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SAS on a Mac? Yes!Jack Hamilton, Kaiser Foundation Health Plan,
Oakland, California
SAS ON A MAC?In recent years, Apple Computer has progressed from
being a niche player, whose products were used only by hobbyists at
home and graphics and marketing departments at work, to being a
media darling, to having its computers adopted by many people as a
serious alternative to Microsoft Windows. But who cares if it can
spreadsheets and Photoshop and junk? Does it run SAS software?
The short answer is yes. The long answer is slightly more
complicated, and is explained below.
THE PRESENTATIONI'm not going to attempt to tell you everything
you might possibly need to know about using SAS on a Mac. That
would be as hopeless a task as attempting to tell you everything
about running SAS on any other platform - books have been written
on the subject without covering everything. Besides, any
documentation would be outdated almost as soon as I had typed it
in.
Rather, I will show that that running SAS on a Mac is
straightforward, and nothing to be afraid of. I encourage you to
make liberal use of Google to look up anything I discuss.
AN INTRODUCTION TO THE MACI've used Windows for many years,
starting with a brief and unsuccessful flirtation with Windows 1.0,
and going up to Windows XP. Before that I used Microsoft and IBM
DOS. So switching to a Mac had a certain learning curve. Let's look
at the main window:
Although you won't be able to see it in the PDF or through a
projector, a Macintosh has a very impressive display high
resolution, with beautiful colors (this particular picture is of a
sunset in Alaska).
You'll notice that there's no Start menu and no status bar, just
a menu bar at the top and some icons on the side and
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at the bottom.
Rather than having a menu in each program, Macintosh OS X 10
uses a single menu bar at the top, which changes to reflect the
currently active application.
The icons on the side represent data drives, either real or
virtual. The icon with a cloud on a purple background opens a disk
drive out in "the cloud: on the internet.
The bottom set of icons is called the dock, and it replaces the
Start menu in Windows.
Each icon represents a program or a list of files and programs,
and clicking on the icon opens the program or displays the list.
The set of icons you see on a new Macintosh is dauntingly cryptic,
but you'll soon learn what means what, and you can tailor the dock
so it shows only what you care about, as I have done.
The first icon, with the cute little face, opens the Finder,
which is the Mac equivalent of a Windows Explorer file menu. On the
left is a list of disks and directories, similar to what you get in
the folder view in Windows. One useful feature on the Mac is the
ability to add favorite directories to the list, under Places. I've
added quite a few, perhaps too many, but Windows limits you to only
a handful.
There are file list display options. One looks quite a bit like
the detail list in Windows, with details shown on every file:
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Another shows a cascading list of the directories leading up to
the current directory:
And another one shows a preview of the selected file and the
surrounding files:
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One of the icons is for all the applications on my Mac; I can
click on the icon and get a list of what's available, similar to
the Programs list in the Windows start menu:
This can be just as confusing as the programs menu in Windows,
but happily you can create your own dock groups with just a small
set of files you're interested in:
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Now, if you have sharp eyes you might have noticed a familiar
icon in the doc:
Looks like the SAS icon, doesn't it? Lets see what happens when
you click on it:
It's SAS, running on a Mac.
But I mislead you a little bit. Notice that the log says Windows
XP Pro. Also notice that instead of having round close, minimize,
and maximize buttons in the upper left, it has square buttons in
the right hand corner:
What's happening? SAS is running in a virtual Windows machine
running under Mac OS X.
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VIRTUAL MACHINESSo what's a virtual machine? It's an emulator,
that makes one operating system (the "guest") think it's running on
its own private hardware, even though it's actually running as a
subprogram under the control of another program (the "host"). In
this case, Mac OS X is the host, and Windows XP is the guest.
You may have tried running a virtual Windows machine on the Mac
a few years ago, and been disappointed by its performance. Happily,
two things have happened: the hardware's gotten better, and the
software's gotten better. And the big change is that Mac OS X now
runs on the Intel i386 family, meaning that the software doesn't
have to emulate as much. The combination has made running a virtual
machine very fast for most operations there's no emulation at all,
just machine instructions passed directly through to the hardware,
as on a native operating system.
THE EMULATORSThere were, at the time this paper was submitted,
two major players in the Windows-on-a-Mac market: VMWare Fusion
from VMWare, and Parallels Desktop from Parallels.
The two programs are very similar in what they do. In the past,
when one company has added a feature the other has soon followed.
Both seem to have been designed by people who were familiar with
both the Windows interface and the Macintosh interface, and are
relatively easy to use.
That said, I have chosen to use VMWare Fusion. It seems a bit
more robust in the area of networking. I regularly lose my ability
to access the internet when I use Parallels Desktop, and that
doesn't happen with VMWare Fusion.
That problem may be related to my use of a cell-phone modem
rather than a regular Ethernet connection, so the problem might not
apply to you. Try them both they both offer free trials.
There are at least two other possibilities you might want to
consider. One is WINE, the open source Windows emulator. I doubt
it's robust enough to run SAS, but if you're fearless, try it. Make
sure you have good system backups first.
The second is a new virtualization program released by Sun. It's
likely to work well once the initial round of bugs has been worked
out, bu I haven't tried it.
VMWARE FUSIONAfter you have installed Fusion, you will get get a
choice of how you want to install and run Windows. You will
probably want to create a new virtual machine and install Windows
in it. You may also chose to install BootCamp, which allows you to
boot your Mac directly into Windows, with no emulator involved
(remember, Macs now run on Intel hardware). If you are a Linux
user, you might also want to install a copy of that, or download a
ready-to-run copy from the internet (VMware provides a listing of
virtual machines that others have already built, and the Linux
machines are usually free.
