Virtual Desktops and Virtualized Operating Systems

I've been playing with my new computer for some time now and I got a few things working properly. Last week I got Parallels Desktop, a virtualization programme that allows me to run different operating systems in "virtual machines" on my Mac. I've installed Windows XP Pro and Ubuntu (which is a Linux distribution). Windows works at my screen's full resolution (1920x1200), but I haven't managed to get Ubuntu to work at anything better than 1024x768. Hopefully, Parallels will soon provide an easy way of getting all the drivers working properly as they did for Windows. Anyways, it's cool to have a computer that can run Ubuntu, OS X and Windows all at once at a pretty reasonable speed. Parallels assigns a different IP address to each virtual machine so I can use the internet normally on all three machines simultaneously. Sharing files between operating systems works well too. Between OS X and Windows, Parallels makes it extremely easy to set up shared folders which are exactly that - shared folders. You can just drag and drop files and folders to and from the shared folders as you would for any other folder in OS X or Windows XP. Ubuntu recognizes my USB hard drive automatically and the external hard drive can be accessed easily from OS X and Ubuntu simultaneously, so sharing files is, once again, really easy. I haven't tried sharing files directly between Ubuntu and OSX, but as a work-around, I could simply drag a file to my USB hard drive and then to the shared OSX-Windows folder. I am pretty sure it is possible to set up a network connection between the Windows XP and Ubuntu using the IP addresses, but I am not a networking expert so I'll just use the work-around for now.

Using Virtue Desktop, I have set up virtual desktops on OS X. With Parallels, this allows me to run Windows XP in full screen and switch in and out of XP with the mouse or a keyboard shortcut. The same is true of Ubuntu (although it does not run at 1920x1200) or any video I am watching. For example, I do not need to leave full-screen viewing to take a look at my torrent downloads. I can just pause the video and use the keyboard shortcut to take a quick look at my main desktop. Any programme that can use a lot of screen space can be given its own virtual desktop if you want, so you can keep each desktop uncluttered.