Colin, No need to apologize. It may help you to understand what Parallels does, though, so you can figure out whether it's appropriate for you. The first piece of information that may be helpful is that, while it was originally for the Mac, and its best supported platform is still the Mac, it can run on both Windows and Linux. What Parallels (and software like it) does is to create a virtual computer that can run on your currently installed OS. VMWare is (I think) the commercial pioneer in this field, and is perhaps still the most well known. What this means, in practice, though is that you are not really getting away from Windows, since you are actually running a full copy of windows in its own sandbox. Think of it as running a dual-boot machine, except that you don't have to reboot your native OS to start running the 'Virtual' one. The advantage of this is that you can run virtually *any* windows app (including most games ... although the performance can suffer) in your Linux (or NT/XP or Mac) machine. Generally speaking, however, this is not really a final solution for most people. You still are running windows, and as such must pay for the license and deal with the flakiness. It is sometimes a reasonable interim step when you have applications that simply do not play well (or at all) on Linux. There are also side-benefits with this sort of setup, involving easily saving and restoring configurations and operating environments, and from what I've seen of Parallels, the nested OS is still pretty responsive (this is in sharp contrast to the first time I ran VMWare about 7 years ago ... it was not fast, although it was *very* cool :) ) I hope that that is a (relatively) clear explanation of how that works. Feel free to e-mail me on or off list if you have any other questions. Cheers, Lee On Nov 17, 2007 10:59 PM, Colin Novick <c-novick-1@alumni.uchicago.edu> wrote:
Apologies. Deepest even.
Before anyone needs to chastise me I looked it up and OS X is more Next and other sources than Linux per se.
Apparently Parallels on OS X will run Win and Lin, but the underlying OS is OS X and does not imply that ArcGIS would be stably emulated by a Linux machine emulating Win.
Sorry.
Hope not to have too terribly offended in my ignorance.
Colin
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