Parallels Desktop for Mac build 3036 Beta is available for download.

[STim]

Hello community!

We are continuing our efforts for bringing you even more feature-full product and we are making our latest Parallels Desktop for Mac Beta Build 3036 early available to you. It will be one more FREE update of the currently available version.

Heres a short overview of the new features and enhancements introduced by this Beta:

* New Look and Feel and Improved Usability. Completely redesigned windows and dialogues to make them even easier and smooth. Too many changes to describe just check them out yourselves

* Virtual Machines Catalogue. A very useful feature for those having more than one VM now all of them are available through centralized VM catalogue which appears on each Parallels Desktop for Mac instance start in case you have more than one VM

* One-click Virtual Machine Aliases:
* Automatically created by OS installation assistant or by drag-and-drop from title bar pressing Command-Option keys combination
* Clicking on Alias automatically starts the Virtual Machine
* Shutting down the VM automatically closes Parallels Desktop for Mac application

* Resizable Main Window. Resize Parallels Desktop for Mac main window as you do with any other Mac application

* Auto-Adjusting Screen Resolution. Your Windows auto-adjusts the screen resolution to the actual Main Window size.

* Drag and Drop files and folders between Windows and Mac. A long awaited feature that lets you seamlessly drag and drop files and folders from Windows to Mac OS X and vice versa.

* Read/Write BootCamp partition. Since this build, an Apple Boot Camp partition with Windows XP installed could be used as a virtual HDD for Parallels Desktop for Mac.

* Boot from BootCamp partition. Another long awaited feature that lets you boot your 32-bit Windows XP residing on Boot Camp partition directly in Parallels Desktop for Mac.
IMPRORTANT! You need to boot in your Windows XP natively through Boot Camp and install Parallels Tools for Boot Camp package in it before your first boot in Parallels Desktop for Mac.
NOTE! It is not possible to suspend Virtual Machine connected to Boot Camp for integrity reasons.
NOTE! Running Boot Camp in Virtual Machine will need to reactivate your Windows XP installation.

* Parallels Transporter Beta bundled. Migrate your Windows PC, VMware or Virtual PC VMs to Parallels virtual machines. Please visit Parallels Transporter forum for details.

* Coherence. Shows Windows applications as if they were Mac ones. Try it and enjoy best of both worlds truly at the same time. No more switching between Windows to Mac OS.

* Improved graphic performance. Up to 50% on different applications.

* Connect/disconnect USB devices schema improved. No more wait 5-10 seconds message on USB device connecting to Parallels Desktop for Mac.

* Up to 5 Virtual NICs. Now Virtual Machine can have up to five virtual network interfaces.

* Enhanced Shared Networking Mode. Run Cisco VPN and many other complicated networking applications in conjunction with Connection Sharing Mode.

* Switch between networking modes on-the-fly. Switch networking modes while the virtual machine is running.

* Transparent mapping of Command-AZXCV key combinations. Now you can also use Mac copy/paste key combinations in Windows.

* Power On/Power Off/Suspend/Resume/Pause animation. Just try and see. Were very interested in your feedback about the feature.

* Shared folders configuration on-the-fly. Add/remove/configure shared folders on-the-fly via menu or Status Bar icon without the need to stop your Virtual Machine.

* Drag and Drop CD/FDD images and folders to the Parallels Desktop statusbar. Just drag and drop CD or floppy image you want to connect or Mac folder you want to share onto a respective statusbar icon.

* And dozens of other not that evident enhancements.

Just download Parallels Desktop for Mac Beta Build 3036 to have them all available on your Mac! It will be a FREE update once it becomes Generally Available.
IMPORTANT! Resume and shut down all suspended Virtual Machines prior to upgrade.

Please remember that this is beta software, and like any other beta software you should treat it very carefully. Do not install this Beta into the production environment yet. Do backup your virtual machines before starting them.

If, for any reason, you would like to downgrade to previous stable build, use this link to get it.
IMPORTANT! Uninstall Parallels Tools from the guest OS prior to downgrading and install them again after finishing the downgrade procedure.

As usual, any feedback is extremely appreciated at [email protected] mailbox.

Best regards,
Tim and Parallels Team

------------
Download links:

Parallels Desktop for Mac Beta Build 3036 - http://download.parallels.com/beta/Parallels Desktop 3036 Mac en.dmg

Parallels Tools For Boot Camp - http://download.parallels.com/beta/Parallels-Tools-Bcp-1.0.3-Win.exe

 

[cflem]

Cant install Parallels Tools - XP Corporate Edition

Using XP Pro Corporate and the log file says:

Set Logging to 2
bctool_install() finished with rc 5
Parallels Tools for Boot Camp Setup program cannot find file %s\Driver Cache\i386\driver.cab. This file is required for successful installation of Tools and can be found on Windows XP installation CD.
Setup cannot be continued.

Tried installing with the Windows CD in the drive, and the file is located in Windows\Driver Cache\i386 but still not installing

I use this at work and would love this functionality!

HELP!

CF

 

[academianut]

Use real partition?

