Windows XP on Intel Mac Confirmed

niemassacre writes "According to winxponmac.com, the contest has been won - nearly $14k to narf2006 for submitting a working solution to dual-booting Windows XP and Mac OS X on an Intel-Powered mac. A thread on osx86project.org has confirmations from several testers that the procedure works on the 17" iMac, the Mac mini, and the MacBook Pro. Many sets of pictures and videos (such as this installation video) are floating around (and mentioned in the thread). The solution itself should be posted soon." Poit! Congratulations to narf.

Comments

Re:MacBook Pro

[charlie_vernacular]

You could try SideTrack by Raging Menace - that allows for extensive modification of the trackpad including horizontal scrolling, and hot corners. At the moment, they say that they're still working on a MacBook Pro version. It has decent try before you buy period as well.

I don't work for them, just a satisfied customer.

Here's a link http://www.ragingmenace.com/software/sidetrack/

Regards

Charlie

Mirror of the movie

[jmke]

Here's link to the XP on MAC video from a site which can handle a /. http://youtube.com/watch?v=nzH6OFpXgzI

be kind to their server

[thelost]

use the coral caches. I can't believe they weren't coralised in the main post

forum
http://forum.osx86project.org.nyud.net:8080/index. php?showtopic=11731
Video:
http://www.projectosx86.org.nyud.net:8080/winonmac .mov

Re:Why?

[slantyyz]

It's actually called DarWINE and it's not quite at the level of maturity you see in the Linux world. Codeweavers says they're working on a version of Crossover Office for the Mac, but they haven't posted any news about it recently.

Crossover Office is pretty good on Linux. I'd rather use something like Wine (provided it worked on 100% of the stuff I need -- wishful thinking) than VMWare. Having said that, I'd rather use VMWare than dual boot.

Can't play the video

[SpinyNorman]

Using the Quick Time player on Windows XP it says required compressor not available (1st time I tried it also said not available on server)... what do I need?

Re:Can't play the video

[uzor]

You can d/l quicktime separate from iTunes...you just need to look a little harder for the link. Try this: http://www.apple.com/quicktime/download/standalone .html . the other option that I have used if you don't want iTunes, is to open the iTunes installer with Winrar, and just extract the quicktime installer from it. The quicktime installer is called separately from the iTunes installer, so extracting/running it separate from the rest of the app works just fine.

Re:Why?

[Anonymous Coward]

This latest news makes me happy - it's like I bought a very fast Mac, then just over two weeks later I received a very fast PC of equivalent specs for free. What is there to complain about?

The only thing to complain about is the high price of non-OEM Windows. If you want to run Windows games on your Mac, you still have to pay a few hundred dollars for Windows XP to run them on.

Re:Great...

[nichrome]

OS X on commodity hardware has already been done.

But trust me, this is something a lot of people have been looking forward to, as well.

from macrumors

[ClassicComposer]

Since it's won now, I guess I can talk. The install requires a Windows XP PC, with which Windows is already installed. From here you use Nero Burning ROM to mix files from your XP SP2 CD, copy them to a new project, and add in some $OEM$ files and folders, and fix some of the files in i386. From here, you use xom.efi (which is the bootloader), and bless it in Terminal. Once it's blessed on startup you get a pretty nice selector, and you choose Windows. From here the CSM layer pauses for 2.5 Minutes while it does whatever its doing. Then you'll get into Windows Setup.

I should also mention at this time, you cannot reboot Windows. You need to shutdown. If you attempt rebooting it will hang at Windows is Shutting Down screen.

from mac forums

Re:from macrumors

[hr raattgift]

EULAs are not well-tested in English law, but it is established in Scottish law (Beta Computers (Europe) Ltd v Adobe Systems (Europe) Ltd, 1997, Outer House of the Court of Session). The Court of Session is influential upon English and Welsh courts, and the Beta decision is considered sound.

In general the argument would be that the item you are purchasing is a limited right to copy the software included in the package. Ordinariy the law of copyright would make you liable if you did so without explicit permission, or if you exceeded the terms of a limited licence.

All other rights are reserved to the copyright holder, and indeed, it is an asset which is depreciated.

Penrose, in the Beta decision, used the following logic: without a EULA, there exists NO licence for Adobe to copy the software onto its computers, and therefore no legal way for Adobe to use the software at all. Therefore the EULA must be part of the contract, and enforceable by both parties. (Adobe enforces its right to copy pursuant to the licence, Beta enforces the limits within the grant of those rights, consideration is based on this meeting of minds).

