Apple Officially Releases Beta Dual Boot Loader 909
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."
Re:Doh! (Score:3, Interesting)
it's from iGod, it HAS to be good ;) (Score:3, Interesting)
"hey, genius, I can run Windows under two layers of emulation faster than your freakin' routine runs native. optimize or die! I got Pagemaker running without panics and you don't!"
so since there are enterprising uber-nerds with vista alphas running on the Intel macs now, Apple probably figured it was time to protect their kernel and boot loader from hacks and put their own flexible one out.
Say Goodbye To The Mac Software Market... (Score:0, Interesting)
With massive numbers of Mac developers not wanting to or not being able to put out OS X x86 versions of their product/software and now they can just support their entire user base with a single Windows version...
Whoops!
Hope you like Apple i-apps and shareware...
Front Line Report (Score:5, Interesting)
I pay for OS X, because it's relatively suck-free. Windows installs grow on trees.
Why would I ditch OS X? If I wanted a free system I'd go back to Linux.
Think of OS/2 (Score:1, Interesting)
designed for Windows Vista (Score:1, Interesting)
Here's my hypothesis: I think that iTunes/iPod has become more important to Apple (it's their cash cow now) than the Mac line - i think that they believe that they can sell more of their computers with Windows.... and then pre-install iTunes and reach a larger audience for their music store. That's what i'm betting on.
Re:Legally Multiboot? (Score:2, Interesting)
Somehow I think if ATI, Nvidia, etc were going to use the DMCA to attack platforms with "unofficial" drivers, they'd have done it long ago with Linux.
I wasn't implying that other companies would attack unofficial drivers. I agree with you, there's clearly no interest on their part. But that wasn't the question - whether or not those companies would choose to pursue legal action doesn't define the legality of the software.
Not to mention the rather flaky assumption that the drivers included in this package are in any way "unofficial" - I mean, how "unofficial" can drivers *provided by the hardware vendor* be ?
I never made such an assumption. Again, I'm contrasting the "official" release by Apple with "unofficial" ones created by third parties not associated with any of the hardware involved. That's what the original poster was asking about.
Re:Legally Multiboot? (Score:4, Interesting)
End of Mac OS X ports (Score:1, Interesting)
In a lab setting... (Score:3, Interesting)
My own situation: I'm a faculty member with both research and teaching labs in computer security, where we often muck about with various settings and try different combinations of machines on a network. If I could have one piece of hardware which would boot (without fighting with it too much) Mac OS X, different Windows flavors, Linux, the BSD's, and Solaris x86, that would be fantastic. Right now I have separate (and seriously aging) hardware for Apple stuff. Stick a 300 gig drive on that baby and have a bunch of partitions.... hmmmm...
When it's time for a lab upgrade, this will be something I have to look at very seriously. The "official blessing" does mean something to me -- I wouldn't want to invest in 15 machines for a lab and then have Apple come back later and throw in incompatibilities because they decide they don't like the unofficial multiboot solutions (think about what they've done with the iPod and Real as far as incompatibilities).
Now if that hardware would just support virtualization (Xen or something) to make this even easier, I'd be one seriously happy camper.
Re:What will Mac developers think about this? (Score:5, Interesting)
Now with a virtualization solution, Apple would really be in trouble. OS/2 trouble, that is. People switching mac-win-mac all the time really removes any incentive to port an app to the mac.
Well, we'll see...
This just in ... (Score:3, Interesting)
How's that for some great numbers ???
Re:Linux? (Score:3, Interesting)
But what would be the advantage of running Linux vs. the BSD-based MacOS X?
"More stable"? I thought that's what MacOS X was famous for. "Nicer interface"? Same response.
I can understand how someone might want to escape Windows for Linux, but I don't understand craving that Linux experience when you have a Mac.
EDUCATION MARKET (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:What will Mac developers think about this? (Score:1, Interesting)
The fact is, serious Mac developers generally make very good money. You forget that as the
Finally, anyone that thinks that the "holdouts" will eventually be forced to install Windows to run software on their Mac is smoking something that's not legal in my state. How many times has Apple been declared "dead" before? The soul of the Mac is the OS, and frankly, no Mac user I know has any desire to go back to Windows. Running Windows about compatibility, not superiority or permanency.
