I just realize that dual booting Ubuntu on my MacBook Air is huge barrier for me to use it. I’m always too lazy to wait the painful shutdown/reboot process. Then, I need to consider the alternative option, yes, Virtualization.

I have seen some of my colleagues using Windows on their cute Apple laptops via Parallels and VMWare Fusion. Definitely, all that copies are pirate and I don’t want to follow their path. After finding information around, I found that there is also a good free (as free speech) one, VirtualBox.

Although VirtualBox web site states that Mac version is still beta and lacks some features as in Windows/Linux version, my test concludes that it’s enough for normal usage.

The setup process is straightforward if you’ve ever used some VM technologies (for me, it’s VMWare Server a while ago). Just download VirtualBox disk image, install it as normal Mac application, create a VM image and setup new OS as if it’s native one. This article from Mac2Windows gives very detailed, step-by-step, howto for beginner.

I have little problem with video resolution. It’s limited to 800x600 and installing guest additional driver doesn’t show more options in preference. Fortunately, Ubuntuforums tends to have every answers for your every question. Just adding one line in /etc/X11/xorg.conf can fix it.

Running another OS in virtualized mode is inferior in term of performance and cause some input confusions. Anyway, it’s lower the barrier of booting process. I hope I can review Ubuntu 8.04 final by this method.

I used to be a GIMPShop user for years. GIMPShop, as the name already suggest, is the tweaked version of GIMP to behave like Photoshop. It’s just the temporarily hacked one, doesn’t intend to be separate software project. But it’s good enough for me who just want to crop and add text label to my screenshot.

The problem came up when I bought a new MacBook Air with pre-installed Leopard. GIMPShop didn’t show up as in Tiger. After Googling for a while, I found that GIMPShop is not compatible with Leopard and the author said he won’t update it anymore.

Fortunately, someone at Wilber loves Apple provides the GIMP Mac package. Furthermore, it’s new GIMP 2.4 branch with loads of new features. However, since it’s not the official and fully-tested version, some bugs remain and installation process is a bit tricky.

Follow these steps if you want to use GIMP on Leopard.

1. Install X11 from Leopard DVD disc 1
2. Download and install XQuartz package from here. Important: Use XQuartz 2.1.2 instead since 2.1.4 is buggy.
3. XQuartz installation requires restart. Do it once.
4. Download and install GIMP package from Wilber loves Apple.
5. Start the GIMP. The first run is a bit slow, be patient.

After using GIMP 2.4 for a while, it’s very welcome improvement. New interface is cleaner and some more features are added.

Update Since GIMP 2.4 brought us new way of select-and-move and Mac version seems not recognise the Alt key (need to use in combination with Ctrl to move selection). The workaround is to ‘Select Float’ from menu instead.