Here's my VMWare virtual machine library:
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I can run Ubuntu Linux or Windows XP. I have two copies of
Windows XP a copy in a dedicated virtual machine, and a copy in
BootCamp. If I had a license for SAS under Linux, I could install
it in Ubuntu, but my only SAS license is for Windows, so that's
where I put it.
SINGLE WINDOW MODE VS UNITY MODEBoth VMWare and Parallels offer
the option of running each program in its own Macintosh window, as
shown above, or of showing a single Windows window with all of the
Windows program running within it, as show here:
Which you use is largely a matter of preference - the
capabilities are the same, they're just presented differently
(actually, you can get a slightly larger window in Unity mode, but
it's not much larger). I tend to run in Unity mode if I have only
one Windows program open, and in single window mode if I have
several programs open.
QUESTIONS AND ANSWERS
What's the hardest thing to get used to when you switch from
Windows to a Mac?
For me, it's the keyboard. Here's what my MacBook Pro keyboard
looks like:
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It's fairly similar to a Windows keyboard, but notice that
there's no Insert key, and no PageUp or PageDown. Full-size
keyboards have PageUp and PageDown keys, but not an Insert key for
some unfathomable reason. Within the Windows virtual machine, you
can use a free program called AutoHotKey to assign keystroke
combinations to create your own Insert key and any other keys or
key combinations you want.
I would have thought that the single-button mouse, the different
arrangement of items on the screen, the use of the dock instead of
a start menu, or any of the other visual differences would have
been difficult, but in fact they took very little time to get used
to. It's the keyboard difference that's hard I guess Windows has
worked its way into my physical memory.
Also, you can do almost anything in Windows using only the
keyboard. You quickly hit limits on what can easily done with the
Keyboard on a Mac.
How fast is SAS in an emulator?
Pretty fast, actually. I haven't done extensive testing, but it
certainly feels as fact as SAS running on my work desktop.
Remember, Apple sells very good hardware, probably better than your
Windows machine.
What's slow?
Disk I/O to the Macintosh file system can be really slow.
Your virtual machine can see three kinds of local disks: a
preallocated virtual disk (the fastest choice), an expandable
virtual disk that grows when you need it to, and a network disk
that shows the Macintosh file system.
This last choice, the network disk, is much slower than a
preallocated virtual disk. Use this choice only when you need to
pass files back and forth between Windows and the Mac, or between
virtual machines.
What if I need a SAS program to run really fast?
Boot Windows natively using BootCamp and run your program
there.
Do I need a Windows license?
Yes, and you will probably need to buy a new license it's
unlikely that a license from an existing machine can be
transferred.
But you'll need only one license, no matter how many copies of
Windows you are going to run on one Mac. You will have to call an
automated Microsoft help line to get the second and subsequent
licences activated, but I had no problems.
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Which version of Windows do I need?
I'd say Windows XP if it's still available you probably won't
need the extra visual features in Vista, and there are rumors that
some of the graphics gravy doesn't work well under any emulator. To
run SAS, the Pro version of either Windows is recommended, not the
Home version.
Aren't Macintoshes more expensive than Windows machines?
There's debate about that, because exact hardware equivalents
aren't available, but there's no doubt that the cheapest MacBooks
cost more than the cheapest Windows notebooks. My answer would be
yes, Macs are more expensive. Remember, Apple is a hardware
manufacturer at heart, and has a monopoly on machines running Mac
OS X. They don't want sellers to offer discounts.
So how can I get a bargain?
You can buy a discontinued or refurbished machine from Apple,
www.apple.com. I've heard that there's often an official sale on
Black Friday, the day after Thanksgiving. A local Macintosh user
group may arrange for a temporary discount (a week after I bought
my MacBook, MacNexus and BestBuy offered a one day 10%-off sale).
And finally, although sellers can't discount prices, they can throw
in free or discounted software and hardware this often happens at
MacMall, www.macmall.com, but similar deals can be found at other
Internet sites.
Can I connect to work through a VPN?
Probably. I can't connect to my work VPN on the Macintosh side,
but it works fine in the Windows virtual machine. It really depends
on how your IT department has set things up.
If I boot Windows under BootCamp, can I read my Macintosh
files?
Yes, if you buy a third-party device driver called MacDrive.
Any closing comments?
Macintosh users would never put up with the complicated dialogs
that are needed to perform many common tasks, especially system
related tasks. Take the task of adding a new WiFi connection.
Windows makes yu go through a long set of dialog boxes asking for
things you're not likely to know, like whether it's WEP or WPA and
what kind of encryption is being used. The Mac just figures out
what it can and prompts you for the rest in a way you can
understand.
Serious Windows users will not be happy with the sorry state of
documentation for Mac programs. It's mostly pictures and videos;
detailed information on the workings of common Mac programs is hard
to find unless you fork out for a third-party book.
CONTACT INFORMATION
Jack [email protected]://www.excursive.com/sas/
Please check http://www.excursive.com/sas/papers/ for an updated
copy of the paper and the slides a week or so after the conference.
You can also find a set of links to related articles and web
sites.
SAS and all other SAS Institute Inc. product or service names
are registered trademarks or trademarks of SAS Institute Inc. in
the USA and other countries. indicates USA registration. Other
brand and product names are trademarks of their respective
companies.
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