Of course, I could be wrong. I mean, the WWDC is never quite as exhiliarating as a sweaty Ballmer galloping around the stage pumping up developers....
Look... (Score:5, Interesting)
That I can use my Mac to boot natively into XP to use that app is a huge win; I don't need to keep a POS Dell around just for that one app on Windows. Plus, assuming the MacBook is built like my PowerBook, it'll work for me for years as a war horse that can take the punishment I have inflicted on it (hello round-the-world photo shoot, using the PB as my darkroom and portfolio case)
Remember, Apple is a hardware company...they make real stuff that comes in padded boxes. That they can make both kick-ass hardware, *and* a kick-ass operating system doesn't change the fact that, rightly or wrongly, Windows and Dell are still the kings of the hill. Apple has saved me from having to buy a new PC *and* a new copy of Windows with it. That's less money for Microsoft and Dell, and more for Apple (when I get my MacBook).
Seems like a pretty smart move to me.
Security vendors could take advantage of this (Score:3, Interesting)
Great news for MS and death of Mac Office (Score:3, Interesting)
And why should MS continue to develop Mac Office? For $125 (student/teacher) you can buy the Windows OS and then run the PC version of Office. The same is true for all the other "fringe" software; just add $200 to cost and bundle it with the Windows OS, then every software vendor can claim Mac compatibility.
In the end this will just increase MS share of the OS market and decrease the availability of Mac OS software.
Re:and when (Score:3, Interesting)
Exactly, and at their price-points, they are making out like bandits.
I wonder if what happened was that they saw a big boost in sales after the news broke of the "unofficial way" to run XP on Intel based Macs. Their strategy could have easily been to hold off on this until someone else proofed that there's value in it.
No it won't (Score:2, Interesting)
If Mac marketshare does grow substantially, perhaps in part as a result of this new capability, then the incentive to produce Mac-native versions of games will increase, not decrease. You don't buy an Intel Mac because you want to run Windows on it. You buy one because you want to run Mac OS X on it, but you may also like being able to run Windows as needed. The less needed, the better.
Re:Few Quick Notes (Score:2, Interesting)
I use both quite regularly, and I can't think of a single thing Finder does better than Explorer (and very few it even manages to do as well as Explorer). I can however, think of several things Explorer does *significantly* better than Finder.
Vista? (and Oblivion) (Score:2, Interesting)
I want to hear reports of performance! How well does Oblivion run on the MAC?!?
Official Dual Boot Linux ? (Score:1, Interesting)
Great slogan:
"The only computer with 3 different worlds built-in"
What do you all think?
Re:Wow, this is incredible (Score:0, Interesting)
Still, under the hood, major areas of the OS have been overhauled, from the entire GUI (be it the bare metal compositing engine, or the high-level interfaces that bare little resemblance to the original Explorer), so it's hardly "SP4".
Do what all again? You're proposing they're considering rewriting Vista? In nine months? You're talking about OS X, which was originally shipped four years late and totally unusable (the OS didn't become usable until 10.2, in 2003)? Sure, there's been incremental updates, but the difference between, say, Jaguar and Tiger, while nice, isn't that radical. There's been a few tweaks, not wholesale rewrites, just tweaks, of the compositing engines, but by and large it's the same OS with a few nice features bolted on.What vendor actually ships updates on schedule? Apple doesn't. Apple never released Copland. They were about to come out with Rhapsody and then withdrew the system, releasing only a crude "We're avoiding promoting this because we don't want anyone to use it" version in 1999 (Mac OS X Server 1.0); for the most part they don't even announce schedules any more because they can't keep to them, and they're secretive about what, exactly, is supposed to be in them. The only major difference between Apple and Microsoft here is that Microsoft at least tries to be informative.
Copland was cancelled. "Longhorn" is being delayed by two months. How is that worse? Sure. They should license a completely incompatable operating system that's not for sale in the first place, and whose developer is, by all accounts, keen on phasing it out because they want to switch to the supposedly "Copland" like Vista. Right. Yeah, that makes sense.Amazing what two months delay for Vista can do for the reasoning ability of Apple apologists.