Untested in English law is exactly how this interacts with section 50(c) of the current Copyright Designs and Patents Act, inserted to comply with an EU directive, which grants some rights to make copies as necessary to make software usable. That is, this is a statutory right to copy versus statutory and common law rights reserved to the copyright holder. It is likely that an English court would expand upon Beta and suggest that 50(c) applies only in the case where a limited licence is acquired which does not include wording with respect to "copying" by dragging from one partition to another on the same system for use by the same user, or by "copying" by transferring in and out of memory or by "copying" to a general set of backups which happen to overlap the software in question. This would be consistent with a civil code reading of the directive.

The salient point would be whether the software itself was acquired, or whether the limited licence to copy data from a sold medium to a useful medium was acquired. In the former case, the statute should apply, but this would be inconsistent with the reality of the past decade in the software market.

You are probably right that the contract completes upon (or very nearly upon) the copying of the software into the buyer's system, and that the seller cannot impose further restrictions from that point, including limits of liability and other terms that would conflict with the Unfair Contract Terms Act and the Unfair Terms in Consumer Contract Regulations. However, prior to that completion, the buyer has the ability to reject the terms of the EULA and not exercise the licence. This would make him or her eligible for a refund from the seller.

A copy made for a third party after completion would certainly be a cause for action under copyright law. There is ample statute and common law in this area.

If EULAs are valid, and the EULA assigned rights to an agent to pursue such action under the Contracts (Rights of Third Parties) Act, a suit in England likely would be successful under both copyright law and contract law. The argument would turn around whether EULAs are valid in England, and likely would follow some of the logic in the Beta case from Scotland.

The 1952 Pharmaceutical Society of Great Britain v Boots Cash Chemists decision in England which established that the contract is concluded at point of sale is not conclusive in the area of limited grants to copy. A solicitor who insisted that it is, and that this invalidates EULAs not clearly and fully displayed at the the point of sale despite the obvious hazards to natural equity, is not one I would wish to do business with.

Re:Why?

[Ford Prefect]

The only thing to complain about is the high price of non-OEM Windows. If you want to run Windows games on your Mac, you still have to pay a few hundred dollars for Windows XP to run them on.

Or you could, y'know, buy an OEM copy... ;-)

(For that route, you still need to buy new hardware. Although a mouse is classified as an 'integral system component'. I need a new mouse anyway - this Logitech effort looks a bit manky.)

Re:Irony

[adam1101]

In the *STEP days, Windows NT ran on MIPS, Alpha, PPC, x86, and early versions even SPARC. This was drastically reduced with the NT -> 2K transition, but then again, so was *STEP -> OS X. Nowadays, NT runs on x86-32, x86-64 and Itanium, while *STEP runs on x86-32 and PPC, so it's pretty much a wash.

Some points to bear in mind:

[Phil John]

Windows NT was built from the beginning to run on multiple processors, it had a very advanced hardware abstraction layer built in. The other versions never sold very well and there were problems with application support (e.g. people targetting multiple processor arch's). Apple has clevery overcome this obstacle by including "Rosetta" from the start, something similar existed for NT Alpha called FX!32 but I suspect by the time it was released it was too little too late to save the OS.

I'm sure that the HAL is in place in NT derived operating systems to this day and if MS were so inclined they could do another port. However, there's no real business need (as there is for Apple with their transition) so it's never been done. They target the largest installed hardware base.

The issue with getting Windows on Macintel to work is that EFI is so fundamentally different to the traditional BIOS XP expects that you require either the source code of the OS kernel to make it work or have to, as has been done here, provide essentially a bios emulator. This is nothing to do with portability or HAL's, it's about having access to the fundamentally low-level parts of the operating system, something people outside MS don't have.

Re:Why?

[larkost]

WINE relies on X11. While that will be acceptable for some people, it is a long way from there to a "native" Windows emulation that will be acceptable for most people. Drag-and-drop (at least as much as Windows normally supports), copy-paste, and handling windows as native objects are all issues with X11.

