Speaking of backwards lens compatibility: 102 year old lens on a 5DmkII

As chance would have it Lifehacker today has a guide to virtualisation here:
http://lifehacker.com/5623313/how-to-run-windows-mac-and-linux-side-by-side-and-...+free-with-virtualbox?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+lifehacker%2Ffull+%28Lifehacker%29

This gives a good overview of the features and benefits of virtualisation with their example using Sun’s free Virtual Box. This has been receiving glowing reports of late, although I understand it remains a little behind the industry leader VMware.

However, now that Oracle have acquired Sun, I would not put my eggs into that basket; Larry Ellison is is a very nice guy but I personally wouldn’t trust him further then I could throw him.

Well they certainly all support NTFS where the file size limit is not practically relevant. Just make sure you have a large hard disk allocated to a Windows 7 VM that you can then use for shared data folders.

Alternatively my Ubuntu VMs are ‘formatted’ in Ext4, where shares are certainly visible to Windows.

VMware Workstation also allows for full drag and drop of files between guests, and although I don’t have much experience of using this for now it probably does other more fancy things too.

Everything is highly flexible, and you can easily alter your data setup as you go along. Just make sure you maintain a reasonably current backup, for example on your existing desktop.

I don't know about Apple but in Linux there is a utility called Samba that allows you to set up network shares, permissions, etc. I would have thought there is something similar under OSX.

Yes, but these are intended for more substantial, professionally managed server set-ups, with the software and tools priced accordingly and also at a completely different level of complexity.

However, both Workstation and Server run under Linux giving you some of the reliability and slimline benefits of a bare metal system. You could run that as your host OS then a Win 7 VM as your main desktop environment (or OS X for that matter), with full Aero support under Workstation.

In fact this is what I want to move towards personally, the big advantage being that the VMs are easy to backup and are completely portable between hardware configurations, assuming a minimum number of processor cores and memory.

There’s one other point; virtualisation is available in 2 flavours; one known as a “bare metal” system and the other not. With bare metal, the management software sits directly on top of the hardware, whereas in the other case it is installed under an existing host operating system. Both Server and Workstation fall under this camp, so if you want to try and then get rid of it is a simple matter to deinstall.

Due to the fact that the virtual machine management software introduces an abstraction layer between the guest operating system and the hardware, there is undoubtedly some performance loss. But it is nowhere near as dramatic as you might think.

And with a low performance overhead and today’s ridiculously overspecified hardware you are unlikely to notice any material performance degradation, although lots of memory is a good idea.

For example I run Windows 7 as the host operating system with 1x Win XP x64 and 1x Win XP Pro guests active all the time, and the two former typically always working at load. I also have a couple of Ubuntu VMs configured that I can launch without any noticeable sluggishness anywhere. This all on a now somewhat dated quad core Xenon with 16gb of ram.

There is plenty of info about virtualisation on the VMware website; I suggest you go there to have a look around. Much better you should register yourself and download an always free copy of VMware server and have a play around with it, for example install a Ubuntu VM to get a feel for how everything works. It is really very simple indeed and you will have ample resources assuming you have a dual core machine.

I am using Server on my personal PC right now, but my business systems have recently been moved to a new machine with VMware workstation, as I will do when I get around to it. The advantage of this is that whereas Server fully reserves memory allocated to guests in the host operating system, Workstation frees up unused guest memory and makes it available to the overall system, as well as supposedly providing slightly better performance. As such I would use that if your new machine ‘only’ has 8gb and you use heavy applications like Photoshop.

With a virtual machine the physical hardware is not directly visible to virtual machine operating systems (known as guests). Instead the virtual machine manager acquires system resources from the host and presents these as emulations of standard hardware components that guests access, believing them to be physical hardware. As such OSX would never see the ATI card directly, but I am sure performance would be excellent.

However, you can instruct VMware to grant guests direct access to external usb devices, drives, etc.

It works extremely well and is very stable.

Stefan, I’m assuming you are aware that you can easily run an OSX Hackintosh virtual machine with one of the i5/i7 quad core cpus and 8gb ram? You might even be able to get it running on your existing hardware.

If you want to give it a go I suggest you download a trial version of VMware Workstation since it has better memory management than the free VMware server. And if you are going to buy, there is a substantial educational discount.

Here you go: http://www.dpreview.com/reviews/sonyslta55/

This is the camera I was alluding to in the other thread. Unfortunately the stills capability sounds a little disappointing.

However, this demo of the video mode autofocus seems impressive to my eye:
http://www.sonyalpharumors.com/first-video-taken-with-the-sony-a55/