parallels and ubuntu

im thinking of purchasing parallels and then installing ubuntu on an external HDD and using that to boot up (via parallels). Although it will be slow its the only way i can see to get ubuntu on my macbook.

i dont want to lose OS X, as ive only had my macbook for a few weeks and im enjoying the OS. I refuse to install XP on this thing as its why i bought it...to get away from windows.

Anyoone know of its worth while using parallels and then booting ubuntu off it externally?

thanks

If you install ubuntu via Parallels, it will install it on your internal hard drive.

And actually it won't be slow. You can chose the amount of RAM you want it to use and it will run at half the speed of a dual boot.

However, half the processor speed of a macbook is still a lot.

For example, if you have a dual core 1.8 ghz processor, ubuntu will run like you had a single core 1.8ghz processor.

thanks for your reply BlahBlahX.

I've been told that once parallels is installed (locally ofc) i can then specify where i want the ubuntu install to be (in this case it would be on the external drive).

This was the case with VMware, when i was able to install Gentoo on n an external drive (configured within VMware)

I believe that under parralels you acually get near full speed, since there is hardware support in the CPU for virtualization. The main performance bottleneck is in the amount of RAM you make availible to Ubuntu. Most recommend 2 gigs for best performance.

I also hear that some hardware is not well support with Parallels, you'll need to do some research.

I currently run Ubuntu on a Core 2 Dual MacBook with dual booting. To be honest its much more enjoyable than OSX, IMHO.

I have been using Parallels for a few months with Ubuntu and WinXP. Ubuntu works okay in the recent builds, though they clearly are focused on the WinXP experience right now, which is much better than how other guest OSes work in Parallels. The only challenges I have had are getting higher screen resolutions than XGA, and losing the network connection after waking up from a suspend. The former probably has an easy fix, and the latter is something that happened to windows as well in earlier builds, and they fixed that, so hopefully they will fix it for Linux guest OSes shortly.