Re:Why? 3D acceleration under VMware is on the way

[taupter]

Well, 3D acceleration under VMware is on the way, according to
http://www.vmware.com/support/ws5/doc/ws_vidsound_ d3d.html

It's in experimental stage, but looks promising.
The following link tells how to enable it for a given guest O.S.:
http://www.vmware.com/support/ws5/doc/ws_vidsound_ d3d_enabling_vm.html

Re:Big deal

[elysian1]

Hasn't this been done? It's called Wine.

explanation (riposte)

[mnemonic_]

Colin has received a solution from narf2006 and is currently testing it. Meanwhile, narf2006 has revealed some details on his method; he patched the Windows XP kernel to get VGA working, and wrote a custom Compatibility Support Module (CSM) to allow booting XP from EFI.

According to Intel documentation, using a CSM that plugs into the EFI framework should allow for booting BIOS-based operating systems:

A contemporary implementation of the Framework on a PC includes a CSM for supplying services to operating systems that do not boot using EFI and for supporting legacy option ROMs on add-in cards. For legacy boot the Framework initializes the platform's silicon and executes EFI drivers.

In the words of Jim Cramer, "booyah."

Re:Why?

[networkBoy]

Just tell them you upgraded the MB and that's good enough. They'll let you get by with that rough;y once per year (or any time a super cool new feature comes out).
-nB

Re:I'd prefer a VPC-like solution

[Domini]

There is one or two already... Xen and Q for example.

There is also VirtualPC (sloow and buggy)

I've been using VMware for years now on my personal laptop. It's barely usable in speed terms.

But why use any of these? I'm not interested in running small PC apps my grandma gave me on a CD she got from the cover of PCWorld magazine! And there is nothing I really need to run on my Mac apart from games and doing .NET 2.0 development, and unfortunately emulation does not cut it for games.

Let see, there is Omnigraffle? for Visio replacement, MS Office, Java SAPGUI for OSX (not perfect though) and many more equivalent applications.

No, I would have to say, I would primarily need Windows for games and thus practically require it to dual boot.

I've got an old iBook, a DELL Inspiron laptop and a fastish desktop, and I'll replace all of this with a sleep, light MacBook Pro. (Since I will be traveling soon, and will need something to play Oblivion and X3 on...)

Emulation is cool, granted... but native for games is even better. ;)

Re:Perhaps a stupid question...

[doh123]

all current intel macs meet or surpass the minimum Vista requirements. The MacBook Pro, and the iMac should be able to run all the cool added visual affects, but its unknown if the GMA950 video in the mini can do this. But those options can be disabled and Vista still run.

Re:Graphics card?

[Jugalator]

Well, there's no super strange cards in use; e.g. the iMac uses an ATI Radeon X1600. Sure, they may have somehow modified the graphics card for their needs, but I doubt it.

Supported hardware?

[ElectroBot]

Congratulations to narf2006 and blanka! Great Job!

From the screenshots available on the osx86project.org website it seems that there's still a bit of work to be done: finding drivers!

Here's the Windows Device Manager on iMac Core Duo - http://forum.osx86project.org/index.php?s=ab17121f f41822abd80317ffeafc7788&act=Attach&type=post&id=1 804 (its a 1280x960 JPG image)

The drivers that need to be (and most if not all will be) found are:
- ATI Radeon X1600 PCI Express video driver
- Ethernet 10/100/1000BASE-T (Gigabit) driver
- Airport Extreme driver
- Bluetooth 2.0 + EDR driver
- iSight driver
- IR receiver driver
and possibly 4 other drivers (Bus controller, Chipset, etc.)

I don't know if sound works or not (sound devices aren't expanded in the image). I'm guessing that Firewire and USB 2.0 don't need drivers (Windows XP SP2 supports them out of the box usually)

And then the drivers will have to be found for similar devices on the other Intel Macs (MacBook Pro, Mac Mini)

Very possible

[Temujin_12]

It is very possible to setup a 3-boot situation seeing how Linux Beat Windows to Intel iMac.

Re:an end to speculation

[hawaiian717]

You might want to wait a bit longer... Macworld notes that native video drivers aren't working yet:

http://www.macworld.com/news/2006/03/16/xponmac/in dex.php

Re:MacBook Pro

[McDutchie]

Incidentally, I wonder if anybody around here has any experience using PC keyboards and mice with Macs?

As long as they are USB, PC mice are fully supported out of the box -- no problem.

