No EFI Support for Vista

DietFluffy writes "Microsoft revealed today that it will not support EFI booting for Windows Vista on its launch. The news will be a shock for owners of Intel Macs who had hoped they would be able to dual-boot between Windows Vista and OS X. Intel Macs only support booting via EFI."

Wrath of the Windows Users!

[Aokubidaikon]

"If you won't let us boot yours, we're not gonna let you boot ours either! Hehehe!"

Leader of the pack, not

[liangzai]

Well, Microsoft has always been a slow adapter of everything. USB was late, even a GUI came late. There is still support for floppy disks... no surprise here.

This is good. I don't want to see Macs contaminated with 10 GB of installed rubbish.

MS Removing features, again...

[laptop006]

"Although Microsoft has previously said EFI booting would be supported by Vista, Ritz admitted that EFI support won't be seen in any version of Windows until the release of Longhorn Server."

Great, yet another vista feature removed before released.

Re:MS Removing features, again...

[Zadaz]

Great, yet another vista feature removed before released.

Better than being removed after release.

Re:Stupid Question But...

[AntiDragon]

Simple really - because OS X is still lacking in certain software.
The OS is great. Really. The hardware is a bit overpriced, yes but let's face it, it *is* oh so desirable!

But there is still a ton of software out there that doesn't come in OS X flavour. Notably games.

And to get the absolute maximum performance for Windows games, you'd want to dual-boot, not use some VMware system. ...Hang on...Did I just use the words "performance" and "windows" in the same sentence? I need more sleep....

Re:Wrath of the Windows Users!

[Anonymous Coward]

So what you're saying is that Microsoft wants Apple to let all those PC owners running Windows to buy and use OS X instead? Somebody mod this idiot down. That's not funny, it's stupid.

Will there be mouse support in Vista?

[erroneus]

I'm really worried now! It seems like almost every feature boasted in Vista has been pulled. Database filesystem and all that? What will be left that isn't essentially Windows XP with a much larger greed for memory and other hardware requirements?

Re:WTF is EFI?

[RipTides9x]

Yeah I actually had to read half the article to find that out. There goes my slashdot credibility.

Re:Wrath of the Windows Users!

[Anonymous Coward]

Please take off your four-colored-waving glasses and see the humor in this post. He says nothing of what you are implying...

Re:Will there be mouse support in Vista?

[cortana]

The ability to run Halo 2?

Re:Will there be mouse support in Vista?

[Vo0k]

Basic mouse support will be added in Service Pack 1. Mouse buttons will be supported in SP2 scheduled for 2012. For now you can use the beta version of keyboard interface or stable punchcard input.

For now the problems to be solved is authenticating the mice with the system as a part of increased security, so that no mice from unreliable vendors would be installable. In case of a 3rd party non-approved mouse your system and house will be remotely locked down and the whole block napalmed under the rules of DMCA and Patriot act. So far the system is being beta-tested to remove all false positives, the bugs hindered progress but opened career positions in Microsoft for many new brave beta-testers.

Re:Will there be mouse support in Vista?

[Anonymous Coward]

Don't say that Vista will have no features -- it *will* have through-and-through DRM. That's one feature that Microsoft will not drop.

Re:Wrath of the Windows Users!

[stunt_penguin]

Yea but what I don' get it what booting has to do with Electronic Fuel Injection.. WAIT A MINUTE....!

Horrors.

[Chris Pimlott]

The news will be a shock for owners of Intel Macs who had hoped they would be able to dual-boot between Windows Vista and OS X. Intel Macs only support booting via EFI."

Neither of them was available for comment.

Re:Dual-Booting Can Go Take A Freaking Hike

[shmlco]

"XP running under VMWare in Linux on an Intel iMac..."

Wow. Are they sure they can't get DOS and OS/2 involved in that process somehow?

Re:Leader of the pack, not

[Ruphuz]

I used to leave a 150 MB FAT16 partition on my HD to store data for flashing the BIOS

You must have one hell of a BIOS.

Re:WTF is EFI?

[nfk]

For the same people, BN is 'Billion', LUT is 'Lookup Table' and DONT is 'Disturbing Opponents' No Trump' (it doesn't have the apostrophe though).

Re:Windows XP boots on MacBook Pro

[MemoryDragon]

sorry here is the link http://www.mathcaddy.com/windowsxpbootsonamac!!!!1 / [mathcaddy.com]

Windows XP boots on A Macbook Pro!

[Anonymous Coward]

Windows XP boots on A Macbook Pro! [mathcaddy.com] Apparently it wasn't so hard really.

Re:Chicken and the Egg?

[afaik_ianal]

It pizzez yo off too, doez it?

Re:Will there be mouse support in Vista?

[duncangough]

It's going to get much worse, I'm afraid. That's right, they're removing Solitaire [suttree.com] too.

Vista not to natively support protected mode

[Jesus_666]

Redmond - In a surprising turn of events Microsoft held a press conference yesterday stating that Windows Vista will not support the 32 bit mode of Intel 80386 and compatible processors. When asked about why this feature was left out from the release lead coder Alfred E. Newman replied: "We felt that 32 bit support was just not ready for Vista. The NT line of operating systems is still too cutting-edge to be used in the productivity powerhouse that Vista is going to be." Instead, Microsoft will deploy a new version of MS-DOS as the operating system's foundation. The new DOS, called "MS-DOS 2006" will feature improved support for TSRs and the capability of automatically loading supporting programs directly into extended memory, allowing it to have all 640 kilobyte of conventional memory ready for applications that depend on it.
Microsoft promised that all other proposed Vista features (except for those already canceled) will "have a chance of making it into Vista". When asked about whether customers coud be expected to put up with Vista's proposed 480 installation floppies Newman replied: "What, me worry?"

