Tech geeks love numbers. When discussing computers, they speak of gigabits and gigahertz, of RAM and ports. The more tech-adept among them will even swap out the internals or write their own code. They are tinkerers extraordinaire and are just as happy customizing their rigs as they are in using their machines for their intended purposes, be it work or pleasure.
Then there’s everyone else.
Tag: RAM
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Every Mac geek out there screams for this machine and screams most loudly when it comes time to buy a new computer. They look around and realize that there’s no way they need the power of a Mac Pro (and no way to justify the price) but they don’t want to feel locked in to an iMac or something. Why, they moan, doesn’t Apple make a machine for me? I want to be able to swap out the video card and really bump up the RAM.
If you’re that guy time to shut your pie hole. The reason that Apple doesn’t make that machine is because you, me, and about three other people really want it. Apple isn’t in the business of making computers for people who feel like stripping them down and mucking with the motherboard, the company is in the business of selling computing solutions to people who don’t want to mess with a computer. Face it, if you’re willing to swap out a video card and add a hard drive you’ve got both the time and expertise to trick out a Linux box or really make Vista sing.
Parallels Desktop for Mac and Fedora Core 5
I downloaded a trial copy of Parallels Desktop for Mac and successfully installed Fedora Core 5 from CD. The install was quick and smooth but when I rebooted the VM I got this error.
I poked around the Parallels forums and found a thread where someone was having the same problem and successfully resolved it. For some reason the problem occurs when the memory allocated to the VM exceeds 512MB. Reducing my VM memory to 488MB resolved the issue for me.
Poking around the forums some more I found this posting which claims the problem is with Linux.
The RAM issue relates to the intel chip. you need to change the grub script in the boot loader. to do this, boot linux with 512mb, then edit the /etc/grub.conf file. on the kernel line, add
mem=nopentium
then you're good to go and can boot with as much ram as you like.
The problem is not with Parallels but is a limitation of the Linux kernel and the original PC BIOS specification. Once I added the line above I was able to boost with over 512MB of RAM.
I was successfully able to install and run Fedora Core 5 in a Parallels Desktop for Mac VM on a 2GHz MacBook with 1GB RAM.
