I recently needed to decide which virtualization software to use on my new MacMini.
I see three main competitors for Desktop Virtualization on the Mac:
- Paralles Desktop for Mac (~ 80 €)
- VMWare Fusion (~ 70 €, now 40 € introduction price)
- Virtualbox (OpenSource / with Extension pack usage under their PUEL License)
Parallels and VMWare are commercial products while Virtualbox (at least the main part) is now OpenSource and if you use their Oracle Expansion Pack is at least free for personal use under their PUEL License).
It proved to be hard to find some serious comparison of the three at a recent version. So I decided to make my own. Fortunately VMWare and Parallels provide time-limited demos of their software for evaluation purposes. I took that offer. Installed the three and made some testing and benchmarks.
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When you ssh from your shiny Mac running new shiny Mac OS X 10.7 (aka. Lion) into another Unix box running e.g. Linux, Solaris or probably BSD you are likely to encounter an error like the following one when you use terminal based programs like less, nano and alike :
Telling you that it can not work with your Terminal because it doesn't know anything about "xterm-256color".
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Made my EasyTAG build for OSX Lion compatible. Thanks to the gtk+ people who provided gtk Lion patches in no time.
Please post some feedback if it works correctly. I would especially need feedback from 10.4 Users (if there are any left 
because I can't test that myself
Go get it
After having (of course) upgraded to Mac OS 10.7 alias Lion on the first day available – and after having set up my machine the way I wanted it – I thought it would be a good idea to turn on TimeMachine to save my precious new installation to my ZFS / Opensolaris server.
Unfortunately Time Machine told me that I could not do so, because my Time Machine / AFP server didn't have all necessary capabilities. Humm it worked fine with Snow Leopard …
Then I tried to connect to the server via AFP – and that didn't work either :
After inputting my password in the authentication dialog Finder told me that "The version of the server you are trying to connect to is not supported. Please contact your system administrator to resolve the problem."
That would be me …
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So yesterday I restarted my MacBook after some weeks and when trying to log back in, my system mourned that the password I entered was wrong, so it was not able to unlock my keychain, even though I was able to login to my desktop. Hmm I had changed my password like I always do sporadically in the past week, so I typed the old pw and the new pw, triple checked everything I typed, checked CapsLock etc. I was sure everything was correct, so I concluded that my Users login Keychain was corrupted.
I ended up renaming ~/Library/Keychains/login.keychain to ~/Library/Keychains/login.keychain.OLD and then restored a version from 2 weeks ago from one of my TimeMachine backups. Logged out – Logged in and everything works perfectly again.
TimeMachine saved the day 