This is great news! However, one thing I have not seen (perhaps I missed it) is whether this use real partition feature requires boot camp or not. There are other, non-boot camp ways of multibooting OS's. I would like to use parallels to access my other OS partitions that were created without bootcamp.

Did I miss this information somewhere?

 

[jjb]

So some questions about this coherence mode - it sounds like this mode means that a single windows app can run "outside" of the VM window.
1) Can you have more than one windows app at a time?
2) Does coherence basically hide the Windows desktop?
3) Do MS apps running on the Mac desktop have Mac Windows behavior, i.e, are the Windows apps parented inside Mac windows?

(A screen shot or two somewhere would probably answer all of the above

This on a MBP, running Parallels with the START menu running down the left hand side, and "auto hidden". There are 2 "Windows" windows showing, plus Safari

HTH,

JJB

 

[Andrew @ Parallels]

Hi Guys,

Great work and great feature list team.

1) Please, please is it possible to just have read/write but not bootup access to the bootcamp partition from a regular parallels Windows VM, that is have the bootcamp partition just seen as another (asignable) drive letter eg say like the E drive, similar to a mapped network drive (but without the hugh performance hit mapped drives). It would allowed shared access to data within the two Windows environment but without the WIndows activation issue when switching between bootcamp and parallels.

Basically I still have some programs that I need to run that can still only run under bootcamp and all others will happily run under parallels. However, I need disk read/write but not boot access to the bootcamp partition. That way I can install the different programs to the same partition but either under bootcamp or parallel, depending on where they will be run.

I was hoping that this is what the following bullt point in your release was indicating but it is not clear:
* Read/Write BootCamp partition. Since this build, an Apple Boot Camp partition with Windows XP installed could be used as a virtual HDD for Parallels Desktop for Mac.

2) Please also consider providing direct acces to the Mac partition like MediaFour's Mac drive. My experience with shared folders and mapped drives is that it is very slow.

Thanks guys. Keep up the excellent work. Just wish I could switched to the product but without a fix to at least one of the above, it won't work for me.

Chris

You can 2-nd HDD to your VM and mount it to Boot Camp - Add Hardware Assitant has such option. This is indeed the feature which called "Read/Write Boot Camp"

 

[rangr]

I am running the neew beta on a 24" iMac C2D fine. The moust problem exists only when you choose choherence off the menu bar. Click the coherence button on the Parallels sidebar and it works great. Don't know why but that is what I am doing. I had the same problem at first.

made no difference where i selected coherence-- from menu or from sidebar gives mouse drift. have also found that resizing parallels window and selecting different resolution from windows display control panel results in mouse drift.

 

[dsmccrac]

Importance of multiprocessing

Andrew, sorry to take so long to reply to this as I have been off sick. First of all, this Beta release has been a great and unexpected early Xmas present! Thanks!

As you your question about multiprocessing, THIS IS VERY IMPORTANT IN THE ACADEMIC, SCIENTIFIC, AND THE CAD WORLDS. Andrew your argument (one core for Parallels and one for the Mac) makes sense for users of many macs, but for the towers it effectively wastes 2 cores. I have few one person running high end simulation software on a tower, and when he is running this software I believe many of his processor cores are sitting around looking bored! There are others considering buying the towers and probably will when the Adobe apps become universal binaries. Sales of the Towers has been a bit slow due to lack of universal binary support by many developers. When these guys move to universal, the tower sales will really take off and there will be a lot of parallels customers who want to run parallels with more than just one of their 4 cores (or if the rumors are correct, 8 cores!)

Thanks... Don

PS: this was not meant to piss on anyones cornflakes! You guys have done great and are doing great. But I think mulitprocessor support should move to the front burner -- sorry for 2 food analogies in once sentence

but why do you need multiprocessor support in VM? Parallels Desktop is tuned to run best on dual core Macs - one core is fully utilized by Windows and second core by Mac OS X. Optimal performance for both systems.

 

[snodman]

Also on a 24" iMac, can't now boot into Bootcamp

Not only am I getting the dreaded Microsoft "You have 3 days to reactivate" warnings whenever I boot into the VM using Bootcamp as my startup VM, when I try to boot directly into BootCamp now I also get stuck at the partition screen with no keyboard or mouse response in XP/BootCamp to let me select the "Windows XP" partition.

This is on a virgin Parallels installation of the new beta where the only ever installation of XP was through BootCamp and I just used the option in Parallels to use the BootCamp partition as my VM boot drive. Obviously I did follow the instructions to boot into BootCamp first, then install the BootCamp tools, then run Parallels (in this case for the very first time on this Mac) (which worked amazingly well - fabulous job!) which found and booted successfully from my BootCamp XP install.

So two show stopper bugs in my case. Constant reactivation won't work - my son runs 3D games several times a week and will need BootCamp for that, and now it appears I can't even get INTO BootCamp directly any longer. Is there ANY workaround for the keyboard thing on an iMac? They work fine (after the first VM reeboot) in the VM.

 

[AlanH]

Am I right in thinking the new Coherence and drag and drop features are only available with Win XP (maybe 2000)? The don't seem to work with a Windows 98se VM here.

