blueio Posted January 24, 2006 Share Posted January 24, 2006 Many talented hackers are making progress to get Windows XP to boot on Intel Macs http://winxponmac.com. Although it is a wonderful and interesting project that will help us understand the workings of EFI, I wonder if there may be a more practical and safer solution for the rest of who just need to have Windows XP without having to use virtualization software? Why is it so important to have Windows XP on a Mac? Well, I am IT consultant and I find many times my PowerBook useless on the job cause I can't run Lotus Notes, Visio, MS Project, Rational Rose, Toad, special VPN's, etc on OS X. Also, just forget about running these programs in Virtual PC. Running OS X and Windows on a MacBook Pro would allow us to have the best worlds! One possible way to go about this would be to do something that was done to enable Linux to boot on old world Macs. On a PowerMac 8600 (for example) the best way to boot into PPC Linux, was to use a special boot loader called BootX. Basically, it was an OS 9 program that immediately ran as OS 9 had a basic initialization startup. It gave you a choice to ether to continue to boot into OS 9 or boot into Linux. See attached photo BootX is unique from other boot loaders in that it bypasses a computer's firmware (BIOS or EFI) and lets Mac OS handle it. I think this may be the way to go....let OS X handle the boot process that deals with the firmware, then give users a choice to boot into Windows or finish with the OS X boot process. What do you think? Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Metrogirl Posted January 26, 2006 Share Posted January 26, 2006 Interesting idea ... Just a point, you *can* run Lotus Notes on a Mac. I have an IBM friend who does it every day, using the Mac version of Notes. Unfortunately they have to run the VPN software and a proxy server inside a Virtual PC session and connect to work that way because the highly-modified IBM VPN is Windows only. You're probably right about the other software not being available on the Mac. I hate that too, and it forces me to use Windows for a lot of stuff. I only mention the Notes thing because it might help other people. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
vsmith1 Posted January 27, 2006 Share Posted January 27, 2006 I agree and have run Lotus Notes client on a Mac - in fact I ran it on my PowerBook - which was faster than the ancient Dell Latitude I had from work at the time. I also used Cisco VPN client which also ran fine. Neither of these required the back-end boys to do anything. I brought across from the Dell the Notes id file, .dsk and .nsf files that I wanted. For the Cisco VPN I got the .prf files. In regard to Visio then yes - there is nothing to run it other than VPC (yuck) - but I successfully used OmniGraffle pro with Visio XML import and export. In fact, with the lovely shadows that OmniGraffle has people actually said my diagrams were brilliant. In regard to Project then again I tried a few on trial - such as merlin, and a couple of others. I'm not a Project manager and a viewer would have done me. This was not brilliant mainly due to the sheer size of some of the plans. I cannot speak on the rest but isn't Toad a SQL tool - I have used Navicat and SQL Grinder. The thing is that unless we push we'll never get such tools native in OSX - whatever binaries. I'm glad that IBM have committed to deliver Notes 7 for OSX. We may even get a native SameTime client. I have used the browser version and there is Mercury - a limited SameTime client. Vince Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
furyg3 Posted February 21, 2006 Share Posted February 21, 2006 I'd have to agree that this would be a very acceptable solution (for booting linux, anyhow). AFAIK, there seems to be other limitations that you'd have to get around regarding loading XP though (XP makes some BIOS calls on startup). I used bootx on my older macs quite often, and while a grub or lilo implementation is preferred, a "loadlin" approach wouldn't be too shabby. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Vusal Posted October 16, 2008 Share Posted October 16, 2008 Many talented hackers are making progress to get Windows XP to boot on Intel Macs http://winxponmac.com. Although it is a wonderful and interesting project that will help us understand the workings of EFI, I wonder if there may be a more practical and safer solution for the rest of who just need to have Windows XP without having to use virtualization software? Why is it so important to have Windows XP on a Mac? Well, I am IT consultant and I find many times my PowerBook useless on the job cause I can't run Lotus Notes, Visio, MS Project, Rational Rose, Toad, special VPN's, etc on OS X. Also, just forget about running these programs in Virtual PC. Running OS X and Windows on a MacBook Pro would allow us to have the best worlds! One possible way to go about this would be to do something that was done to enable Linux to boot on old world Macs. On a PowerMac 8600 (for example) the best way to boot into PPC Linux, was to use a special boot loader called BootX. Basically, it was an OS 9 program that immediately ran as OS 9 had a basic initialization startup. It gave you a choice to ether to continue to boot into OS 9 or boot into Linux. See attached photo BootX is unique from other boot loaders in that it bypasses a computer's firmware (BIOS or EFI) and lets Mac OS handle it. I think this may be the way to go....let OS X handle the boot process that deals with the firmware, then give users a choice to boot into Windows or finish with the OS X boot process. What do you think? Visio, Ms Project and Toad run pretty well for me with Crossover. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
dillon31292 Posted October 16, 2008 Share Posted October 16, 2008 There was really no need to necropost. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
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