The new decision was universally met with conetempt within the Apple world. "They think that pushing the MS-DOS version number from 7 to 2007 is a big step," Random MacGeek from AppleRumorsUpYourButt.com commented, "but we clearly had the biggest version number jump when Bungie went from Marathon 2 to Marathon: Infinity. Microsoft is late to the game, as always."
When asked about the topic of Microsoft being late to the game Apple replied: "It's true! Microsoft promides to buy me and GNU here a beer at the game. Now it's halfway over and Microsoft is nowhere to be seen!" "We're not going to invite Microsoft to the next game," GNU added, "we have better things to do with our time than to spend it waiting for some guy from Redmond."

Re:Leader of the pack, not

[Anonymous Coward]

whoosh! the joke went over your head

Re:Dual-Booting Can Go Take A Freaking Hike

[jonadab]

> > "XP running under VMWare in Linux on an Intel iMac..."
> Wow. Are they sure they can't get DOS and OS/2 involved in that process somehow?

Sure, no problem. All you need to make that work is an EFI-emulator written in Java; there's already an x86 emulator written in Java, so then we hook that up together with the EFI emulator and basically what we have then is an Intel-Mac emulator, which runs on the JVM. The JVM is available for OS/2, so we'll have XP running under VMWare in Linux on an emulated Intel iMac running on the JVM under OS/2, running in VirtualPC on OS X, which is running on PearPC under FreeBSD, which is running under bochs on DOS in domain2 on Xen. That'll be much faster and more convenient than dual-booting, since at least three of those emulation layers promise near-native execution speeds.

HTH.HAND.

Re:One little error.

[Quarters]

I hope you weren't implying that Slashdot posters are pendantic.....oh, wait, you were.

Re:Bios Work.

[Nosklo]

My thoughts too. There is a Linux BIOS project. Could something be written that makes EFI boot into a Linux BIOS which then allows Vista to be booted?

[chrisp.de]

That would be the biggest boot salad [pascal.com] ever seen!

I mean, Real ROM -> EFI [journalspace.com] -> rEFIt [chrisp.de] -> eLILO [sourceforge.net] -> Linux BIOS [linuxbios.org] -> Vista [microsoft.com]!!!

Re:Wrath of the Windows Users!

[Jerom]

Yes, but only in Simon Garlick land are Ipod MP3-PLAYERs not hardware. :P

J.

Re:Will there be mouse support in Vista?

[noidentity]

"What will be left that isn't essentially Windows XP with a much larger greed for memory and other hardware requirements?"

Look on the bright side; you can be sure they won't remove those features.

Re:Will there be mouse support in Vista?

[martin-boundary]

Sorry to disappoint you comma the mouse has been deprecated in capital Vista dot There's only voice commands now dot end comment close no not the browser not the BROWSER I said ah it's back wait now there's two damn computer no don't load damn.com start START START!

Re:One little error.

[_xeno_]

I hope you weren't implying that Slashdot posters are pendantic.....oh, wait, you were.

And, on that note, it's "pedantic." I know, because the last time I misspelled it "pendantic" on Slashdot, I had a good five or six replies correcting me...

why not just abstract out the computer?

[CdBee]

start linux, start vmware in linux, start XP, start vmware in XP, start linux on vmware on xp on vmware on linux, then you can unplug the iMac and carry it off leaving the operating syatems hanging in mid-air in an endlessly self-supporting loop.

Re:Wrath of the Windows Users!

[ceeam]

No. Realdoll (www.realdoll.com) is a fucking toy company.

Re:Wrath of the Windows Users!

[Anonymous Coward]

He said Windows users. As a Windows user I'd rather OSX booted on my machine than the opposite. I don't want to buy Apple's proprietary, overpriced hardware.

That said I was involved in no conspiracy to prevent Vista from booting on Intel Macs. I suspect the reason is Apple not wanting to support a bunch of their users who they've coddled to the point of incompetance trying to install Vista on their machines and completely blowing it up. That's a call MS should rightfully be answering. Would you want to take that call? "I put vista in the coffee cup holder and the sad face is on the screen. Did I buy the wrong color?"

Re:Wrath of the Windows Users!

[AdamWeeden]

If iPod + iTunes is a solution, I don't want to know what the problem was.

Re:Wrath of the Windows Users!

[klubar]

Thus you could turn your mac into a really expensive PC.

Step 1: Buy a mac
Step 2: Buy emulation software
Step 3: Buy an MS operating system
Step 4: Buy applications to run on th MS OS
Step 5: Enjoy the good looks and positive karma of your new mac

Re:One little error.

[dbguy]

I hope you weren't implying that Slashdot posters are pendantic.....

Actually, most Slashdot posters are pendantic, since the majority of them (us?) are male. No doubt there are some females posters are moderately pendant themselves.

Re:One little error.

[Hal_Porter]

Hmm, 'pendantic'. Utter genius.

We really need a +1 Troll mod category.