Comments on: How to run Windows on a Mac

By: How to share a printer from OS X to Windows XP | Macintosh How To

How to share a printer from OS X to Windows XP | Macintosh How To — Mon, 14 Sep 2009 12:34:36 +0000

[...] lodge my e-tax I have to run windows XP on my mac (using Virtual box see this article on how) but needed to print it via my printer that was shared on my mac – took a bit of working out [...]

By: admin

admin — Sat, 14 Jun 2008 03:11:26 +0000

I downloaded wine and it was incredibly complicated, with all sorts of windows messiness. I couldn’t even get windows explorer to work. VirtualBox on the other hand works wonderfully. And yes I have the new version, and it is quite nice.

By: Mike P

Mike P — Fri, 13 Jun 2008 03:55:42 +0000

You might like to know that a non-beta Mac version of VirtualBox has just been released.

See http://www.virtualbox.org/wiki/Downloads

By: MikeW

MikeW — Wed, 23 Apr 2008 01:23:41 +0000

I was interested to read your comments on running Windows on Mac. I am running XP without a problem in a program I purchased with my MacBook Pro called Parrallels. (http://www.parallels.com).

To date (around 2 years of use) I have not discovered a ingle program that does not run. It functions as well or better than my native Windows PC.

I would highly recommend this.

By: Mike P

Mike P — Thu, 17 Apr 2008 11:56:15 +0000

Man, if you thought running Windows on a Mac/Linux was cool, now there’s a version of Linux that installs straight into Windows – http://www.linux.com/feature/131753

It looks like it will run basically anything Ubuntu linux can run, just as if it was a Windows program.

Still not as slick as a Mac though.

By: wayne

wayne — Thu, 17 Apr 2008 08:14:32 +0000

Good to hear form you Mike! Does wine work? The wine page says Explorer 7 does not work in it. But I’ll give it a go if I get free time (what’s that?) and then I can sell my windows XP.

The hardest part of installing Windows was registering it, it took ages on the phone with this lady as we both read a long series of numbers out to each other over the phone – ridiculous!

By: Mike P

Mike P — Wed, 16 Apr 2008 11:08:58 +0000

Using Wine also means you’re not supporting the evil empire, if you think of M$ like that.

By: Mike P

Mike P — Wed, 16 Apr 2008 11:07:57 +0000

Hi Wayne,

Never tried this on Mac, but have you tried Wine – http://www.winehq.org/ – which runs Windows apps for absolutely no cost, (no need to buy Windows)?

It doesn’t need a Windows installation disk, and doesn’t use a virtual machine, but emulates the API (application programming interface) calls that Windows programs use. It just pretends that Windows is there, but redirects any API calls to the appropriate API calls on Linux/Mac/BSD, kind of like a language translator. This also means it acts in a more native fashion than a full emulator, ie: it uses menus and clipboard from the Mac itself, or at least the Mac version of X-Windows/X11.

It is originally a Linux program, and I used it to run MS Word successfully several years ago, but it does stacks more than just Word. It’s been in development for Macs for the last 2 years or so and so I think it would be quite stable. It’s nearly at version 1.0, which is saying a lot for an open source program of its ilk.

There’s also a commercial version of Wine for Mac called CrossOverMac – http://www.codeweavers.com/ – Codeweavers also put a lot of their profits and code back into the development of the free version. I think the commercial version with support would still be cheaper than a copy of Windows XP.

Hope this is helpful. I’d love to hear how it goes if you give it a try.