Re:Linux? (Score:3, Interesting)
If you're running a specific application that requires the performance boost, then you ought to be running it on a machine that that runs the best environment. Unless, I suppose, you're running an app that you only need occasionally.
Re:and when (Score:3, Interesting)
The only real potential downside I see is that app writers get one more excuse not to write Mac apps, but to be honest, I don't see a substantial shift in that from today; views are already well entrenched.
As one of those app writers, I will say that once you get over the learning curve of Obj-C/Cocoa -- you will not want to return to the land of ugliness that is associated with the older APIs.
Even with C#, I'm bothered that the Development System just writes a lot of template code for you, rather than having true separation of the visual elements from the code.
In the last few days (Score:3, Interesting)
captive NTFS (Score:4, Interesting)
Re:Few Quick Notes (Score:2, Interesting)
filesystem = virus buffer (Score:2, Interesting)
Re:filesystem = virus buffer (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:Linux? (Score:3, Interesting)
For the sake of argument. . .
I have a Pismo. upgraded with a 900 MHz G3 and a 40 gig drive, which dual boots 10.4.6 and Ubuntu Breezy running Gnome. I actually find 10.4.6 to be a little quicker than Ubuntu in some areas (web browsing) and much faster in other areas (Ubuntu's Samba is borked, which limits it to 10BaseT for transfers, while transferring between two OS X systems us much faster). Now, I am by no means a Linux expert, so there may be optimizations of which I am not aware which could increase Ubuntu's performance. However, for stock, off-the-CD installs, I find OS X to be as fast or faster.
Beyond this, there are other issues. When Ubuntu installed, it didn't support direct rendering to the Pismo's graphics card. I had to google around and find out how to enable this, as well as double buffering and Xft. Last night I had to spend half an hour in the Terminal to get DeerPark to work on the machine. I am finding other problems, too: I have yet to find a way to monitor CPU temp in an application like conky [sourceforge.net], because there doesn't seem to be support for the Key West bus yet. Etc.
My point here is not to bash Linux, because I am enjoying the learning. But to enter into the argument, But what would be the advantage of running Linux vs. the BSD-based MacOS X. . . one answer is that OS X works out of the box in ways Ubuntu doesn't. This obviously isn't a concern of yours, but I think it's what matter to most computer users, who are somewhere between partially and completely clueless. My brother, who gets along in OS X, would be lost in Linux. So, while someone with your needs obviously gains little from running OS X, I think the average computer user gains a lot from OS X.
"We don't support MacOS X -Please install Windows" (Score:5, Interesting)
Well, now vendors are just going to tell these people "Please install Windows" and they won't feel guilty about it. After all the users don't have to throw anything away and are actually ADDING something to their system. And if they could afford that expensive Mac then they surly can afford a copy of Microsoft Windows. And with Apple fully supporting this now there is no excuse to defend against having to install Windows.
I hear all the folks that think this is cool because now they can run all of their Windows only games - but they should have been demanding that companies port to MacOS X. Now they will likely never see another game for MacOS X again now that they can be expected to "Just install Windows".
And I don't even want to think how this will affect the Web now that Macs can run that old obsolete piece of trash IE browser that so many moron web designers seem to expect people to have. "You want to browse our site using a Mac? Please install Windows and use IE 6!"
Are you insane? I am buying a MacBook Pro now! (Score:3, Interesting)
I want to use OSX, almost desperately, but there are key applications that haven't been ported "YET".
I will now buy a Mac OSX, use it in all its glory, and dump into XP when I need a few critical applications, then quick boot back into OSX!
All I can say is Wooo-f*ckin-hoo! I'm a happy man.
Re:Doh! (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:Linux? (Score:3, Interesting)
I totally agree. I still advise friends to try Apple computers (PLEASE! PLEASE! I'M so sick to death of helping them with their Windows machines!!)
But I no longer have quite the confidence in Apple (and maybe it is particularly in Steve) that I did for a while there.
The term "roadmap" gets used a lot as an explanation for why they suddenly switched to Intel. But everyone knows that Intel's roadmap has been a work of science fiction for several years. It is a marketing document, not a planning document. Like Microsoft did (and still does) for years, the idea is to scare off competition by saying "See what WE are going to be doing next year! You can't possibly keep up with us!" But AMD HAS kept up, and passed them in every area, while at the same time cutting costs.