And clipboard synchronization is still borked with Windows 98se - the Parallels Tools window shows just the first character of the OS X clipboard, and I can't paste anything into Notepad. Copying from Notepad to an OS X text window works fine.

 

[Andrew @ Parallels]

I assume you still need to in stall the standard parallel tools after installing the boot camp parallel tools package?

Yes, correct.

 

[DizziD]

Back to no launch with the beta...

I couldn't run parallels for quite a while, then with the last release version things started working properly for me. Now with the beta, I'm back to this message when I try to launch any virtual machine:

Parallels Desktop failed to initialize Virtual Machine memory subsystem. If this is the first time you see this message, try to reboot your computer and start your virtual machine again. Otherwise please contact Parallels support. Error code (2)

Not sure how to help troubleshoot it, as nothing has changed except the beta - hope I can get it working. The new features look great.

 

[Michael A. Lowry]

I don't really understand what you mean by having a second partition on the drive? maybe u r installing in the external drive. I have mine in installed in the macbook hd, so there are 2 partitions, the macOS partition, and the bootcamp partition.

There are two physical SATA drives in the system. The second drive is partitioned into two partitions: one Journaled HFS+ partition and one NTFS partition. The Boot Camp partition is the NTFS one.

 

[Andrew @ Parallels]

Am I right in thinking the new Coherence and drag and drop features are only available with Win XP (maybe 2000)? The don't seem to work with a Windows 98se VM here.

Drag and drop and Coherence are available only for Windows 2000/XP/2003 now. We are working on Vista support and it is planned to support Linux in future. But I doubt we will support Windows 98 for these features.

 

[Michael A. Lowry]

I successfully used my bootcamp partition from inside Parallels. But now I have another issue. When I boot through Bootcamp (natively) I use Macdrive to access the data from my HFS+ partition. But now Macdrive loads up and doesn't find any Mac partition !!! I happened after I installed Parallels Tools. Does anyone had the same thing? Is this a bug in the parallels tools? Is there a workaround? I will miss Macdrive a lot if it became incompatible with Parallels.

I doubt this will ever work. MacDrive works when you have booted the machine into Windows because it has exclusive access to the Mac HFS+ volumes. When you are booting the virtual machine into Windows, there's no way MacDrive running in that virtual machine can get exclusive access to the Mac volumes. This is because Mac OS X is booted off of one of those volumes and Parallels is running off of one of those volumes.

Your best bet is probably to use the Shared Folders feature to share your Mac volumes with the VM.

/Michael A. Lowry

 

[AlanH]

Drag and drop and Coherence are available only for Windows 2000/XP/2003 now. We are working on Vista support and it is planned to support Linux in future. But I doubt we will support Windows 98 for these features.

Thanks, I rather suspected I'd get that answer. And how about a fix for drag and drop to Windows 98? (see my edit above - you are too quick ! )

 

[CPFarhood]

I agree that USB 2.0 is important, but why do you need multiprocessor support in VM? Parallels Desktop is tuned to run best on dual core Macs - one core is fully utilized by Windows and second core by Mac OS X. Optimal performance for both systems.

That's an awfully shortsighted statement.... The Mac Pro is already quad core and will undoubtedly hit 8 cores in the very near future. SMP support for the VM is absolutely imperative to the successful progression of virtual machines given that multi-core is the direction both Intel and AMD are taking.

 

[don montalvo]

you guys just kicked vmware's butt from here to timbuktu

OK the "Coherency" feature, just slaughterd VMware. Damn good work guys!

this is the "break" we've been waiting for. i can now assure 100+ parallels seats will be purchased by one client in the next quarter. the holdup on the decision was whether it was worth doing parallels if it couldn't use the bootcamp volume.

this is truly incredible development.

don

 

[nycruza]

Just to share...


Fix:
Kill kbdmgr.exe process in Task Manager
(if no ctrl-alt-del, then Start, Run, and type: taskmgr and run it that way

Thanks for the tip!
As soon as I killed the process, I was able to install the Tools and everything is running GREAT!

So, is there a way of having this process killed automatically each time you select the Parallels profile?

ajm

 

[jse75]

Like others I'm wondering if it would be possible to transfer my existing Paralells virtual HDD into a Boot Camp parition. I'd like to use Boot Camp, but I've always used only Parallels, and I would not really want to reinstall everything.

Any thoughts on a good way to accomplish this?

Jason

 

[DaveB]

Build 3036 downloaded, installed and worked flawlessly - EXCEPT when I attempted to shutdown. Process hungup after preferences were saved. Problem was "solved" by removing McAfee VirusScan Plus 2007 from the VM (Windows XP). Any similarity, solution or work around appreciated.

MUCH thanks to the development team for an outstanding product!

p.s.- Purchased on Day One!

DaveB

 

[don montalvo]

Like others I'm wondering if it would be possible to transfer my existing Paralells virtual HDD into a Boot Camp parition. I'd like to use Boot Camp, but I've always used only Parallels, and I would not really want to reinstall everything.

Any thoughts on a good way to accomplish this?

Jason

...i'm axiously awaiting an answer to this as well. in the meantime, i'm doing a complete backup of my home directory and /Users/Shared/Parallels (where we store our shared windows image by default).

don