messiah

It's gonna be new computer time shortly and I'm planning on making the switch over to Mac, however, there is one piece of software I cant leave behind and there's no decent alternative for the Mac - AutoCAD.

What's the best way of running AutoCAD on a mac? Bootcamp with Vista is appealling but I'd rather not have to shut down and reboot when switching from program to program - and I'd like my drawings to be "rescued" by Time Machine if the need arises.

Heard of Parallels and other things like it but hope the guru's could offer some sound advice.

thanks in advance.

Markus

If you don't want to dual boot then you're only option is to go with a VM setup. There are various options here.

1) Parallels. You've heard of it and it does work. The latest version has 3D support but I'm not sure how good it is. Their forums are somewhat hidden, but can be found here. I'd have a look over there and see what is said about AutoCad.

2) VMWare's Fusion. VMWare are very, very well known for their VM solutions and they have been working on Fusion for a while now. It's still in beta, but reached RC1 status last week, and is slated for an August release. Well worth checking it out, again, have a look at their forums to find out how well it works

3) Codeweavers CrossOver. This is basically an implementation of WINE. I *think* it might run Autocad but I would not be shocked if it did not. I know you can run Steam via it, so it must have some 3D support in there, and I did run the Half Life 2 demo through it and it wasn't too bad.

One thing to bear in mind when using options one and two is that unless you setup a shared folder and save your documents to the macintosh side of things, they will be stored in a hard disk file, as that is how the VM is contained. Thus this whole machine file would be backed up by time machine, but the files within that machine would not be individually accessible, you'd need to restore the whole machine file, then get into it to recover the files.
If you store them in a folder that exists on the mac side then Time Machine should be able to recover them.

Now, having said that, there is something that might be possible. You can setup Parallels and Fusion to use a boot camp partition as the hard drive. This is how I have my system setup. It allows me to access the same OS and files wether I dual boot or run a VM. It does appear to be quicker than using a VM file, plus, the disk is mounted on the desktop, so, providing Time Machine will see it and I think it will, it should backup the files. Restoration would be interesting as if the volume is NTFS then it's read-only (hence why Time Machine might not play with it), but it might work. Bit hit and miss as TM isn't released yet.

What you really need to do is to find someone local to you, who has an Intel mac and ideally already has a boot camp and/or VM solution installed, or get them to download trial versions of the aforementioned software and setup Vista/XP SP2, then you install autocad and see if it works. You could possibly pop down to the local Apple Store/Reseller and see if they'll do this for you, depending on how friendly they are they could do this to win another customer.

mike1210

this week I will be testing Autocad 2007 running Parallels, I'll report back on if the lecturers were impressed or not

ChefDude

does an app run via parallels at the same speed as on windows, ie; it's not interpreted like through an emulator?

I realise it's still an intel chip under the bonnet, but I don't understand how parallels will run a windows app from linux.

messiah

Thanks Markus - I have a mate with an iMac but I dont think he'd appreciate me experimenting in that way unfortunately. Are you also suggesting partitioning the HDD into 3? 1 for OSX, 1 for Vista and another for docs? sounds like it could be good option as it'd enable me to run a full version of office also - as long as TM was able to back the docs up. Only downside is that I wouldnt be able to have AutoCAD open at the same time as the mac apps.

Mike - look forward to hearing the results.

I lost a load of my drawings about a year ago and I've been generally hacked off by Windows for some time now so keep wanting to swap but there's always something new just around the mac corner such as leopard.

Next time I'm near an apple store I think I'll be pestering one of the Genuis' a little...

Markus

It is a bit slower running the app via Parallels, as there is a bit of emulation happening, but nowhere near as much as there would be if you were, for example, running Virtual PC on a PowerPC machine.

Markus

No, that's not what I was suggesting and right now, I don't think you are actually able to partition the machine that way and have BootCamp run Well, you might be able to if you hack around with things, rather than using Boot Camp Assistant.

My suggestion is to boot camp the machine, thus you have two partitions, OS X and XP/Vista. Within the VM software you can configure "Shared Folders", this basically allows you to have a folder on the Mac partition available to the PC partition, and vice versa. I would then save all my documents in that shared folder. As it's visible and read/write accessible on the Mac partition then Time Machine should have no trouble reading/restoring the files.

Another thing you could do, but it's an additional expense, is to use MediaFour's MacDrive product. This allows XP/Vista to mount Apple formatted (HFS/HFS+) drives. Thus when you went into XP/Vista you would see the Mac partition as though it's just another PC like partition, with full read/write abilities. You could then set things up so the My Documents folder on Windows points to the Documents folder in you Mac OS X home folder, again saving the files in a place accessible to both setups. This is how I have things configured.

As an aside, if you do choose the Boot Camp partition method (and you only need to boot once from the partition when you set it up, after that you could use it purley via a VM) then to back up the partition I'd use something like Mike Bombich's NetRestore Helper, part of the NetRestore package, to create an image of the Windows partition. Make sure the "shrink" option is enabled too (it is by default). This will give you an image you can restore should the OS go **** up.

messiah

A mac version of autocad would make life a hell of a lot easier!

I see what you're getting at Markus, but I'll have probably forgotten all that by the time it comes to purchase time, just trying to get a solution sorted in my head at the minute, and it doesnt look like there is a simple solution - hopefully things will become clearer once leopard & TM are available, and I would be buying an external HDD for TM's use.

Markus

Hopefully Boot Camp in 10.5 will allow you to use an external disk for the partition. If you have a Mac Pro then it will allow you to use one of the other internal disks you may have, but alas the iMacs and MacBooks don't have additional internal storage so you can't use that feature

I've had a bit of a search and the general consensus seems to be that running it in a boot camp environment, in other words, boot into XP/Vista, is going to be the best bet to ensure compatibility and full utilization of the machines resources.
Because of this dual boot abilitiy, I don't expect to see an OS X version of AutoCad, though there have been rumors there might be one. However, I can see why there won't be one, why waste dev time on an OS X version when you can simply dual boot into XP/Vista and run AutoCad. Yes, it's an arrogant viewpoint, but it makes financial sense to them.

mike1210

Forgot to post back on this, general impression was they were impressed with parallels, couple of niggles though, some 3d glitches in the packages. Performance wise I've noticed it can be a little slow to get going sometimes when logged in but im guessing this is due to updates (Windows and Anti-virus) being pushed down through Group Policy (my setup is bound to Active Directory)

Autocad 2007 caused no issues, apart from slow startup speed they said it ran fine

Archicad did cause a few niggles in 3D rendering. The function to import pictures onto 3D objects was causing problems, as was moving items in 3D and trying to select parts of the object in 3D.

Also tested a program called Revvit which works without problems

My only niggles with Parallels now is security issues in a domain enviroment....but lets not go there