Apple announced a public beta of Boot Camp, which helps you install Windows XP on your Intel based Apple hardware. This includes drivers for graphics, networking, audio, wireless and bluetooth.
I’ve got to get this out of my system first: This Is So Freaking Cool! Okay, I feel better now.
With Boot Camp you can dual boot between Windows XP and Mac OS X. Details are still coming out, but I’m going to guess that this contains updates to EFI to support BIOS dependent operating systems. If that is the case then you should be able to multi-boot between other operating systems also (like FreeBSD or Ubuntu). Perhaps even Windows Vista when it is released. If you combined this with something like Mac Drive 6, which allows Windows to read/write to HFS/HFS+ (the Mac OS X file system), you’ll have a pretty reasonable setup.
Boot Camp will be included in the next version of Mac OS X (10.5) Leopard. I don’t believe that a release date has been talked about yet for Leopard, but we are supposed to hear more this summer (August). This also brings into question the rumors about virtualisation software being included in Leopard. How far with Apple really go with allowing/supporting other operating systems on their hardware? As much as I’d like to see this rumor be true, part of me things that it isn’t likely that Apple as a company would be thrilled with the idea. They have to draw the line some where on encouraging people to use non-OS X software.
At this point I see Boot Camp as good news for Apple and consumers. For die hard Apple fans this won’t change anything, but it makes for one more reason for Windows users to make their next computer a Mac instead of a traditional PC.
2 replies on “Boot Camp”
I’ve seen this story and for what it is possible to see from the first installations of Windows on Macs out there, it isn’t possible yet to use Base Camp to boot anything else than Windows Home/Professional SP2.
But I supose that Linux or FreBSD or OpenSolaris will eventually be bootable via Boot Camp. Let’s Hope.
Yep, I think this will definitely help Apple sell more hardware, and coincidentally get more people exposed to Mac OSX. I started mentioning this to my wife tonight, and she was totally jazzed about the idea. She had heard something about it on the radio earlier today (on NPR I think).
She was very hip to replacing her current (Windows) system with an Intel Mac. She’s not very partisan about the O/S–her only concern is being able to run some specific apps for her quilting business. I’m pretty sure that once she got familiar with OSX, she would prefer to do as much as possible with it, and that would actually be quite a bit: email, web browsing, and Office covers over 90% of her usage. She’d still need Windows for her embroidery software and Electric Quilter, but it’s a tiny minority of her usage.