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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.
Yeah this is great news! I'm a mac freak, but this makes an intel mac a great proposition as all my work stuff is Windows based!
Now all we need is for someone to make a hypervisor, or allow booting XP from within mac os without emulation, and we'll have a great system!
Does this version dual boot fully with Mac OS?
I'm sooo tempted to buy a Mac Book Pro now - my poor wallet.
Where can I get this? I haven't found any details or downloads yet...
I'd almost be tempted to buy a MacBook Pro if this works without any issues. It'd be nice to boot into Windows for my day job and OSX for home usage. The only thing really stopping me is the lack of a right-click button under the trackpad. I'm sure somebody can/has come up with a software hack to use two fingers to right-click, but I don't know how annoying that would actually be without using it.
and a amssive congratulation to Narf. This was an exciting contest to watch develop and definately brought out a lot of talent. Now the question in my mind is will this have any affect on the new intel-mac sales; Will people be keen to buy them because they can dual boot windows/mac os x on the same machine? Recently I bought a mac-mini (before the intel ones went live sadly) and I have to say, having used winxp for years after two weeks of my mac-mini on a KVM I'm just about ready to move over. I can't actually imagine many reasons for me wanting a PC any more. I'm not into gaming like I used to be, and mac os x is such a lovely user experience. I admit it, i'm a born again apple fan-boi! What exactly is the situation on driver support for someone booting winxp on a mac? That's what I am interested in, anyone got a clue?
Promote Charity on Myspace, Show Your Colours!
Because you're not a Mac user who lives in the Windows world. Some of us who make our money in the Windows world need to run applications that don't run on Mac... yet. I do Cognos development, and I have to provide my own notebook at work. Outside of work, I'm all Mac. Why have two notebooks when I can have my cake and eat it too? Yes, I could get a whitebox x86 notebook and run a hacked version of OSX, as the PC zealots would have it, but seeing how my PC is used for business, I'd like to stay above board. Which I can't do with an illegal version of Mac OSX running on a whitebox notebook.
if you can run Windows on a Mac now, will game developers stop porting games to Mac, since Mac users can run Windows?
--
Given enough personal experience, all stereotypes are shallow.
What's stopping you? There are tons of people who are already booting OS X 10.5.5 on cheap commodity hardware. There's even a wiki that tells you what cheapo hardware to buy to get the best Mac experience.
1. The first guy to do something gets lots of points
:-)
2. Anybody who does a lot of work so I don't have to gets points
3. The definition of hard has less to do whith whether the technology looks challenging and more to do with how long it actually takes people to accomplish. This was not instantaneous with a bunch of people piling on working solutions at the same time. This guy stands alone after a significant period of time. That makes this "hard" in a defacto sense of the word and is definately worth some points.
4. I'm not a Mac user. I'm a Windows user. Of course Mac users love their OS. I don't. After supporting several Mac people and trying to make use of it myself, I've decided I actually dislike it quite a lot (no flames, please, this is just a personal preference). However, I _love_ Mac hardware. I've lusted after the clean, light notebooks and the "cheese grater" G5 desktops are shear design elegance. As a current Mac user, judging this by the fact that you wouldn't want to run Windows is missing the fundimental point that Windows users might like the option of buying great hardware from Apple. From my perspective, this is worth lots of points.
Add em all up and this guy can redeem his points for several rounds of beer should I ever meet him
TW
Dual booting is unpractical
- You have to stop everything on Mac OS (Linux, BSD, whatever) to get into Windows and vice versa.
- Data exchange between systems is horrible (common FAT32/ext2 partition? yikes!)
Being a fulltime Linux user, I know the pain. Now I have two machines sharing data over the network. That's the proper solution, unless you lack funds for a small x86 system. So, in conclusion, I don't understand what all this fuss is all about.
my 2 cents, of course.
Rather than talk about what Microsoft and Apple think, I'd love to see the marketing department at Dell today.
Moderation in All Things... Especially Moderation - gurutc
Apple would never want to support this or even make it easy. But this is a boon. Many people such as myself who wouldn't switch previously will now consider it. In fact I am certain, my next computer will be a Conroe Mac. I predict the cool machine next year will be dual booting Mac with Conroe. Reminds of the old days when hackers liked the Amigas with x86 module that could run Dos/Amiga/Mac software all at full speed.
Why this won't negatively affect SW developers view of mac sales:
The average Mac user is never going to set up a dual boot (especially given no support, difficulties involved) so this really won't impact software developer plans (ie they won't stop making Mac software). Even those who dual boot will probably prefer to have native Mac versions of software. In the end all Macs sold will be potential buyers of Mac software. That is why this is a perfect solution, no official support and difficulties make it something only those who MUST have it will do, so it will not have any significant percentage of people using a Mac, but buying Windows software for it.
Why this is better than booting OSX on a whitebox:
Booting windows on a Mac, is a legal solution. Apple has said they are not doing anything to stop it. So you can have legal OSX and legal WinXP on the mac and keep them both updated with ease. Also the Mac which has less HW support will be running on it's intended platform. Windows should have no problem running on the same hardware. Contrast running pirate/hacked OSX on the whitebox (the only way to do it) which will always be of questionable stability and a fight to upgrade without breaking it.
Way to go guys!
He said PC, not "license of Windows XP".
If you have a retail license of XP, it can be transferred to the Mac. If you have an OEM copy, you have to tell MS "I just had to replace the motherboard, CPU, and RAM"
120 characters for a sig? That's bloody useless.
It seems that one might well be able to subvert the 'standby' or 'sleep' modes of both OS's to provide fast OS switching; hit a key to get the system to slumber (i.e. save system state) then add a 'system state swap' hack where you can switch over into the slumber mode of the other OS and reawaken.
AFAIK both OS's have both 'light standby' and sleep modes, presumably sleep involves swapping the ram out to disk and even reinitialising hardware on wake, so may just be the ticket.
If this can be made to work and tweaked for speed it would seem that you'd be able to ALT-TAB between OS's with a sub-10 second delay. That'd do for me.
Hope so!
FL
[FrLz]