The same is true for PC keyboards, with a few annoyances. All the functions are available, but the Mac-specific ones are on non-obvious keys, which is somewhat annoying. The following is as found out experimentally on my Logitech officially-PC-only keyboard, for which there is no Mac driver available, in combination with my PowerMac G5:

• The Windows/Start key is the Command (cloverleaf) key. The Alt (= Option) and Command keys are on opposite locations than on a Mac keyboard.
• F12 is the eject key. (On the Logitech keyboards the function keys are only reachable by turning the "Mode F" indicator on.)
• Pause/Break is the "increase brightness" key, Scrl Lk (Scroll Lock) is the "decrease brightness" key (on the Logitech keyboards, the latter one is only reachable by turning the "Mode F" indicator off).
• The Volume and Mute controls work as indicated on the keyboard.

There are utilities available with which you can switch the Command and Option keys around so that on PC keyboards they are on the location you would expect. I use uControl on Mac OS X 10.3.9 (Panther) to achieve this, but it doesn't run on 10.4 (Tiger). The uControl webpage refers to fKeys as an alternative for Tiger, but it doesn't seem to have the Option and Command key reversal feature, so I don't know how to get that functionality for Tiger. I imagine there must be something out there, but I can't be bothered to look it up right now.

I hope this helps.

Re:Dual booting is unpractical

[AddressException]

I believe there is some kind of HFS driver for windows?
http://www.mediafour.com/products/macdrive6/

Re:The Good, the Bad and the Ugly

[eklitzke]

You mean like this? http://www.osxbook.com/book/bonus/misc/knoppix/
Or perhaps this? http://www.mactel-linux.org/wiki/Main_Page

Re:Why?

[Tim C]

OEM copies are not boxed, and come with absolutely no support from Microsoft; they're also supposedly tied to the machine that they came with, although I've had no problems with that. Full Retail are boxed, come with some period of free support from Microsoft (90 days?) and are not tied to the machine.

Re:All Extremists

[Andrew Kismet]

Pfft, everyone knows that frog story is a debunked myth. Find a better proverb to use, or risk your argument falling flat on its face in an actual debate.

That give, I agree with you ^^

Re:Installation video

[MarcoPon]

Sorry, here's the correct one: http://exe64.com:6969/

Bye!

Re:Big deal

[lucifuge31337]

VPC does not run on Intel Macs.

Re:MacBook Pro

[Huge Pi Removal]

Surely the problem is not so much getting right-click functionality under OS X, but getting it under Windows (where it's far more important). This probably won't be solved for a while yet.

Myself, I'd just get a small USB mouse to plug in. Then you get a scroll wheel too.

Re:So where's the meat?

[.Chndru]

Download away.. http://www.winxponmac.com/download/

Mirrors for the files you need to do this......

[8127972]

http://harrisonjordan.com/Winxponmac_0.1.zip
http://leewilkins.com/share/winxponmac0.1.zip
http://www.jerrybrace.com/Winxponmac%200.1.zip
http://www.geekdinner.co.uk/winxponmac0.1.zip
http://www.apple.tempex.sk/wordpress...nmac%200.1. zip
http://individual.utoronto.ca/kkapoor/winxponmac0. 1.zip

Re:Dual booting is unpractical

[slashflood]

Dual booting is unpractical - You have to stop everything on Mac OS (Linux, BSD, whatever) to get into Windows and vice versa.

Not quite true.

Re:MacBook Pro

[CyberDave]

The uControl webpage refers to fKeys [kodachi.com] as an alternative for Tiger, but it doesn't seem to have the Option and Command key reversal feature, so I don't know how to get that functionality for Tiger

The key-swapping feature is built-in to Mac OS X Tiger. Take a look at your Keyboard section in System Preferences. (The only problem with this is that it swaps it for all keyboards, which is annoying if, say, you have a laptop with a built-in keyboard and want to use a generic PC keyboard).

That said, the Microsoft and Logitech drivers for their respective keyboards also include this functionality (and then some) and also allows you to customize what all those extra buttons do, which is nice if you have one of their keyboards, but not so useful if you want to, say, use an IBM Model M keyboard via a USB-PS/2 adapter (which works great), so you'll need to use Tiger's built-in swapping functionality.

Custom Slipstreamed XP CD?

[CyberDave]

Now that the directions are out, it looks like it requires doing a little slipstreaming to the Windows XP CD (and apparently one that has SP2 in it already).

For those of us who work in IT, like me, and have already created a slipstreamed XP CD with the latest security updates (and storage drivers--thank god for that! no more F6 during an install), I want to know how to add the XP on Mac fixes to that already-prepared CD. Oh, and I want to know how to do that without having to go and actually figure it out myself (mostly because I don't yet have an Intel Mac of my own to play with). WINNT.SIF I can handle, but I'd rather leave TXTSETUP.SIF to someone more knowledgeable (hopefully that will work with the iastor drivers that are already inserted into my CD).

