Submitted by The web was abuzz the last few days because of a set of photos on Flickr that allegedly showed the progress of Windows XP being installed on an Intel iMac. Many questioned the photos’ authenticity, but it now appears they might have been real after all. A person by the name of ‘narf2006’ has been hacking away for weeks, and the organizer of the WinXP on Mac contest has taken down the forum on which one had to post the proof and instructions.
*Sigh* Now all the comments of Digg and Slashdot are going to get repeated here.
= Yes, there is a valid reason for this
= No, Macs are not shit
= No, Windows is not shit
= No, the Apple fanbois are not mad
= No, the windows fanbois are not jealous
= No, you don’t buy a Mac just to put windows on it, there’s more to it than that
= Yes, games do matter actually.
= No, this is not pointless; again.
You are forgetting one:
= The guy who says “Now all the comments of Digg and Slashdot are going to get repeated here.”
The trolls will definitely be out though, even OSNews has them. I can’t quite understand why people don’t see how this (XP on Macintel) is useful; granted it might not be useful to them, per se, but some people just have to use Windows sometimes, whether they like it or not; and carrying one laptop, sure beats carrying two. OSX is much better for the daily non-work stuff (if your work is Windows-centric). And not forgetting gaming on Windows of course.
edit: “on windows”
Edited 2006-03-14 19:01
Not really. See the organizers blog at: http://www.pintmaster.com/wordpress/
the page is back up: http://www.winxponmac.com
no changes…?!
edit: ok, the forums are STILL down though.
Edited 2006-03-14 19:29
Nobody’s pointed out yet that even assuming these photo’s are legitemate and you can boot XP on Intel Macs that there is still another phase to be satisfied. Noboy’s created a boot menu for easy switching between Mac OS X and Windows XP on the Intel Mac.
I remember reading that either Grub or Lilo already had EFI support, in which case all it would take is a boot CD that would find all the partitions, determine which is OS X and which is Windows and install the bootloader with the correct configuration. I wouldn’t be surprised if after the first few releases it was even skinned in such a way as to look like it belongs in there.
You are correct, GRUB has EFI support.
This is going to remind me of the BeOS days, except I’ll be booting OS X to do “real work” and XP to play games instead of BeOS and Win98…
– chrish
I really would like to replace my Dell laptop with an Apple one, but I need to be able to do my business work. All of that is on Windows, not OSX. Having to boot into Windows for work sessions and then back into OSX for personal ones would be fine. Better still would be running the two somewhat simultaneously where you hibernate one operating system or the other for fast switching between the two. I’m looking forward to dual boot. This way I can have a Mac at home and at work.
I have been a big fan and user of Crossover Office on Linux for a while. Now that OS X is running on Intel Chips, Codeweavers is getting ready to launch Crossover Office for OSX. I have been contacted to be in thier Beta program.
What this means for business is that you can run a number of Windows office apps natively (more or less) in OS X.
http://www.codeweavers.com to check out the list of apps that run. This could make switching to Macs a viable alternative for some functions in some businesses.
Windows Office apps already run natively in Mac OS X.
http://www.microsoft.com/mac/
So, I’m curious, why would you need/want to run MS Office for windows through crossover office when the native applications are already there for OS X?
Also, looking through the list of apps, I didn’t see anything that didn’t either (A) already have a Mac OS X native app, or (B) have an OS X alternative in existence that was as good.
Yes, I can see its use for *nix, but I don’t think the market is there for OS X.
Why use Crossover Office? MS Office for Mac is hindered because it is missing one tiny little app… Access. I would love to be able to use my Mac all the time, but beings how my office is almost completely run off of Access it is hard to migrate completely so I end up having to have atleast two different computers if I want to do any work from home instead of working all late and crap all the time.
Sure, on the other hand OSX has already an application that is more stable than access when using large databases : TextEdit…
Why would I run Windows on a Mac? What a stupid idea and all the buzz on this website about it is getting old fast.
Don’t say “because we can” or cr*p about technical challenges.
Look, if someone spends thousands of $’s on a Mac why waste it by running Windows on it.
Windows runs perfectly on PC hardware.
By the same token I wouldn;t try running OS X on a PC.
Now vmware, that’s a different matter……..
There’s an easy answer. Consolidation.
Buy a nice new shiny mac box if that’s your deal, chuck out that moldy oldy hp, and dual boot windows.
You get to keep your existing apps for whatever use they serve for you, and get an update to a much better OS.
“Why would I run Windows on a Mac?”
The question is, what is a Mac? Why would I not run Windows on any old x86? Why not?
Why would I run Windows on a Mac?
Why would anyone care whether or not you are interested in running Windows on a Mac? And really, why would someone not run Windows on a Mac? Aside from the tiresome anything-but-Microsoft kiddies who find the idea somehow offensive, that is.
The answer is even easier than that:
Counterstrike Source.
W00t!
All your macboot are belong to the penguin. 🙂
I plan to have a machine that boots 5 OSes.
1.Windows XP
2.Mac OS X
3.Windows Vista (if it can be hacked to run like XP was)
4.Ubuntu Linux
5.A Linux distribution with KDE.
I’m not keeping my hopes up,but I hope this will soon be possible.
4.Ubuntu Linux
5.A Linux distribution with KDE.
You might use one linux distro with more desktop environments or window managers.
perhaps kubuntu?
er… desktop environment != distro…
It’s already possible.
you can run osx on any pc with ss2 or ss3 support you know , it’s not legal or working supergood though..but still possible!
Exactly.
http://www.vimeo.com/clip=54706
If you ever used Windows XP, you should know what boot screen looks like… What a bad made fake
well that video took away a lot of the doubt i had. the responsivness of XP on there was just too fast for it to be in VPC. doesn’t he have to have the dual-boot option at startup to win the prize though? i didn’t see that in the clip.
Maybe that’s yet to be added, still a week to go until the deadline. Or possibly you hold down the Option Key and select which partition to boot to? (as you can with PPC Macs)
http://youtube.com/watch?v=YfbvrrlZlnM
For 1 simple reason. Boot screen is wrong ! It is now a white background with a windows logo, but a black background and a windows logo on boot time.
And the strange point is that the video is blurry for showing interesting part : back of iMac, panel in windows.
So, next, please ?
This may in fact be a fake, but there is a bit more to getting windows to run on a mac than just bootstrapping the OS and faking some BIOS calls. One also has to deal with the fact that the Mac boot time video is not the same as Windows (the processor might not even run in the necessary Real Mode during bootup), so they’d also have to write some sort of video driver to make it work. Probably they don’t have that yet, so they substituted a white logo screen for the startup video. BSODs probably don’t work either in this setup. I wonder if they were able to get the kernel debugger working.