The
January 10th release of the first Intel-powered Mac models got a
lot of people's hopes up that these Macs could boot to run PC
operating systems like Windows or Linux. It makes sense, after all
- they're using the same Intel processor as Windows PCs from
manufacturers like Dell, Sony, HP, or the clone-shop around the
corner.
Many Mac users have need, now and again, for a single
specialized Windows program that lacks a Mac equivalent; this is
the case for many custom-developed business applications, for
instance. Others would like to be able to play games that come out
first (or often only) for the Windows platform.
Emulators like Microsoft's Virtual PC or Lismore Software's
Guest PC (see Guest PC: A More
Affordable Way to Put Windows on Your Mac) can be used for
occasional Windows use, but they've got a speed penalty and are
really no use to game players at all.
The day of the product release, Apple VP Phil Schiller was
quoted as saying that Apple wouldn't put any barriers in the way of
people wanting to run Windows on the new Macs. But it hasn't proven
to be as easy to accomplish as many had hoped.
Within a few days of the first Intel-powered iMacs becoming available,
a MacNN forum poster reported the results of trying to boot with a
range of bootable CDs, including Windows XP, Solaris, and Ubuntu
and SuSE Linux. None could be used to boot the iMac.
There are a couple of levels to the problem. Virtually all
standard-issue PCs start booting using a tiny program burned into
ROM known as the BIOS; these are all related to the boot software
used in 1983's IBM-AT, letting the computer know about the
connected hard drive (and some other drives), video card, and other
standard hardware. Even modern BIOSs are pretty primitive and tend
not to know about many of the sorts of modern hardware connected to
computers.
EFI Is the Issue
Several years ago, Intel proposed a new, "extensible firmware
interface" (EFI) to replace BIOS, but it hasn't been widely
adopted. Windows XP doesn't support EFI, though the next version,
Windows Vista (promised for sometime in 2006) will. (Typical Linux
distributions also don't include EFI support at this time). The
Intel Macs use EFI rather than BIOS, making it difficult to simply
boot to a PC operating system CD.
It shouldn't be impossible, however. Gateway, for instance, has
marketed an EFI-based Windows Media Center system since 2003,
writing a custom compatibility module to enable Windows XP to run.
And Intel has released ELILO, a Linux boot-loader for EFI. Linux
distributions supporting ELILO should be popping up soon, and
(fingers crossed) these should be able to boot the Intel Macs.
(Microsoft's current 64-bit Windows versions include EFI
support, but the current Intel-powered Macs are 32-bit systems. So
far, I haven't heard any reports of anyone trying to use Windows
Vista beta to boot an Intel-Mac).
There are other issues as well; while it may be possible to boot
the new Macs using an external FireWire drive, most people booting
to multiple operating systems prefer to partition their computer's
internal hard drive, dedicating a partition to each operating
system. If there's any software allowing users to mix and match
Windows and Mac-native partitions on a single physical hard drive,
I'm not aware of it.
None of this is insurmountable. There are almost certainly a
number of pretty smart programmers working on these issues right
now. But at the moment, if anyone has managed to boot up an Intel
Mac to any version of Windows (or Linux), they're keeping pretty
quiet about it.
Emulation
What about emulators? Microsoft, makers of Virtual PC, are said
to be working to support the Intel Macs in the next version of that
product. There are some suggestions that, while not impossible, it
may be an uphill struggle; VPC was built using Metrowerks'
CodeWarrior compiler. It's reportedly harder to convert such
programs to support Intel processors than programs made with
Apple's Objective C compiler.
Lismore Software, developers of Guest PC, also said they're
working towards Intel support, but put it relatively far down the
list of features that they're working on. Other emulators may offer
support sooner; iEmulator
is promising an Intel-native version by the end of February. And
one product, OpenOSX
WinTel boasts that it already "runs native on Intel". I'll be
looking at OpenOSX WinTel and iEmulator and will report back
ASAP.
OS X on Windows PCs
With a version of OS X running on the Intel Macs, many users are
also salivating at the possibility of running OS X on standard
PC hardware. There are issues of legality - Apple's retail
OS X boxes are all licensed for upgrading a system from
another Mac OS version, not for installation on a non-Mac
system.
There are also, most likely, technical reasons why the OS X disc
that ships with, say, an Intel iMac won't be usable on a Dell or HP
PC clone.
Apple's Phil Schiller told eWeek, "We will not allow running Mac
OS X on anything other than an Apple Mac." eWeek said that
Apple hadn't gone into any specifics, but they suspected that the
software looks for a TPM (trusted protection module) as an
authentication mechanism during startup. 