From a quick glance at the patch provided, it looks like it provides the iaStor drivers for the Windows installer to be able to access the hard drive (since the Intel Macs appear to use an Intel 945 chipset with ICH7 storage, this makes sense, since you can't exactly hit "F6" during boot to load the drivers from a floppy. It also looks like it adds a custom framebuffer driver, since the X1600 is apparently one of the few things that doesn't have working drivers yet (everything else seems to be supported by the generic Intel Chipset drivers, the generic Marvell Yukon Gig-E drivers, the generic Broadcom WiFi card drivers, etc). I guess the X1600 issue isn't an issue on the Mac Minis, since those have Intel 950 integrated graphics.

In any case, this is the greatest news I have heard in a long time. I really want to get a MacBook Pro to replace my aging Power Mac G4/500 DP and my crappy eMachines laptop, and I want to dual-boot Windows XP just so I can play games at LAN parties without having to drag my desktop system around (and run a few bits of Windows-only software). For day to day use, nothing beats Mac OS X.

Torrent to the solution

[La Camiseta]

There's a torrent to the solution at http://exe64.com:6969/ seeing as how the onmac servers seem to be down at the moment.

Re:Why?

[kabz]

It's not very fast, but XP works in Q / QUEMU.

Here's a pic of it running:
XP running in QEMU.

mirrors

[javiercr]

the site is slashdoted, another mirror: http://www.devishlyslinky.com/winxponmac0.1.zip

Win XP on Mac - HowTo and files - v0.1

[S4t0r1]

here a little torrent where you can find narf2006 howto and files http://exe64.com:6969/torrent.html?info_hash=889b0 afec31c90c2ca744ce0463954017a43685a What you'll need ---------------- 1. An original XP PRO SP2 CDROM It doesn't have to be bootable, but it should have a I386 directory on the root. 2. The xom.zip file. 3. Nero Burning ROM 4. A blank CD 5. A PC of course... 6. 20-30 minutes

Remapping mod keys is built in to Tiger

[klez23]

There are utilities available with which you can switch the Command and Option keys around so that on PC keyboards they are on the location you would expect.

Tiger (the latest OSX, included with all Intel Macs) includes this functionality. Open the "Keyboard & Mouse" preferences, and click "Modifier Keys." Remap to your heart's content.

Re:Dual booting is unpractical

[nxtw]

Last I remember, they're both roughly 2Ghz machines in terms of performance

You do not recall correctly.
Using CineMark 9.5 CPU benchmarks on Windows XP, a 1833MHz Athlon XP (probably a 2200) gets 209, while an 1830MHz Core Duo uses 271. Factor in that a Athlon XP 2100 would be a little slower and the 2.0Ghz Core Duo would have the advantage of dual core as well as being faster, and the Core Duo is signifcantly faster. Furthermore, an X1600 will be much faster than Ti500...

The Apple would most certainly be the "faster" machine.

Re:So where's the meat?

[aitikin]

I could be very incorrect in this, but as I recollect the fix is supposed to become open sourced. I can't access the site but I remember yesterday or the day before readying that every donation from here on out will be put to use on funding the open source project that comes of it.

Possible solution to do it without a PC!

[mr_zorg]

It seems to me that the only reason you need a PC to do this is because the author is only familiar with Nero Burning-ROM to create bootable discs. It certainly isn't easy to do on the Mac, but if I've got it right, this should work. I don't have an Intel Mac to test on, can someone try this? First, install Fink. Then install the "mkisofs" package. From there, unzip the solution given and cd into that directory in terminal. Insert your XP install CD. Then run these commands:

cd src
ditto /Volumes/YOUR_XP_INSTALL_CD .
cp -r ../patch/ .
cp ../boot.img .
cp ../xom.efi .
cp ../howto.txt howtomac.txt
mkisofs -b boot.img -no-emul-boot -boot-load-seg 1984 -boot-load-size 4 -c boot.catalog -iso-level 4 -r -J -V XP_ON_MAC -o ../xp_on_mac.iso .

Note that the mkisofs is long and may be wrapped on your screen. But it should be all one line... This will create an ISO that you should be able to burn with Disk Utility. I've taken the liberty of putting the xom.efi and howto instructions on the ISO as well to make things simple. Then, just follow the howto instructions in section II "The Installation". Hopefully that works! Let me know!