What, in fact, Apple lacks is a road map of their own. Apple users don't have a clue what Apple might do next, which is why there are so many rumors and rumor sites about them. Just yesterday I read a long long article about why Apple hasn't penetrated the business market. The article had it all wrong in my opinion with which I can save you a lot of reading: Businesses like certainty. If they can't know everything about what you are planning they at least like to have a general idea, and with Apple that simply isn't the case.
The switch to Intel make zero sense, nada, zip, zilch, unless you start coming up (as some have) with really far-fetched notions such as Apple abandoning OS X or Hardware, or both. Besides, I think the cell based PowerPC processors that are the guts of the new Xbox and Playstation systems are fascinating. They have low power potential, multiprocessor potential, they are used in ruggedized military equipment, are the heart of some of the new supercomputers being built, and on and on. There is nothing bold and daring about the switch to Intel. Just the opposite, it is a capitulation to Windows: "We can never get the driver-writers on-board, so lets just look so much like Windows that Windows drivers will work for OS X". You can bet that's where this road is leading you, and the next step will be running Windows APs under OS X, and the next step after that is "Oh heck, Windows isn't that bad after all, lets just run Windows." Been there, done that with OS/2 and I ain't gonna go there again.
Read what Microsoft says about malware:
http://www.eweek.com/article2/0,1895,1945808,00.as p [eweek.com]
Essentially: Be prepared to re-frmat and re-install as often as something sneaks through.
And I think that is what Apple users are in store for in the long run. But as long as OS X is around (I'm not making any bets) it certainly IS an easier OS to use than Windows or Linux, I'm just not so sure it will remain as stable and virus-free as it is today for every long.
With regard to your Ubuntu test, after running Debian on my iBook for a couple of years I decided to try a recent PPC version of Ubuntu as well. Since I was familiar with Debian (and Ubuntu is based on Debian) I figured I'd have no trouble with it at all. But I hated it. It WAS slow. I have no idea why. At one point I put a normal DVD in there to see if it would play it (it didn't) and the machine practically ground to a halt. It was doing disk I/O like crazy with no feedback to me about what it was doing. Long after I had removed the DVD and gone on to other things the machine was mostly useless, being preoccupied with something other than me. After only a few hours I concluded that Ubuntu wasn't doing anything for me that I didn't already have with my Debian install, so I went back to Debian where there seems to be much less mysterious behavior.
I DO expect Ubuntu to continue to improve though (I think the PPC version is relatively new) and end-user improvements made in
Re:Get your Linux on... (Score:3, Interesting)
Lets you point the NT bootloader at a Linux partition.
I suspect, however, that if Boot Camp uses a bog-standard BIOS compatibility module for EFI, Linux will just work, except for the ATI RADEON x1600 drivers, which don't exist yet.
I'll try it out soon
Re:Nope. (Score:3, Interesting)
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.
Not as bad as you think, though. I have an Intel iMac, and I was able to download and install the Boot Camp beta. Yes, it really is easy. Clearly, it provides an emulated BIOS for the hosted operating system. They intend for you to install Windows XP SP2 in here, but there's no reason you can't install something else.
Like FreeDOS, [freedos.org] for example. No, that's not a faked photograph - it really is FreeDOS booted natively on an iMac!
Linux will run just happily under Boot Camp, too. At least, I booted the Fedora Core 5 installer, and it went into graphics mode ("vesa") just fine. I can provide another cell phone photo on that, if you need it. I intend to burn a single-disc DVD installer for FC5, and install on the 5GB space I carved out for myself. I'll definitely post photos to my web site [umn.edu] when I've done it.
Colour matching (Score:2, Interesting)
Even if you're just creating web graphics, having a properly calibrated monitor puts you more or less in the middle of the pack, reducing the number of people who will, through badly calibrated systems, see something that looks like ass... unless you're in the porn biz.
Booting into Windows locks you into the Windows colour management system, so the whole point of running Adobe on Mac hardware is negated.
Got It Backwards... (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:filesystem = virus buffer (Score:2, Interesting)