http://www.osnews.com/story/20725/Review_EFI-X Exploring the Future of Computing en-us Copyright 2001-2009, David Adams adam+nospam@osnews.com Sun, 08 Nov 2009 23:21:11 GMT http://www.osnews.com/images/osnews.gif http://www.osnews.com http://osnews.com/thread?342439 http://osnews.com/thread?342439 Its an excellent review, detailed and specific and balanced. The account of the legal issues is also very good. And finally, the comments are unusually intelligent and thought provoking and balanced. The whole thing is worth a careful read.

The thing you're left wondering is whether the device itself is really necessary. It seems just to do an initial boot using EFI, and then allow the user to pick a boot device.

So, would the BOOT-KABYL-BUMBY.iso do this equally well? I don't feel interested enough to assemble the required hardware and a retail copy of OSX to try, be interesting to hear from anyone who has. That said, if you were going to buy a new machine anyway, the spec required is pretty reasonable, so it would not be a bad choice.

Their pricing comparison basically shows you get a more fit for purpose machine than the Pro, with better quality components, for around half the price. Its the kind of tradeoff any Mac buyer in an open market would make - 95% would benefit from lowering the processor spec and investing more in graphics and hard drives, and still saving money. They used the Antec 180 in the tested machine - so even the case is way better than Apple's. Tue, 06 Jan 2009 07:46:00 GMT donotreply@osnews.com (alcibiades) Comments http://osnews.com/thread?342447 http://osnews.com/thread?342447 I find this review somewhat lacking details. Except for short sentence claiming EFI-X run Linux, there is no further comments about which Linux they tested in EFI mode. Or how booting from GPT partitions with Linux works. Tue, 06 Jan 2009 10:32:00 GMT donotreply@osnews.com (zdzichu) Comments http://osnews.com/thread?342450 http://osnews.com/thread?342450 Seems to be an updated USB EHCI plugins in IOUSB extension which causes the problem. Using one from 10.5.5 could resolved it.... Tue, 06 Jan 2009 11:10:00 GMT donotreply@osnews.com (loll) Comments http://osnews.com/thread?342452 http://osnews.com/thread?342452 I've got one Efix device for a week. The thing allows you to install OSX and update it without hacks, but only if you stick with the narrow supported hardware list. There is a similar method that uses a USB stick called BOOT-132 but you need to install the correct kernel extensions for your hardware, which could be tricky (or impossible) to find. The only difficult thing that efix makes you to do is to configure the motherboard BIOS properly. Tue, 06 Jan 2009 11:37:00 GMT donotreply@osnews.com (harlock2019) Comments http://osnews.com/thread?342502 http://osnews.com/thread?342502 The main point of this device is arguably the ability to install Mac OS X without using sharpened knitting needles and some kind of Voodoo doppleganger of your computer. To that end most reviews won't feature obscure features like Linux EFI compatibility. (Less than 10% of PC users install OS X, few of those will use EFI-X, and even fewer of those will install Linux using EFI-X)

That said it would be nice to know how well it works with Linux, what distros or more specifically what kernel configurations are required. Tue, 06 Jan 2009 19:05:00 GMT donotreply@osnews.com (DittoBox) Comments http://osnews.com/thread?342703 http://osnews.com/thread?342703 I wonder HOW is possible to boot OpenVMS on their system... Thu, 08 Jan 2009 14:07:00 GMT donotreply@osnews.com (csynt) Comments