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by Jared Richardson.
Original Post: Parallels, Development Environments, and the Second Mouse Cursor
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The web site was created after the launch of the book "Ship It!" and discusses issues from Continuous Integration to web hosting providers.
At this week's local Ruby hack night I talked a fellow coder (Tony Spencer) into going home and installing Parallels. It's an awesome software package that let's me run Windows and Linux on my OS X laptop. The speed is phenomenal and once it's installed I can run the images on any supported operating system.
That means I can bring someone onto a project being developed on RedHat (okay, actually Fedora). I can have this second person buy a copy of Parallels for his Windows XP box, then I can give them a copy of my RedHat image with the complete development environment intact. ~Everything~ was in place and running. Very cool.
In under five minutes this developer was up and running on a project and I could help them over the phone because I knew where everything was installed. Nice.
It also runs full screen on my second monitor... that's cool.
However, when some people use Windows XP in Parallels, they get a second mouse cursor when they run Windows. That's no good. In fact, that's exactly what happened to Tony Spencer this week after I showed him RedHat and XP on my Mac.
I forgot to tell him to install the Parallels Tools. Start up your Windows image, then hit the task bar. Under VM, you'll find Install Parallels Tools. This will improve your video performance, eliminate the second cursor, and let you use Windows sharing to exchange files between XP and OS X. Very nice.
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