Leigh Dyer arrives in OS heaven with a triple-booting Intel Mac.
Moving your entire product line of both hardware and software from one CPU architecture to another isn't an easy job, but given its progress so far I'd say that Apple could write the book on it. In the last few months Apple has released Intel versions of its iMac and Mac mini systems, as well as the remarkable MacBook Pro, finally answering those that criticised Apple's failure to bring a PowerBook G5 to market.
Apple's biggest surprise so far though has been Boot Camp -- the official but unsupported method of installing Windows XP on Intel-based Macs. Apple had said on several occasions that it would do nothing to prevent running alternative operating systems, but it certainly came as a surprise to me to see the company actively encouraging it. But why can't Intel Macs boot XP in the first place, and what does Boot Camp do to allow it to work?
Welcome, soldiers
Boot Camp is actually a collection of technologies. The key is in the firmware upgrades that Apple has released for each of its Intel systems. Intel Macs use the Extensible Firmware Interface (EFI), a modern, but incompatible, replacement for the age-old BIOS. Intel has been touting EFI for many years, but until now it has been seen mainly on Itanium systems.
The firmware updates add a Compatibility Support Module (CSM) to Apple's EFI that can boot non-EFI-aware operating systems. It's designed to boot XP from a local hard drive partition, or El Torito-style bootable CD like OS installers to live CDs, but in theory it should be capable of booting just about any standard PC operating system.
Along with the firmware upgrade, Mac OS X 10.4.6 includes support for safely resizing OS X (or specifically, journalled HFS+) partitions, and the Boot Camp Assistant helps you repartition and burns an XP driver CD for you.
Unsurprisingly, opinions on Boot Camp are mixed, but now that it's out there I think it's a smart move. Apple is, after all, a hardware company, and if Linux and Windows users can now buy Macs safe in the knowledge that they can use both their favourite OS and Mac OS X, or perhaps even all three, on their new machine, they may well see greater adoption in the marketplace.
I don't think we'll see any big migration of Windows users to Macs running Windows though. Intel Macs are more comparable to PCs in terms of secifications than any previous Macs, and for many Windows users, the extra cost for Apple's machines will be hard to swallow, especially when the cost of a Windows licence is added. For some users, though, Boot Camp is a dream come true -- developers and support engineers have access to a universal machine that can run Linux, Windows, and Mac OS X, all with full performance.
Linux on Intel Macs
I do have a bit of a vested interest in Apple's Intel systems because I have one myself: a 1.83GHz MacBook Pro. I've had a 1GHz Powerbook G4 for about three years now for out-of-office work, but it's looking a little dated these days and I was delighted when Apple revealed that one of their first Intel systems would be a replacement for its aging PowerBook line.
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| Linux already runs nicely on the MacBook Pro once it's installed. |
The MacBook Pro runs Linux surprisingly well, given that it has only been available for a couple of months. Having a lot of Intel hardware in there helps -- basic chipset features like USB and SATA are well supported, as is the Core Duo CPU and its Enhanced SpeedStep for frequency control. Networking is also supported, using the sky2 driver in recent kernels for the Marvell Ethernet chip, and the third-party Madwifi drivers (www.madwifi.org) for the Atheros 802.11a/b/g chip. There's even accelerated 2D/3D support for the Radeon Mobility X1600 video chip using ATI's latest drivers.
Not everything is perfect though. The on-board Intel HD Audio drivers load, but doesn't produce a sound, and ACPI doesn't seem to handle sleeping yet, though it does report the battery state. There are some minor annoyances as well, such as emulating the system's missing mouse buttons, and convincing the page up/down function keys to work.
The real show-stopper is in installation. You can boot your favourite Linux install CD easily enough using Boot Camp (just hold down option and alt at boot), but creating a bootable Linux install is no easy task, particularly if you want to triple-boot with XP. The problem lies in the rather fragile hybrid partition table needed to make XP's MBR partition table co-exist on a hard drive with the GPT partition table used by Mac OS X. The partition resizing tools that Apple added in OS X 10.4.6 can create a hybrid GPT/MBR partition table, and the EFI boot loader can chain-load a BIOS-style boot loader from the start of one of those hybrid partitions. It's a neat solution to a complex problem, but it's designed only with an XP dual-boot setup in mind.