Re: Dual Boot Win XP On Macintel: More Re Boot Camp
- From: Derek Currie <derekcurrie@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>
- Date: Wed, 05 Apr 2006 19:38:49 GMT
In article
<derekcurrie-5439D0.10154305042006@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>,
Derek Currie <derekcurrie@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
<http://www.macintouch.com/>
Apple today declared war on the Microsoft monopoly with Boot Camp Public
Beta
This note includes analysis of about dual booting or multi-booting XP on
a Mac as well as Darwine.
I am going to avoid for now the question of why one wants to subject
one's self to that Microsoft OS. Let me instead start by pointing out
how silly it is to say: "Apple declared war on the Microsoft monopoly
with Boot Camp Public Beta". WTF? How does bringing the ability to boot
into XP hurt Microsoft? They do nothing but benefit from your purchase.
I am surprised to see a 'computer warz' mentality over at MacInTouch,
who are well known as the best overall site to visit daily for Mac news
and tech info. Get your warz straight folks.
Dual Booting:
1) Why bother with dual booting on Macintel? For the moment the benefit
is to run Win XP and compatible software at raw CPU speed. We know from
last month's XP-On-Macintel hack that XP runs at a great speed on
Macintel.
A dual boot system allows you to get away with a lower amount of
installed RAM. Since you are running just one OS all you need is one
OS's worth of RAM. These days 1 GB is recommended.
It's free! (Well, after you buy Windows XP).
2) The problems of dual booting on Macintel?
(A) What about when you want to get back to working in Mac OS X?
Every time you want to run the other OS you have to wait through a
reboot. Ho hum boring yawn zzz waste-o-time.
(B) There is nothing stopping a vicious Windows specific virus from
wiping your Mac OS X partition as well as any other data anywhere on
your hard drive.
(C) You need to keep track of when you are on the Internet with
what OS. No way am I going to let Windows XP onto the Internet! All I
have to do is read the experiences of Microsoft themselves to throw up
my hands in horror. What did Microsoft say in the article I posted
yesterday?
"At Microsoft, we are fielding 2,000 attacks per hour. We are a constant
target, and you have to assume your Internet-facing service is also a big
target," Danseglio said.
No thanks. I'll stick with using Mac OS X on the Internet, period.
3) So what about multi-booting? So far we have heard from four different
companies who 'plan' to offer some sort of emulation |or|
virtualization.
As a long time user of PC emulators I know I would rather abandon them
and go for serious virtualization, which is to say that Windows XP would
be running in total directly on Macintel hardware as a parallel
operating system in its own RAM, virtual memory, etc. This is a new
concept for most of us. Read more about it at:
<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Virtualization>
Undoubtedly virtualization will have its quirks, but it provides great
benefits:
A) Speed: It's running off the CPU directly.
B) The instantaneous ability to move, as a user, between either
operating system.
C) Immediate access to all files between both OSes.
D) The wall between the operating systems could potentially be
transparent to the user. No more running one OS in a window (versus
emulation).
E) Potentially no need to worry about Win XP going on the Internet.
If/when the XP partition gets trashed with malware, it stays there. But
this requires a buffer zone setup read ahead:
If someone gets decent virtualization working then emulation will be
thrown out the window and good riddance.
4) The problems of multi-booting on Macintel?
A) All four solutions, emulation or virtualization, are still
vaporware.
B) It is unclear whether hardware virtualization is possible on the
current crop of Intel Core Duo chips. It may well be disabled, or not
even installed. Intel call their hardware virtualization technology
'Silvervale.'
<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Virtualization_Technology>
C) Virtualization requires you to have:
i) Double the RAM you would need with two operating systems,
depending upon each OS's requirements. The recommendation I have seen
from one potential virtualization vendor is 2 GB, one GB per OS.
ii) A fast CPU to deal with potentially double the calls of
one OS. The vendor recommendation I read found Intel Duo Cores to fit
the bill. The upcoming double Duo Cores would be ideal.
D) Depending upon how virtualization is set up, we could run into
the same problem as dual booting where the hundred thousand plus pieces
of Windows malware could damage the Mac OS X section of the hard drive.
