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Windows XP on Intel Mac Confirmed

Posted by Zonk on Thu Mar 16, 2006 09:57 AM
from the what-do-you-want-to-do-tonight-pinky dept.
Businesses OS X Operating Systems Apple
niemassacre writes "According to winxponmac.com, the contest has been won - nearly $14k to narf2006 for submitting a working solution to dual-booting Windows XP and Mac OS X on an Intel-Powered mac. A thread on osx86project.org has confirmations from several testers that the procedure works on the 17" iMac, the Mac mini, and the MacBook Pro. Many sets of pictures and videos (such as this installation video) are floating around (and mentioned in the thread). The solution itself should be posted soon." Poit! Congratulations to narf.
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[+] Technology: WinXP on a Mac, Hoax? 390 comments
Brill writes "Ars Technica is reporting that a member of the 'WinXP on Mac' forums called narf2006 may have succeeded at the impossible. He's submitted his solution to get XP on an Intel Mac, for the $12,000 prize, but for now the only proof available is a blurry Flickr collection of photos that could be faked with virtual PC. His reputation on the forums however is strong, and he's already calling for testers." We've had people write in to say this has been announced a hoax on the contest page. The contest page is, of course, down due to bandwidth reasons. Engadget's conversation about this announcement has several theories on how this may have been faked. What's the verdict? Real or Fake?
[+] Slashback: Real-ID, PriceRitePhoto, RIM 75 comments
Slashback tonight brings some corrections, clarifications, and updates to previous Slashdot stories, including a possible iBill framejob, the first steps towards defying the Real ID act, Peter Quinn continues his support for Open Source, Judge flunks lawsuit against spammers, WinXP on a Mac, round 2, Juniper drops message board suit, Vint Cerf answers questions on TLDs, PriceRitePhoto gets relisted, and RIM goes on the offensive for patent reform -- Read on for details.
Offsite: XP on MacTel is official: narf gets paid
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Windows XP on Intel Mac Confirmed 25 Comments More /

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  • Wow (Score:5, Funny)

    by 2.7182 (819680) on Thursday March 16 2006, @09:59AM (#14932322)
    Now I can dual boot a good and bad OS. (I am not saying which is which!)

  • I hope ... (Score:5, Insightful)

    by Luscious868 (679143) on Thursday March 16 2006, @10:04AM (#14932368)
    I hope everybody who dragged this guy's reputation through the mud offers him a huge apology! Maybe it's just because I'm growing older, but the older I get the more cynical I feel like people are becoming. Maybe it's always been this way and when I was a kid I either didn't notice or just shrugged it off....

    • Re:I hope ... (Score:5, Insightful)

      by mzieg (317686) <mark@zieg.com> on Thursday March 16 2006, @10:09AM (#14932418) Homepage
      I'm thinking $14 grand would stand-in for an outpouring of apologies. It would for me :-)

    • Let's hear it for peer review (Score:5, Insightful)

      by murderlegendre (776042) on Thursday March 16 2006, @10:32AM (#14932636)

      Did you really read the original (yesterday's) commentary on this? It looked like a basic peer-review process to me, albeit in true /. style. A person steps up, makes an extraordinary claim, and the community of peers does its best to suggest every possibility for falsification.

      It took a while, but the truly hare-brained ideas (like a photoshopped image of a MacBook) were discredited leaving only a couple of reasonable possibilities (like a full-screen display of an XP screengrab image).

      So honestly, would you really prefer that a peer-review process work from the premise that the proposal is true, as opposed to false? While the former is certainly much "nicer", the latter is more in keeping with scientific modes of thought. I'd have expected nothing less, had I presented the same claims + shaky evidence.

  • an end to speculation (Score:5, Interesting)

    by thelost (808451) on Thursday March 16 2006, @10:04AM (#14932373) Journal
    and a amssive congratulation to Narf. This was an exciting contest to watch develop and definately brought out a lot of talent. Now the question in my mind is will this have any affect on the new intel-mac sales; Will people be keen to buy them because they can dual boot windows/mac os x on the same machine? Recently I bought a mac-mini (before the intel ones went live sadly) and I have to say, having used winxp for years after two weeks of my mac-mini on a KVM I'm just about ready to move over. I can't actually imagine many reasons for me wanting a PC any more. I'm not into gaming like I used to be, and mac os x is such a lovely user experience. I admit it, i'm a born again apple fan-boi! What exactly is the situation on driver support for someone booting winxp on a mac? That's what I am interested in, anyone got a clue?

