Do you need to be a software programmer to do scripting? And what exactly is the difference between programming and scripting?
Name and address supplied
DQ: These questions are never easy to answer. Theoretically, scripting - writing so-called language to control a software application - is supposed to be easier than 'real' programming, but that may depend on what you already know. Computer operating systems - including Apple's Mac OS X, Microsoft's Windows and Linux - all have some ability to automate certain tasks. You can even use visual or graphical user interface scripts that will remember where you pointed the mouse and where you clicked. But be careful: any time you attempt to tell a computer to do something automatically, you must be prepared to get it wrong. Still, there are many things that are obviously innocuous. For example, navigating to a certain folder, listing the files in order of size and giving those over 1 gigabytes a special colour is unlikely to do much harm, even if you get it wrong. But if you decide to put files with a specific extension - bak, for example - into a folder then delete everything in the folder, you will need to exercise extreme caution. Have a look at scripting samples on these sites:
www.apple.com/applescript,
www.microsoft.com/technet/scriptcenter and en.wikipedia. org/wiki/Scripting. I want to run other operating systems on my Mac computer. Can you suggest any program to help me do this?
Henry, Pok Fu Lam
DQ: I have previously discussed Parallels Desktop for Mac and VMware Fusion, both of which are virtualisation software used to run a 'guest' operating system on Intel processor-based Macs. These can be downloaded and tried before you buy them. Sun Microsystems recently released a new version of its virtualisation software package called VirtualBox (virtualbox.org/wiki/Downloads). I put Ubuntu Linux in the VirtualBox and it ran without a hitch. I downloaded a disk image of Ubuntu from the Web but did not need to create a duplicate on a CD-Rom. No problem for VirtualBox; it was able to read everything from the ISO disc image.
According to the VirtualBox documentation, the application supports just about any operating system. You will, of course, need legitimate installation disks for whatever system you wish to put on your machine. VirtualBox can also be used on computers based on other operating systems. If you wish to run this on an Intel-based Mac, you must have plenty of memory and disk space.