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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.
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Every time there's anything on this the first comments are along these lines. Fine! You don't want to play games or do any Windows devlopment - other people do! And this lets them. The end.
I hope everybody who dragged this guy's reputation through the mud offers him a huge apology! Maybe it's just because I'm growing older, but the older I get the more cynical I feel like people are becoming. Maybe it's always been this way and when I was a kid I either didn't notice or just shrugged it off....
Why?
Games.
Stuff like VMWare will do a great job of running applications, but for stuff that requires access to modern hardware, dual-booting is probably the only real answer.
I've been doing it for years on my PC, after all - serious stuff gets done in Linux, but when I want to mess around with modding Half-Life 2 then I quickly reboot into Windows XP, and instantly get 100% software compatibility. If something gave me the ability to dual-boot my new MacBook in a similar manner, then that would be great - I'd essentially have both a Mac and a PC in one shiny laptop case.
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?
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It seems to me that native hardware will mean that we're not far from seeing a lot of really great "not-emulation VPC-like products." This is nice, but it seems that being able to have the two up side-by side would be more useful. Wouldn't native hardware also mean that a VPC could run at nearly full speed, only taking a hit due to whatever resources were already being used by the Mac OS and applications? Still, this is a nice achievement.
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Apple is happy. Now all those Windows users who want a Mac (more market share, yippee!) will buy a Mac and dual boot, yet they can still "try" to protect their OS from running a white box.
Microsoft is happy. They didn't have to spend any of their own money to get compatibility, and if they're lucky, maybe more than 30% of the dual booters will actually pay for a Windows license.
Why? Because of the huge number of applications that are only produced for Windows -- these are small enough that the makers can't be bothered to, or don't have the expertise to, make a Mac version, yet aren't essential enough to make me go out and buy a Windows machine just to run them.
One example would be the PC interface software for my cell phone. Nice to have, but I only use it every few months to back stuff up and am not about to go buy a PC just to run it. Same story for game hacking utilities.
Congratulations to Narf. I'm anxiously awaiting booting WinXP on my Intel iMac.
I'd think Apple would love it. They played no part in working out the solution, but now their hardware is the most versatile around for running the two desktop OSes I've wanted to have on one machine. Done deal, buying a mac.
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I find this kind of funny and ironic...
Apple announces that they are moving to intel. OSX is DRM'd and bound to Macs so that it cannot be run on commodity hardware. Senior execs at Apple also state that they will not do anything to prevent Windows from running on their hardware.
Intel Macs come out.
Hackers get OSX86 up and running on Dells with relative ease, despite Apple's best efforts to prevent them from doing so. However, they have such a hard time getting Windows to run on a Mac that a contest is started and 13,000 dollars worth of prize money is offered.
Oh the irony. :-)
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Wake me up when someone lets me run Windows binaries *inside* Intel OSX. That is the achievement.
I disagree. I think Microsoft is not at all happy about this. Knowing that a mac can run Windows eliminates a major reason a lot of people (including myself) don't use a Mac - I need Windows for certain tasks that I cannot otherwise do. This will increase the Mac marketshare and ultimate, Microsoft will lose out!
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A hack must have been expected, even desired, by Apple. Being able to run both OSX and Win XP (and Linux) on a single notebook would be massive. If you need Wintel, you can buy anything, but if you want OSXP, you have to buy from Apple.
I, for one, am desperately trying to restrain myself from running out and picking up a Mac Book.
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well to compare, how many people do you think have bought an xbox because they could mod it, stick an emulator or backed up games onto it and play away (to back up my point I can say I know at least 5 people who have, it's pretty popular). Hacks start of as hacks, and then someone puts in the hard work simplifying them, making them more accessible to everyone and then we no longer need to play around with bootloaders etc. This is already big news and will be appearing on all the apple news sites, it's certainly gonna get the apple fanboi zealots riled. It will also get a lot of interest from people who don't just want to play games on their macs, but do a few of the things they still can't do on their macs - admittedly very little now - in windows. On another note, I feel that the mac populaces face has changed since OS X came along. Mac users have become much more homebrew, hacker friendly and do frequently get down and dirty with their darwin innards. People with that kind of attitude - which seems widespread in the community now - might well relish getting their machine to dual boot xp, just because.
