Motorola and Mac

[HumHead]

OK-

I now have almost enough laptops to make a new coffee table, and I will soon be adding a MacBook Pro to the pile. That does not, however, mean that I like having to drag around more than one at a time.

What are people's experiences and recommendations regarding using Windows on a MacBook Pro for Motorola programming? I know that a number of people have used the USB cable to program XTS5Ks without issue. I am thinking of adding an ExpressCard RS232 card to support Waris, etc.

My general impression is that using a real serial card and booting natively into Windows XP using Boot Camp should provide a perfectly solid platform to program most current generation products.

Does anyone have any thoughts or experiences with Parallels or VMWare? Is one going to be more stable than the other, or is programming from a virtual environment simply choosing to take up brick making as a new hobby?

Thanks in advance for any input.

[tvsjr]

I have no experience with Macs for programming. However, I do support several Macs for other work, and I've found VMWare Fusion to be far more stable than Parallels. I would think VMWare would be OK for anything programming via USB, like TRBO and Astro25. Serial stuff, I'd boot to XP.

[alex]

I have no experience with Macs for programming. However, I do support several Macs for other work, and I've found VMWare Fusion to be far more stable than Parallels. I would think VMWare would be OK for anything programming via USB, like TRBO and Astro25. Serial stuff, I'd boot to XP.

Well, considering most Mac's don't have a serial port - you won't be programming any of the "old" stuff without USB adapters or some other solution.

I've seen and have used CPS with the Astro25 series run without any issues reading/writing. I haven't seen anyone flash, but I don't think that's an issue.

-Alex

[HumHead]

Well, considering most Mac's don't have a serial port - you won't be programming any of the "old" stuff without USB adapters or some other solution.

Thanks guys.

Alex:

There are ExpressCard serial cards available that are essentially the same as the PCMCIA serial cards- A real serial port with a real UART. I expect that those would provide fairly solid results.

[dsheli]

I have a 2.2 GHz MacBook Pro and programing via XP, Bootcamp works flawlessly. From my experience XP runs better on a mac then it does on a dell. From my experience I would say that you should not have a problem with the RS-232 card but I can't say for sure.
David