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Apple Officially Releases Beta Dual Boot Loader More Login

Apple Officially Releases Beta Dual Boot Loader

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  • Wow, this is incredible (Score:5, Informative)

    by daveschroeder (516195) * writes:
    But, some notes:

    - Even the existing onmac.net/ [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 ins
    • Re:Wow, this is incredible (Score:5, Insightful)

      by mccalli (323026) writes: on Wednesday April 05 2006, @08:46AM (#15065802) Homepage
      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 [macrumors.com]?

      In my opinion, the existance of this tool only strengthens the rumour. If you're going to run a virtual Windows, you still need to have an actual installation of it lying around somewhere. Windows won't run from an HFS+ drive, it will need its own NTFS set-up somewhere - this tool will let you create such a set-up, ready to be dual-booted today and virtualised tomorrow.

      Cheers,
      Ian

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      • Re:Wow, this is incredible (Score:2)

        by daveschroeder (516195) * writes:
        Desktop virtualization solutions have the ability to use a file on the host as the virtual disk; I see no reason why any possible virtualization solution from Apple would be any different.
        • Re:Wow, this is incredible (Score:2)

          by Mark Imbriaco (133740) writes:
          Sure, but it could also support real partitions instead of using a file-based virtual disk. Using the actual drive instead of the file-based virtual disk is far more performant.

          I agree with the previous poster, this looks like a slam dunk lead-in for the later Apple virtualization. Bring it on!
          • Re:Wow, this is incredible (Score:1)

            by EXMSFT (935404) writes:
            1. Performant isn't a word. Even though many of my former co-workers liked to use it as one.
            2. Virtualizing the device - unless REALLY poorly written - should not have a deleterious effect on performance. Unless it is read from an entirely different spindle, it's still competing for I/O with the MacOS. The ideal would be VMWare running on the MacOS with Windows from a second spindle. Or simply running WINE on the Macintel, subverting the Windows install on the other partition to gain Windows app compatibility
      • Re:Wow, this is incredible (Score:3, Informative)

        by C0vardeAn0nim0 (232451) writes:
        so, you never used vmware, did you ?

        there's something called "virtual disk", a huge file siting on top of the host OS native filesystem (HFS+, ext3, ufs, etc) that the virtual machines maps to the guest OS as an IDE/SCSI disk.

      • Re:Wow, this is incredible (Score:2)

        by Karl Cocknozzle (514413) writes:

        In my opinion, the existance of this tool only strengthens the rumour. If you're going to run a virtual Windows, you still need to have an actual installation of it lying around somewhere. Windows won't run from an HFS+ drive, it will need its own NTFS set-up somewhere - this tool will let you create such a set-up, ready to be dual-booted today and virtualised tomorrow.

        Further, even with a really good uber-virtualization scheme in Leopard there would be times you would want to boot up to XP... Such as rea

        • Re:Wow, this is incredible (Score:2)

          by flamingnight (234353) writes:
          may also be the case for the XPClassic environ... (Or whatever they call it.)

          You mean the Red Box [lowendmac.com]? It's been a rumor since the late-90s Rhapsody days. With Apple assisting on the WINE project now, it seems to be more of a reality than a rumor these days.
      • Re:Wow, this is incredible (Score:2)

        by morgan_greywolf (835522) writes:
        VMware, bochs, Xen, and QEMU can all run Windows (and other OSes) that have their filesystems stored inside an image file on the host OS. Why would any other OS virtualizer be different?
      • Re:Wow, this is incredible (Score:3, Insightful)

        by glesga_kiss (596639) writes:
        To me it looks as though Apple have been working on this for a while. The first XP boot on a mac/intel box was only a few weeks ago, right? And in that time they've done this:

        - built a drive repartitioner and tested the hell out of it. A bug here, bye bye personal documents and OS.

        - added a bootloader keyboard hook and a system for specifying multiple bootloaders. (may have already existed?)

        - compiled a complete set of XP drivers for the hardware

        - writen an installer application to take you through

        • Re:Wow, this is incredible (Score:2)

          by Aneurysm9 (723000) writes:
          built a drive repartitioner and tested the hell out of it. A bug here, bye bye personal documents and OS.

          They obviously didn't test it well enough. Windows install when great, ran fine, when I tried to boot into OS X again, poof, nothing. Corrupted the HFS+ partition. DiskUtility couldn't repair it. On the bright side, it's my first mac and I've only had it 6 days so no accumulation of settings and data that couldn't easily be replaced.

        • Re:Wow, this is incredible (Score:1)

          by Government Drone (631596) writes:
          I suspect that this has actually been in development for quite a while as some nighttime/hobby project of one or more programmers at Apple that got "outed" somehow, & then became an official project. Kind of like the Graphing Calculator [pacifict.com] of the original PowerPC Macs...