some surplus computers from my local high school, which I will be attempting this on. Here are some links: [gizmodo.com] & [lifehacker.com]

For starters, you can always Google: Hackintosh & the model computer you want to use. I used this for my GX270: Google.com

Git Em SteveDave can't get his new avatar to display

@jharris0221: You may be in luck! I haven't tried run OS X on a windows system, but Virtual Box allows you to setup a virtual environment to install almost any operating system your heart may desire. My only concern would be it's ability to share peripherals on your virtual machine. For example, don't expect your webcam or printer to work.

A3sthetix

A free alternative for running Windows apps under OS X is Darwine, a darwin port of Linux's wine for OS X. I had uTorrent up and running in under ten minutes. Download is here [is.gd]

*Sorry if this double posted, The Gawker Comment Beast ate my first comment.

SadFootSign

@bronskrat: that's how to make it LOOK like a Mac. Doesn't run like a Mac, anyone who thinks that hasn't actually used a Mac. Go Hackintosh or buy a Mac. Mac skins are so 2002.

Al Iguana

And to make your XP run like a Mac check out [www.kentd.com]

bronskrat

Great! Now I can run all those Sierra adventure games I got from ClassicGamesStore.com on my mac!

alexannic

i got a decent deal on parallels with a macheist deal so makes no odds to me. i just wish they'd hurry up and fix the linux tools problem with ubuntu 8.04 so i can have a play around with that properly

Gonzie

Do a search for MicroXP. It'll run Windows on 48MB just after booting without impairing functionality for most people - I dare say 90% of people.

sunk818

I started to use VirtualBox when it came out of beta (aka it's not in beta anymore so the post has a typo). It works pretty well, but I don't have real pressing needs so I haven't pushed it very hard.

Pretty good for free!

goingthewongway

The app used to run Windows is free, but Windows is not free. So you really can't run Windows on your Mac for free.

smcallah

@SadFootSign:
except it doesn't work for all apps, and requires some command knowledge.

kmkl

cool. I must have missed the post about vistualbox running seamlessly in linux because I didn't know virtualbox could do that. I'll have to take a look at it again.

jcoffman

@A3sthetix:
no, you can't.
unless you can mimic mac hardware, or get a hacked version of mac.

kmkl

I looked at Parallels vs Vmware Fusion vs Virtualbox a couple days ago. If I was going to buy one, I'd buy Parallels. The UI seems better (although I've heard Vmware is better at using both cores). Virtualbox for me was flawless. The only feature I missed was the ability to drag and drop files from the Mac Desktop to the virtualized XP desktop (which Parallels allows).

glitch1138

It looks like a copy of Windows XP Home starts at $70-85, so I don't think the headline is exactly accurate--VirtualBox may be free, but running Windows on it isn't. Still, good link.

Swirlee

Big downside is that Virtualbox can't re-use a Boot Camp partition to create the Windows virtual machine. So Boot Camp users it means having to install Windows twice - unlike with Parallels.

Richard Cosgrove

I run xp as a guest in Ubuntu hardy, it works great for those windoze apps you need.
It takes some tweaking in hardy to get the USB working, but it's not that bad.
As for games that is a no no as far as can tell, Vbox does not virtualize 3D directX drivers. Wine or crossover mac is your best bet for that.
As for running leopard as a guest I tried and kept getting errors. If anyone else pulled it off please tell how.

snikket

I have been running VirtualBox on my Vista machine for a while now.

Just set up my nieces' (twins) new Macbooks with VirtualBox and WinXP. Works fast, though the "Seamless" mode runs slower. They were previously using XP boxes I had built for them, I would have liked to just have cloned the existing computers, but my past experience with cloning onto virtual machines has been hit-or-miss.

Some caveats: USB does not work in guest OS yet; still haven't gotten the shared folder to work, but I think that's my fault. The guest OS can see the iSight camera, but it needs drivers.

felixgolden

I've been a regular Parallels user for over a year and just tried VirtualBox. It looks like it runs Windows pretty well, but I didn't try it for long. One thing I like about Parallels is Coherence (there's a similar feature in Fusion), the ability to make Windows apps run seamlessly on the Mac desktop, and it didn't appear that VirtualBox has this. It's more of an old-fashioned (but no less useful) guest-OS-in-a-window proposition.

That being said, today I did away with all scraps of Windows on my Macbook Pro... the last reason I have for needing Windows just went away! (I no longer need Windows to connect my Mac to my Windows machine at work. Hoo-rah!)

RainyDay

@RainyDay. Actually VirtualBox does have a mode similar to coherence. It's called Seamless mode and it works the same.

Jason

USB is kind of a hassle in Linux-Vbox too. Finally got it to work, though it means that whenever I attach something like an external USB harddrive to the Virtual machine, I won't be able to access it in Linux again until I physically remove the drives cable from the computer and then replug it.

[www.virtualbox.org] has a few hints - who knows, since OSX is ripping of Unix/Linux, perhaps these hints might be useful to those who havw trouble getting USB to work in OSX as well?

krank23

@lehmon: In your system preferences, go to the keyboard and mouse section, and in keyboard tick "Use all F1, F2, etc. keys as standard function keys". Once you have got past the EULA, you can untick it again to make the multi media keys work.

reclusivemonkey

If you are interested i run osx10.5.2 under windows the other day using vmware.
You need to setup it up as freebsd 64 bits os

hal9000

As it happens, I informally benchmarked each of the three products recently and came up with some interesting results. I was hoping to use VirtualBox but VMware Fusion came out best in tests; VB ran noticeably slower and used twice the memory of VMware. (Parallels ran about as fast but also used much more memory.)

Since I need several VMs, memory consumption was more important to me than it might be for some others. Also, VB wasn't unusable by any means, just slower.

(Tests conducted three or four months ago on an Intel Mac Mini 1.66 with 2GB RAM running Tiger. YMMV.)

ThatTallGuy

@Al Iguana: agreed that it's not a Mac, just skinned to look like one. But at work, they're not going to buy me a Mac nor are they going to allow me to Hackintosh my machine, so this is as good as life can get. And I can comment that skinning it does have its advantages. I believe my work is quicker with that RocketDock alone. I'd like to see some usability research on the effectiveness of the doc vs. the start menu.

bronskrat

I am not a software developer, but I periodically need to use Windows and Ubuntu for various work related reasons on my MacBook. I used Parallels for the past year exclusively and it was great until Ubuntu upgraded to Hardy Heron. Parallels has all sorts of problems running Hardy Heron and the response from the Parallels team has been slow and poor. In the meantime, I gave VirtualBox a try and found it to be just fabulous. All of the features UI features that Parallels has are available in VirtualBox, and the implementation seems to be more elegant and easy to use. I have not tried running Windows using VirtualBox yet, but next time Parallels tries to charge me again to upgrade, I will probably be tempted to just move all my virtual machines to VirtualBox.

By the way, I have not found any difference in the robustness of VirtualBox vs. Parallels. If anything, VirtualBox may be even more robust since it actually works smoothly with Linux, with which Parallels has problems.

tyojohn

Based on the limited commentary I read, this doesn't function with Boot Camp partition(s) (plural for those that are slick) if you happen to have one/them. :-(

Gilbert