Looks good? Click on the button to continue and it’ll start downloading a ready-to-roll Parallels installation image of he operating system:Īs you can see, it’s about 1.2GB so if you’re on a dialup (is anyone still on a dialup?) it’s going to take a while. Still, let’s keep stepping through the process.įirst off, is this really what you want? Here’s the description, along with an indication that it’s the Linux 11.04 Desktop distro release of Ubuntu that’s available:

That’s really all you need to do, it’s going to do everything else in a surprisingly automated fashion. The option you seek is on the lower left: “Download Ubuntu Free”. Once you’ve installed Parallels Desktop on your computer, simply launch the program and you’ll be given a variety of options for proceeding: It’s just neatly tucked into the Mac OS X environment and - a nice bonus - can run full screen giving you the distinct impression that your Mac is only running Linux, which is bound to impress your geeky friends! Now I realize that Parallels Desktop, like VMWare Fusion, is a commercial Mac application and has a price tag associated with it, but it sounds like this is related to your work and, well, sometimes you have to pay for your tools, right? The again, it’s not that expensive at $79.įrom a testing perspective, the Ubuntu Linux environment within Parallels is functionally identical to running the operating system native on a PC computer, which is nice. Why? Because it’s literally a one-click download to get it up and running. There are a number of different ways to install Ubuntu Linux on your Mac system, but one of my favorites, hands down, is to install it within the Parallels Desktop environment.

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