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Going To Boot Camp
An anonymous reader writes "PC World has first impressions of what it's like to run Windows with Boot Camp, the recently announced official dual-boot software for the Intel Macs." From the article: "Back in Windows, I got right down to business and installed a few games to put the graphics and sound support to the test. The quick and dirty verdict on performance? Most impressive. Doom 3 and Far Cry both ran smoothly with high-end graphics options turned on. In both cases, I had to tweak visual settings manually, since the games automatically set themselves to very low settings. Far Cry, for example, autodetected very low settings, but it ran without a hitch when I bumped the resolution up to 1280 by 720, with all visual quality options set to 'High.'"
You know, I wasn't really planning to replace my dual G5 powermac for quite some time, but this might be enough to motivate me to put it up on ebay and get an intel machine when they come out. Every once in a while I get the "hey you gotta try this awesome game" IM from a friend, and being able to fire up windows and give it a shot would sure be nice. I still have no desire to waste space with a second windows box that would only be booted once in a while, but being able to dual boot would be pretty sweet. Plus, with virtualization coming soon (beta already out), there's suddenly a whole lot more reason to upgrade to intel macs.
Other than that though, it's an excellent product. I've been running the Q front-end for Qemu, and used Virtual PC 7 on PPC. This blows them both away. But please can I have a sound card? Pretty please?
Usenet thread containing my walkthrough comments whilst I was performing the install is here (scroll down the thread a little).
Cheers,
Given the desire for Linux to run on everything, it's not surprising that someone's already tried running Linux with Boot Camp, which apparently does seem to work. Granted, there's still the issue of Linux drivers for the hardware, but it is a start.
It's kinda cool that Apple can essentially release ONE drivers disk and be done with it. A lot has been said over the years about Apple's benefits of having known hardware...
This is how it works out with Windows. Here, have one installer. It will work on all our machines, and support everything in it. One Installshield script. It was the fastest WinXP or ANY Windows installs I've ever done.
Thank you for playing, have a nice day.
Since Mac virtualization looks pretty strong, Windows Vista will include virtualization, and virtualization is becoming standard fare on Linux, Boot Camp might just be the "entry level" method for running both Mac and Windows apps "on the same computer". Simultaneous execution in multiple windows under virtualization is a much bigger step, but dual-booting is much easier for the normals to understand. And it gets us down the road to a bigger technical step, but a nearly seamless migration (and great relief) for the normals: Mac/Windows apps running in the same desktop, with IPC/clipboard integration across "OS" boundaries as tight as across mere app boundaries.
How long before the OS is just another app, along with any other OS'es required to run other apps? Just a library collection, running on a "nanokernel": the virtualization SW? And which OS will best run the virtualization: Windows, Linux, or some RTOS?
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make install -not war
Don't hold your breath. Adobe is busy digging itself out of the huge mess that is "we never got off Codewarrior", and won't go Universal-Binary until the next release. Microsoft isn't in quite as bad a position, but is desperate to get people to upgrade to verion N+1 in office, so don't count on a free UB version there.
Mark my words: you won't see a pro intel tower until Adobe (and possibly MS) are Universal Binary.
While the "cottage industry" is mostly embracing UB and virtually everything I use has been UB for at least one or two minor revision numbers- the big boys are dragging their feet. Even Diskwarrior (from the vaporware kings, Alsoft- DiskExpress for OSX anyone?) isn't UB yet.
I'm not exactly thrilled about Bootcamp. Why? 1)I don't want to dedicate 20-30GB to a disk partition for a host OS I'm not going to use except for gaming and 1-2 Windows-only apps I need. I much prefer an emulator-based solution like Qemu, or WINE aka "darwine". I'm also not thrilled because this just largely removed the "necessity" fire from under the pants of darwine and Qemu developers, and both projects desperately need more work.
Unfortunately, Qemu/Q is buggy enough that Windows Update doesn't run on an installed guest OS and it doesn't import VPC7 systems cleanly like it claims. Darwine can't handle anything more complex than Minesweeper; half the installers I try don't run, and what does install never works. One error I saw in the WINE log said "JPEG support not builtin". Just loooovely.
Oh yeah- and if you use Mono on OSX, there's an intel-only build, but it's missing a lot of standard important libraries, and the devs have refused to release a proper build. Oh yeah- and setting up a system to actually build mono is a goddamn pain and two thirds.
Please help metamoderate.
Anyway. I have tried OS X and I just dont like it. I feel it's to dumbed down to appeal to newbies and other non-technical people.
I go to MIT. I would say that fully half, maybe more, of the computers used by professors and students here are Macs.
And obviously, these are not hippie artists or non-technical people. They are scientists, engineers, Nobel-prize winning physicists. Hell, a few weeks ago, we had Gilad Bracha (the guy at Sun responsible for maintaining Java) give a guest lecture. He presented the slides with a PowerBook.
That should tell you something. These are some of the smartest people in the world - they're not buying the Macs for the pretty colors. My friends tell me the situation is the same at other technical colleges.
Did you ever open up the command line? If you expanded it to fill the screen, you could pretend you were running Linux. Hell, you can even run KDE under Mac OS X if you wanted to. Unless you're tinkering with the OS, there are very few things you can do in Linux that you can't do in OS X.
But the beauty of OS X is, you don't have to deal with all the hassles of Linux. With OS X, every feature of the OS just works, leaving you with more time to get actual work done, instead of fighting to configure some new software you installed, or resolve a dependency problem.
Also, Linux on laptops sucks. Power management support, fan control, wireless network support, sleep support, bluetooth, manufacturer-specific keys, none of those work. It may be possible, but it isn't pleasant.
You have to love the responses to this.
Type A: Woo who! Apple is going to the moon, and taking over the PC market. Brilliant... (stock market in this camp as well).
Type B: Apple just doomed themselves, OSX will die now...
Hmmm. Perhaps the truth lies somewhere in between? Which do I think it is closer?
First off, The vast majority will never dual boot. So this will not create a mass movement one way or the other. (A much bigger impact will be the virtualization program announced.
The only real impact will be those potential switchers who didn't want to abandon windows. A safety net. And the bet is that once they switch they will be doing more and more mac and less and less windows. So a small net win. I put myself in this camp.
Negative possabilities: Game devs will drop mac since they can dual boot. Well most people won't dual boot, I think they will simply watch sales of mac games. If Macs pick up market share, someone will want to exploit that with native games.
So I think this is a net positive, just not on the scale most think. This is of interest to me, but I am a small part of the market. Now where is is my Conroe Mac?
Is it really that surprising? When I was last upgrading my laptop (which is my main machine at home), I very nearly went for a Mac. The main thing that made me shy away from that was that one application (a decent design/admin GUI for PostgreSQL) that I use quite a lot was not available, nor were there any decent alternatives to it, on the Mac. Had I been able to boot into Windows to use that one tool (or even better, used it under emulation/virtualisation while still in MacOS), I would almost certainly have ended up with a Mac.