Virtual Mac OS 10.6.8 guest vm in Lion: initial experiences

[MacNephDoc]

I stumbled through a Snow Leopard vm install on my early 2011 15" 2 GHz quad core i7 MacBook Pro last night.

I say "stumbled" because there are some fundamental concepts I didn't grasp about native vs. virtual OS installations.

For example, my (new for me) MacBook Pro came with Lion installed and no machine-specific SL Install DVD. These machines originally shipped with Snow Leopard (I think it was 10.6.6). I still "need" Quicken, so I partitioned the machine's hard drive, popped in my "retail" SL install DVD, and watched it kernel panic the machine. I solved that by asking Apple to send me the machine specific DVD (which, by the way, certainly doesn't look like the discs that Apple usually ships with new Macs - it looks like one I might have made myself at home). That allowed me to install and update SL, but of course limited me to dual-boot access to PPC apps that need Rosetta.

I read the news on Friday, and yesterday tried to create a SL vm within Lion and Fusion 4.1. Fusion handled my machine-specific SL install DVD in a peculiar manner. It didn't recognize it directly, but it created a DMG image of it and mounted that, then told me that it couldn't install SL on my machine. Others told me to try the retail install DVD, and I assumed that wouldn't work because of the hardware in my laptop, but of course it DID work because the virtualized hardware isn't the same.

There are oddities:

1. No sound output available from the vm (not a big deal, because I don't need Quicken to talk to me). I tried adding a sound card (in virtual machine settings) when the virtual machine was shut down), but the "sound" menulet remains gray and can't be modified.
2. Only monitor resolution supported in the VM is a non-native 1024 x 768 (my laptop's native resolution is 1440 x 900).
3. Some of the Apple "eye candy" is missing in action - scrolling, for example, is not fluid, and even though the vm is 10.6.8, 2-finger scrolling goes in the "Lion direction." (That didn't really surprise me, because my Win 7 vm scrolls in the Lion direction, too).
4. I'm not at all clear how networking is supported. Although I have internet access through WiFi, and although I have the VM set for "bridged" (its own IP address as opposed to NAT) networking, there's no user interface to the WiFi hardware from within the VM.

My initial conclusion is that this will provide me more acceptable access to Quicken that would dual boot, but people who use PPC apps for graphics purposes or who need sound output won't be happy.

I've not done any formal testing regarding how much having the VM active affects native OS performance (I gave my VM 2 GB RAM and 2 cores), but the native OS doesn't really "feel" any different in light use.

One other odditiy: if the virtual machine goes to sleep, it's very cranky about waking up again. I assign the VM its own Lion desktop by running it in full screen mode (Command-tabbing if the vm isn't in full screen mode is quite disorienting, because one expects to see the icons of all open Mac apps rather than just those open in the vm, and running the vm in full-screen mode helps to better separate the two environments. If the VM goes to sleep, it blacks the screen, and if I page the desktops back to the vm, trying to get it to wake up again is quite disconcerting - initially no respone, then a spinning metal pizza wheel cursor frozen in once place for 20 seconds or so, then finally the login dialog box.

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Jim Robertson