Skip to main content

Windows on Mac: Boot Camp Not the Final Word

Apple's free Boot Camp software has put the company at the front in the race to run Windows on Intel-based Macs. Boot Camp beta software is easy to install and solves most of the performance and hardware support issues of other solutions. But Boot Camp will not be the final word for Mac users who need to use two operating systems.

Virtualization solutions that run Windows inside of Mac OS X have the potential of better integrating Windows with the Mac by giving users access to both operating systems at the same time.

Virtualization products, such as Microsoft's Virtual PC, enable users to switch between Mac OS X and Windows applications without rebooting. As eWEEK Labs reports, Boot Camp users can't access Mac files when the Mac is booted from Windows XP. Virtual PC not only gives users this ability, but also lets users copy and paste between Mac and Windows application documents.

In addition, Virtual PC lets users save files to the Mac side, then undo all of the changes made to Windows in a session, leaving the Windows disk image in pristine condition. Boot Camp doesn't provide any of these dual-OS features. Boot Camp enables Windows XP to boot the Mac as if it were a plain vanilla PC.

Right now, Intel Mac users won't find many of these features in any virtualization solution, either. Microsoft's Virtual PC is not available for Intel Macs. Microsoft has indicated that it is looking into a port to the Intel Mac platform but has not announced a ship date.

There are other virtualization efforts for the Intel Mac, such as the free Q, which lets users switch between Mac OS X and Windows without rebooting. Most of these efforts are based on the open-source QEMU virtualization engine. All are still in the early stages of development, with parts of the Mac hardware still emulated and limited support for peripherals, and without copy-and-paste-type integration features of Virtual PC.

An open-source project called Darwine is taking a different approach to virtualization. Still in early stages of development, Darwine aims to run Windows applications directly in Mac OS X, but without Windows. Darwine is a port of Wine, an open-source project that runs Windows applications directly in Linux, without running or virtualizing Windows at all. Google is using Wine code in its Linux version of Picasa.

Wine and Darwine add a compatibility layer that provides the equivalent of the Windows API. These means that Darwine doesn't have the overhead needed to support all of Windows XP's functions, as do standard virtualization solutions.

Unlike Boot Camp or Virtual PC, Darwine provides no Windows desktop, no Start menu, no task bar; just Windows applications in their own windows.

The current version of Darwine hosts Windows applications with X11, a Unix graphical windowing environment. Apple's X11 for Mac OS X is a free download. Like virtualization solutions, X11 for Mac OS X lets users cut and paste between X11 and aqua windows, which in Darwine's case is Windows XP and Mac OS X application documents. The Darwine project plans to move from X11 to direct support of Windows applications in aqua.

At this point, the easy-to-install Boot Camp beta is miles ahead of Darwine and the other virtualization efforts. The Darwine Web site refers to the current version as a "developer preview," warning that it is not ready for average users. Installation of Darwine is complex, and some functions, such as sound, do not yet work.

Boot Camp, on the other hand, will be integrated into the next version of Mac OS X, "Leopard," which is scheduled to ship at the end of the year.

Comments

Popular posts from this blog

US says world safer, despite 11,000 attacks in '05

The U.S. war on terrorism has made the world safer, the State Department's counterterrorism chief said on Friday, despite more than 11,000 terrorist attacks worldwide last year that killed 14,600 people. The U.S. State Department said the numbers, listed in its annual Country Reports on Terrorism released on Friday, were based on a broader definition of terrorism and could not be compared to the 3,129 international attacks listed the previous year. But the new 2005 figures, which showed attacks in Iraq jumped and accounted for about a third of the world's total, may fuel criticism of the Bush administration's assertion that it is winning the fight against terrorism. Asked if the world was safer than the previous year, U.S. State Department Counterterrorism Coordinator Henry Crumpton told a news conference, "I think so. But I think that (if) you look at the ups and downs of this battle, it's going to take us a long time to win this. You can't measure this month ...

Al-Qaeda number two in new video

Al-Qaeda's number two Ayman al-Zawahiri has appeared in a video saying that Iraqi insurgents have "broken the back" of the US military. He praised "martyrdom operations" carried out by al-Qaeda in Iraq in the video, posted on an Islamist website. And he called on the people and army of Pakistan to fight against President Musharraf's administration. This is the third message from prominent al-Qaeda leaders to emerge within a week. A tape from Osama Bin Laden was broadcast on 23 April, followed two days later by a message from Iraqi insurgent Abu Musab al-Zarqawi. Pakistan focus Zawahiri, who wore a black turban and a white robe in the video, described the leaders of Egypt, Jordan, Saudi Arabia and Iraq as traitors, and urged Muslims to "confront them". He praised Iraqi militants, saying that the US, Britain and allies had "achieved nothing but losses, disasters and misfortunes" in Iraq. "Al-Qaeda in Iraq alone has carried out 800 ma...

Does light have mass?

The short answer is "no", but it is a qualified "no" because there are odd ways of interpreting the question which could justify the answer "yes". Light is composed of photons so we could ask if the photon has mass. The answer is then definitely "no": The photon is a massless particle. According to theory it has energy and momentum but no mass and this is confirmed by experiment to within strict limits. Even before it was known that light is composed of photons it was known that light carries momentum and will exert a pressure on a surface. This is not evidence that it has mass since momentum can exist without mass. [ For details see the Physics FAQ article What is the mass of the photon? ]. Sometimes people like to say that the photon does have mass because a photon has energy E = hf where h is Planck's constant and f is the frequency of the photon. Energy, they say, is equivalent to mass according to Einstein's famous formula E = m...