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Did you really read the original (yesterday's) commentary on this? It looked like a basic peer-review process to me, albeit in true /. style. A person steps up, makes an extraordinary claim, and the community of peers does its best to suggest every possibility for falsification.
It took a while, but the truly hare-brained ideas (like a photoshopped image of a MacBook) were discredited leaving only a couple of reasonable possibilities (like a full-screen display of an XP screengrab image).
So honestly, would you really prefer that a peer-review process work from the premise that the proposal is true, as opposed to false? While the former is certainly much "nicer", the latter is more in keeping with scientific modes of thought. I'd have expected nothing less, had I presented the same claims + shaky evidence.
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Excellent work by Narf2006 and Blanka.
I don't understand why some people are so negative about something which gives the user greater flexibility and choice. I love using OS X for my personal needs, but my job requires Windows and CounterStrike:Source requires DirectX, so it's made my MacBook Pro even more flexible and that can only be a good thing.
Whilst I can imagine that some software producers will look at the situation and say "The Mac now runs Windows so we don't need to produce a Mac native version", I think the ability to boot Windows tears down one barrier to buying a Mac...if you have to run Windows then you don't need to compromise and buy a Windows only machine.
Finally, I know you can buy a regular PC and dual-boot with a hacked copy of OS X, but it's illegal, whereas dual booting a genuine retail copy of XP on a Mac is legal and that makes it a real option for the workplace. I look forward to taking my MacBook everywhere and leaving that chunky Dell on the table...someone needs to start producing 200GB+ 2.5" 7200rpm drives fast!
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Microsoft is most wholeheartedly not gonna care. They sell you an OS to install on whatever machine you want. As long as it's not a pirated copy (which is a seperate issue), then they don't care.
As to Apple, I doubt they would care either. They primarily sell hardware. OS X is just something to set their hardware apart from other computer makers. Nobody is gonna NOT buy a Mac because it can run Windows, but somepeople might now buy a Mac (who otherwise wouldn't) because now it can.
It benefits both companies.
"People who think they know everything are very annoying to those of us who do."-Mark Twain
Dual booting is impractical under a lot of applications, but for some people (those constrained by budget, space, or the desire to not tote around two notebooks) it makes the most sense.
As for data exchange, unless you're packing a notebook, I'd probably just put together a lightweight file server with Linux so that you're not trying to juggle partitions on your local machine any more than is necessary.
120 characters for a sig? That's bloody useless.
that makes you.... an idiot. ;)
i think the money is humiliation enough for the nay-sayers.
--Idiots, Every single one of YOU, A flaming mass of conglomerated morons, hey wait a second, isnt that how RAID works?
Here's the scenario. I would like to try out Mac OS, and maybe even use it 75% of the time. However, I wouldn't buy a Mac because I would still need to use windows for the other 25%. If it was possible to run both on the same hardware, I could buy a Mac, run MacOS whenever I can, and then boot into windows for the 25% of the time that I need to run windows. Sounds a lot like how I run Linux right now. Although its close to 90% linux, 10% windows. If running Linux meant that I couldn't run windows, I probably never would have tried linux to begin with.
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"Wouldn't a VM be better for this?"
I'm kinda loathed to give msft $ for a VM when I can just install WindowsXP from my installer disk.
I need a new laptop anyway, so may as well go with an Intel based Mac and be able to run pretty much anything i want.
Considering the fact that the Device Manager screenshot from the iMac Core Duo shows an abudance of "Unknown devices" (including the display adapter), and considering the drivers for these devices probably do not exist for Windows, I don't see people playing games anytime soon.
I believe that was done on purpose, to show that he wasn't just replacing the frames in his video. Plus he could move around and show us the back of the machine. That video left little room for forgery, especially since it showed a change in resolution on the screen, and a return from sleep mode, that would be very hard to fake.
Or it could just be the coffee, as another poster has already metioned.