With emulators this was NOT a problem. You had Windows running in its
own sub-partition with zero access to anything on the Mac main
partition. The best I virus could do was nail whatever you happened to
have in the folder that was shared between the OSes, therefore you never
kept anything there beyond its moment of need.
5) Virtualization problem solutions:
A) A Buffer Zone between file systems: It would be ideal to have
virtualization with Windows XP locked up within its own partition,
unable at all to access anything on the Mac OS X partition. Well, there
goes the benefit of Immediate access to all files between both OSes. But
creating a buffer zone between them would certainly be worth tolerating.
You toss files you want to share in the buffer zone and jump over to the
other OS to get them. Let's hope the two companies planning on
'virtualization', however they define it, will create this buffer zone
file area.
B) We may well have to wait for the second crop of Core Duo CPU
chips to get Intel hardware supported virtualization.
6) So how about Darwine running on Macintel?
A) What is Wine? 'Wine Is Not an Emulator'.
<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wine_%28software%29>
Wine is a set of libraries that allows x86 applications to run on
Unix-like operating systems running on x86 hardware. Mac OS X is Unix.
So Wine should work fine to run Windows applications on Macintel. In
reality Wine can be quirky due to Microsoft's penchant for
proprietarizing everything in sight, meaning that Wine is missing some
code to run certain Windows applications.
B) Darwine: This project began for PowerPC Macs using an x86
emulator to provide hardware compatibility. Not much came of it, and
emulation always slows things down. But now the project is focusing on
Macintel hardware which is already x86, therefore not needing any
emulation. Darwine is not yet ready for prime time. It is still in
developer-only release, use at your own risk. But you can keep up with
its progress at:
<http://darwine.opendarwin.org/>
C) Benefits:
i) Speed! No emulation.
ii) No need for double the RAM, although more RAM couldn't
hurt.
iii) No nasty Windows GUI, sloppy file system, registry, DOS
commands. In fact there are no Microsoft horrors at all, not unless you
install them.
***
So what is my personal preference? I would prefer NOT to dual boot
Windows. I like doing a number of things at the same time, tossing up
something on my Mac, while it churns I do some work in Windows, etc. It
is common for me to be at work on my workstation Windows PC, workstation
Mac and my Mac PowerBook all a the same time. As long as I stick with
three things at he same time I can juggle very well.
What I want, ideally is hardware assisted virtualization over either
emulation (of course) or Darwine. Why:
- I am willing to come up with the dough for the required RAM.
- It allows me to have rapid OS switching on one box.
- It allows me rapid file sharing, even if I have to use a Buffer Zone.
- I know the full range Windows apps are going to work in
virtualization. That is not the case with Darwine.
- I can theoretically go one maniacal step further and add in Linux
virtualization! Nyahahahaha! This seems a bit far fetched, but it could
happen! With the current version of Virtual PC I can run both Windows
AND Linux in their own Windows along side Mac OS X. Yeah, it bogs down
everything, but it works and its fun.
I expect other questions will come up. For example, if you do this stuff
at work, who is going to support you? Not Apple, and not Microsoft?
Mixing the two up is not their business. So how about your IT staff?
Oddly, IT techs typically get stuck on one OS and one machine and think
it's the one and only thing worth using. Windows techs are shown proof
that replacing their PCs with Macs will reduce their support costs and
staff requirements by a factor of 10 (ten!) and they act like they are
being told lies, anything to forget they have ever heard of such heresy.
And so it goes.
Therefore, multi-OSing of any kind in a professional situation is most
definitely going to meet resistance. But it happens! NASA mix Macs with
Windows PCs every day and manages to successfully get space craft to
Mars, Jupiter and Saturn with those computers happily working together.
:-D
--
Fortune Magazine, 11-29-05: What's your computer setup today?
Frederick Brooks: I happily use a Macintosh. It's not been equalled for ease
of use, and I want my computer to be a tool, not a challenge.
<http://money.cnn.com/magazines/fortune/fortune_archive/2005/12/12/8363107/>
[Frederick Brooks is the author of 'The Mythical Man Month'. He spearheaded
the movement to modernize computer software engineering in 1975]
.
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