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Apple Officially Releases Beta Dual Boot Loader
Slippy Douglas writes "Apparently, Apple has made good on one of the 30th anniversary product rumours. Apple today announced the Boot Camp Public Beta, which allows Intel Macs to easily and legally multi-boot. Boot Camp will be a standard feature in Mac OS X 10.5."
But, some notes:
- Even the existing http://onmac.net/ solution wasn't "illegal" or against any Apple or Microsoft license agreement - not saying the summary said that, but it kind of implied it might be
- The HUGE difference with Boot Camp is that it includes Windows XP driver profiles for Apple-specific hardware - including video drivers! Hello games and video intensive Windows software!
- Another big difference is that it includes a live repartitioning tool so the drive doesn't have to be reformatted to install Windows as the current solution requires
- And, it wraps everything up in a nice "setup assistant"-like interface
- It does burn a custom Windows XP installation disc (no, this does not violate any Microsoft or Windows license agreement, as making custom Windows installation discs has been routine in IT shops for years)
- Currently, it looks like it supports only Windows XP SP2, not any multi-disc XP-based installations (or other non-Windows OSes), but since Media Center is already working with the other solution by making a custom installation disc, I have no doubts that it could work with this as well
It's pretty incredible that Apple has decided to do this, to say the least.
However, the true benefit for many people won't come from dual-booting, but from running Windows (or any other x86 OS) in a virtualization environment alongside OS X with no dual booting or rebooting needed.
Virtualization company Parallels announced that it will be bringing its Parallels Workstation virtualization product to Intel-based Macs. Parallels is a hypervisor-based (with a kernel module) virtual machine solution already shipping for Windows and Linux, and is the first desktop virtualization product to support Intel VT/Vanderpool CPU "partitioning". It's also only $50. Parallels also has a long list of officially supported guest OSes, and that's just the ones that are *officially* supported. So either way, we'll have a nice dual boot solution AND a nice virtualization solution!
So Boot Camp will be standard with Leopard...great. What about the thing that a lot of us actually want, virtualization from Apple, rumored to be in Leopard? And not just virtualization to run x86 OSes, but to also run multiple instances of Intel-variants of Mac OS X and Mac OS X Server (*as well* as any other x86 OS)? Now THAT would be the holy grail. Desktop virtualization for things like Windows and Linux/BSD environments, and server virtualization for multiple Mac OS X/Mac OS X Server instances on a single box.
Since Apple has shown it's been officially willing to acknowledge the alternate OS/Windows universe on Intel-based Macs, I actually have a lot more hope for native, integrated virtualization in Leopard as well!
All this app does is partition the disk, and burn a CD with the drivers that Windows needs to use Apple's hardware. If you want to run Linux, you're still on your own.
-jcr
The only title of honor that a tyrant can grant is "Enemy of the State."
To multi-boot before this you had to use drivers that had been hacked and probably violated someones copyright. This system generates a proper driver disk, and is also probably why the download is 83GB as it'll contain drivers for all of the Intel mac platforms.
Makes me want to pick up that Macbook Pro now!
Well if you make ubuntu work on this setup i am of to by a mac. Anybody knows?
You've been able to boot linux on the intel macs for some time now.
And it looks like someone has ubuntu running on them allready
However, I think you're not going to have everything working perfectly, I think the video drivers will only be 2d, your remote won't work, nor will the CD eject button, etc etc etc.
If you've got a bit of money & just want ubuntu, buy hardware from a vendor who supports linux.
If you want OS X and Ubuntu, still buy hardware from a vendor who supports linux - but also wait until you can buy copies of OS X tiger that are not tied to the new macbook or iMacs & install that on your generic hardware.
My pics.
Wow. You really can't read.
The 83MB is not the bootloader. It's the EFI module and the Windows drivers for the Apple hardware that you have to burn to CD to install in Windows after you get it going. Read more slowly next time.
You cannot use the update versions for a trivial reason: when installing an update version, Windows setup prompts for an update-eligible install disk . Which you cannot provide since you're unable to eject the disk from your drive until you install the Apple driver package.
HFS+: OS X uses it; XP doesn't recognize it
FAT32: Both OS X and XP can read and write to it, but it has limits in partition size and doesn't allow for files larger than 4GB (no DVD backup for you!)
NTFS: Both OS X and XP can read it, but OS X can't write to it
One solution is MacDrive, which allows Windows to read and write to HFS+. But I'd rather that OS X be able to write to NTFS.
Virtual PC lets you move stuff back and forth, but it has inferior performance and some software doesn't work with it (Thayer's guide to birds of North America doesn't run under VPC, for example). And of course VPC doesn't work on the Intel Macs at all.
Still, being able to run Windows is *excellent* news for Apple and for OS X. It means more people will buy Macs because many need to run Windows for specific applications but would rather use OS X for everything else. If they can address the filesystem incompatibility and get the OSs to run concurrently without any performance hit, Apple's market share will skyrocket.
What are you talking about? Linux doesn't threaten Apple in any way whatsoever. Apple's a hardware company, the Mac OS is just a selling point. Why on earth would they care which OS you want to use on your computer? Answer: they don't, and that's why they're releasing this product.
However, all of the Apple's current Intel-based computers are 32-bit. So, you will only be able to install the 32-bit, BIOS-based version of Vista on them.
Karma: Terrifying (mostly affected by atrocities you've committed)
The reason for this is that all IPC, all thread-related operations, and many system calls rely on the Mach port mechanism. Sending a Mach message requires a lot of checking of port rights, and so is The cost of a Mach message send is about ten times the cost of a traditional UNIX system call.
For most applications, this won't be a problem, but as soon as you start swapping OS X slows right down (because the VM subsystem is in the Mach part of the kernel and uses ports extensively). Likewise, if you are running something very I/O intensive, something that does a lot of thread locking, or anything that uses a lot of system calls, then it will be much slower on OS X than Linux, BSD, or pretty much any sane kernel implementation (including second-generation microkernels, such as L4).
Mach is the nicest kernel design I've seen, on paper. It is elegant, and nicely abstracted. Unfortunately, this comes at a significant cost, which can be relatively easily avoided.
[1] A volume renderer that made extensive use of mmap and madvise for handling very large datasets.
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