Soon the installer will ask you “where is the rest of the files”? Give it your mirror URL to make it happy. You’re then promted to select where the installation files are. Once the installer runs, choose to “install a new system or update an existing one”. Make sure you leave some room for your actual Mac OS of course… Installing CentOS virtually I went with 2GB for now, but depending on what you’d like to do with your environment you may want to increase this a little. Go with the defaults here, or ramp up the RAM if you have it. Parallels Desktop will give you the opportunity to configure the container: how much RAM, how much hard drive space, etc. Once the file is downlaoded, choose it from the Parallels Desktop Installer and it will create a new virtual container. I’m sure you can start the installation straight from a URL but I haven’t tired this. It’s always best to pick your own mirror from the CentOS Mirrors List We’ll want to first download a file called netinstall.iso from any of these CentOS mirrors, like this one for example:Īs CentOS versions get updated, the actual link to the mirror will change and may not work anymore. In version 6 this process has changed compared to previous versions.

Next we’ll want to get hold of an autoinstaller for CentOS. This will be the netinstall.iso file we’re downloading in the next step.

Install Windows from a disk or image) and choose an ISO image we’d like to install. There are also quick links to other Linux distributions on the bottom, none of them are CentOS though.

Since this product is geared towards people wanting to run Windows on their Macs its emphasis is on you either buying a copy of Windows through the interface, or installing a copy from disk. You can download it here: and install it. You can get a free trial version of Parallels Desktop and see if it floats your boat. I’m using Parallels Desktop 7 for this exercise. I’m installing CentOS 6.2 in 64bit on OS X Lion on a 13″ Mac Book Pro with 8GB of RAM and an Intel i7. It’s a bit complex so I took some notes – may they be useful for both you and me at some point in the future. Today I decided that I wanted my local copy of CentOS on my Mac Book Pro – and thanks to Parallels Desktop I can run this in a virtual container alongside Mac OS X. You can never have enough servers flying around, be that for testing, playing or developing.

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