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PC Magazine reports on XP-On-Mac Breakthrough


Metrogirl

PCMag, the online version of Ziff-Davis' PC Magazine, today reported yesterday's announcement by Onmac.net that a dual-boot solution to XP on the iMac was now available. The "site reported on March 16 that it has come up with a method for booting Microsoft's Windows XP alongside Apple's Mac OS X on Apple's Intel processor-based Macs, which began rolling out earlier this year. "

 

This comes on top of recent reports of successful Linux booting, Gentoo by Edgar Hucek and Knoppix by Amit Singh.

 

A downloadable package including EFI files and stub loader, modified bios image and i386 hook, is offered for the Onmac XOM (Xp-On-Mac) solution. Details on the function and operation are sparse at this time. The Onmac forum discusses the topic at length but a lot of the content appears to be speculation rather than hard fact.

 

If it is genuine, this represents a major breakthrough and it is a true dual-boot solution since it involves partitioning the hard drive on the iMac into OSX and XP partitions and allowing a choice at boot time.

 

It's not April 1st yet, is it?

 

Rather amusingly, a member of the Onmac forum asked the question "Now we have XP on the Mac, when will we be able to do the opposite and boot OSX on a PC?" (paraph.). Forum members quickly put him straight and pointed him to osx86project.org.

 

Read the PCMag story here PC Magazine or an almost identical report on another Ziff Davis mirror eWeek .


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Yes, I saw the impressive video. If it is a fake, it would be a very good one. I am 98% sure, that this is real.

 

But the question I asked myself now is, if the PC Hackintosh could also have a use for this EFI Emulation?

 

Maybe this would fix some of the ACPI and graphics-issues that we still have with maxxuss version. And maybe, the kernel would not need to be patched so strong. So this would be very interesting. What would happen, if we would start our OSX on a normal PC with EFI emulation, and the patches?

 

Anyway, really good news :D

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From what i understand, graphics hardware isn't being picked up by XP. That's a pretty iimportant caveat in my opinion. I would call this dual-boot solution a great "first step" but I think there's much more to go.

 

Of course it's being lauded here as a first step, so I'm not trying to be a critic. This is a good thing for us web-designers who like to poke about.

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Hi,

 

thanks for the replies. Maybe I did not made clear, what my point of interest was:

 

I just wanted to know, if it is possible to run the EFI Emulation on a PC (not IntelMac!!).

 

Why? Because maybe this would get us around the graphics problems with the EFI related drivers.

 

Sorry for the confusion :D

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