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Multi-booting Mac Intel Developer Machines
ytsejam-ppc writes "Ross Carlson over at Jasbone.com has a great article up on how to install multiple operating systems on the new Intel based developer edition Macs. His particular setup triple-booted Mac OS X 10.4.1 (Intel), CentOS 4 and Windows XP. Just makes me drool."
What about 64-bit chips? These Pentium 4-based Macs are 32-bit, I was hoping Apple would be heading in the direction of 64-bit like they started to do with G5. Are they going to use Xeon chips in the high end machines, perhaps?
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If it's an Intel box, it should be able to run BeOS as well. :-)
Dear Slashdot: next time you want to mess with the site, add a rich-text editor for comments.
There's no reason to believe it won't.
See my post here for more details. At the very, very least it could run Linux and Windows nicely in a virtual machine environment, but it's very likely that yes, they will run Linux - and Windows - regardless of whether the final machines utilize BIOS, Open Firmware, or EFI. Why wouldn't they? Especially in the case of Linux. PowerPC Macs run several varieties of Linux today; why wouldn't they also be able to run on production Intel-based Macs, even if they make the surprising decision of using Open Firmware? And there's no reason Apple would want to *prevent* people from installing Linux, or even Windows, as Phil Schiller himself has said Apple won't do anything to preclude people from installing Windows on Intel-based Macs.
This is a huge coup for Apple: imagine a laptop that can seamlessly run Windows XP and Linux - PLUS Mac OS X. Or better yet, run one environment (such as Mac OS X) and have your other environments in a VM at essentially full speed. It would be a dream machine, to be sure.
Also, as a side note- I received a call a couple of days ago from a woman in the Developer Connection group (I love those Irish accents, rowr :-)...but the accent wasn't enough for me to say yes to leasing the intel developer machine.
"Have you heard about our offer for development systems to ADC Select members?"
"Yep." Who hasn't? People under rocks? :-)
"Are you interested in taking advantage of the offer?"
"Nope, sorry."
Question is, why are they having to do this? Is reception to the development system lukewarm? Did they make a whole bunch, and are just being aggressive about getting 'em out to people? (which would be a good idea). I guess $1k isn't bad at all if you're a serious developer (I'm not).
Please help metamoderate.
Keep in mind that Rosetta isn't a PPC emulator. It re-compiles PPC code to x86 code, and it can also recompile at runtime when it spots certain usage patterns. The upshot is, that Rosetta can in many cases end up producing better than 1:1 speed for PPC apps.
-jcr
The only title of honor that a tyrant can grant is "Enemy of the State."
I've owned computers for 25 years now. I've been through eight bit machines, UNIX machines at Uni, 16 bit Amigas and 32 bit Acorn/ARM machines. I bought my first PC in 1995 and that was because, by then Linux had become useable enough for me. Eventually I also put Windows 95 on that machine. That machine is still around. Like the preverbial axe it has had all of its bits replaced a few times but is still the same machine. It now runs Linux and Windows XP except that it's been hardly touched in the last few months. Why? Because I use an old Mac G3 instead.
I used Macs at work between '88 and '93. I liked the hardware but thought it was expensive. Thought the software was okay but a little slow and sometimes unstable. So if someone bought one for me, I'd use it but otherwise I'd use something else. (RISC OS in the early 90s, then Linux/Windows).
I dislike Windows for many useablity reasons (I'm not an evangelist and will use something if it does the job) and I dislike Linux because it's not finished. Open source coders seem to lose interest once you've got a 90% complete product or application. They either prefer to refactor or add functionality rather than fixing those remaining bugs. I spend all my time at work being techy and I don't want to do it at home. I just want a machine I can use.
So when Apple anounced OS-X a couple of years or so ago I was interested. A UNIX foundation with Apple's useabilty on the top. But again the costs ruled one out. Not that long ago I got word of the availability of a cheap, second hand, Mac G3 so I bought it. Since I've had it it's done everything I need my home workhorse to do and the PC has not been touched. It may be a tad slow but I'm not worried about games as I use consoles for those (I decided a few years ago that I couldn't afford to keep a PC up to spec enough to play the latest games and so it was cheaper to pay the console premium on games and buy a Playstation 2).
I've just bought myself an iBook as I feel happiest using OS-X. I'm not worried whether it's PowerPC or x86 as in the end that's just one component in many and the machine runs the same software. I've grown up and no longer care whether my machine has the latest Hibachi 10Ghz processor, just whether it fulfil's my needs.
So the new machines will have an Intel processor in. So what? It doesn't mean I will put Windows on. I bought a Mac to get away from Windows. Apple will not stop producing OS-X because people don't just buy their hardware for the hardware, they buy a user experience and that requires OS-X.
If I want Office, I can get it for Mac (Actually I use OpenOffice/NeoOffice when I need such an application). I don't need Windows for anything. I have everything on my Mac. The only thing I use my PC for now is Linux development and the one thing that an Intel Mac would give me is the ability to do away with my PC.
You have an assumption that you cannot do without Windows and people want windows. You're wrong and I feel that actually what will happen is the complete reverse of what you describe.