  • Obligatory Pink and the Brain Follow Up (Score:5, Funny)

    by Philosinfinity (726949) on Thursday March 16 2006, @10:05AM (#14932378)
    Brain: Pinky, are you thinking what I'm thinking? Pinky: I think so Brain but where are we going to find rubber pants and sod at this time of night?

  • I'd prefer a VPC-like solution (Score:5, Insightful)

    by illtron (722358) on Thursday March 16 2006, @10:06AM (#14932390) Homepage Journal
    It seems to me that native hardware will mean that we're not far from seeing a lot of really great "not-emulation VPC-like products." This is nice, but it seems that being able to have the two up side-by side would be more useful. Wouldn't native hardware also mean that a VPC could run at nearly full speed, only taking a hit due to whatever resources were already being used by the Mac OS and applications? Still, this is a nice achievement.

  • soo..... (Score:5, Interesting)

    by Trelane (16124) on Thursday March 16 2006, @10:12AM (#14932445) Journal
    if you can run Windows on a Mac now, will game developers stop porting games to Mac, since Mac users can run Windows?

  • Mirror of the movie (Score:5, Informative)

    by jmke (776334) on Thursday March 16 2006, @10:15AM (#14932475) Homepage Journal
    Here's link to the XP on MAC video from a site which can handle a /. http://youtube.com/watch?v=nzH6OFpXgzI [youtube.com]

  • Irony (Score:5, Insightful)

    by Fahrvergnuugen (700293) on Thursday March 16 2006, @10:18AM (#14932519) Homepage

    I find this kind of funny and ironic...

    Apple announces that they are moving to intel. OSX is DRM'd and bound to Macs so that it cannot be run on commodity hardware. Senior execs at Apple also state that they will not do anything to prevent Windows from running on their hardware.

    Intel Macs come out.

    Hackers get OSX86 up and running on Dells with relative ease, despite Apple's best efforts to prevent them from doing so. However, they have such a hard time getting Windows to run on a Mac that a contest is started and 13,000 dollars worth of prize money is offered.

    Oh the irony. :-)

    • Re:Irony (Score:5, Insightful)

      by mzieg (317686) <mark@zieg.com> on Thursday March 16 2006, @10:25AM (#14932585) Homepage
      In Apple's defense (and I do appreciate the irony you point out), OS-X was, from the start, a far more "portable" operating system, vastly more suitable to loading on strange hardware. From it's NeXTSTEP heritage, OS-X could build on Motorola 68K systems. From it's OpenSTEP heritage, OX-X could already build on Intel x86 architectures. From it's Apple heritage, it could build on PPC systems. From it's BSD heritage, it could build on pretty much anything else. OS-X had been ported so much that it had developed a fairly flexible hardware abstraction layer.

      In contrast, consider Windows, which has been successfully ported to...Alpha? Once, many years ago? Windows is far more intransigent about porting to new hardware platforms, because they've never needed to, never wanted to, and never put any friendly handles in to smooth the transition.

  • Big deal (Score:5, Insightful)

    by brunes69 (86786) <slashdot@keiGAUS ... g minus math_god> on Thursday March 16 2006, @10:23AM (#14932564) Homepage
    Wake me up when someone lets me run Windows binaries *inside* Intel OSX. That is the achievement.

  • from macrumors (Score:5, Informative)

    by ClassicComposer (916856) on Thursday March 16 2006, @10:34AM (#14932664) Journal
    Since it's won now, I guess I can talk. The install requires a Windows XP PC, with which Windows is already installed. From here you use Nero Burning ROM to mix files from your XP SP2 CD, copy them to a new project, and add in some $OEM$ files and folders, and fix some of the files in i386. From here, you use xom.efi (which is the bootloader), and bless it in Terminal. Once it's blessed on startup you get a pretty nice selector, and you choose Windows. From here the CSM layer pauses for 2.5 Minutes while it does whatever its doing. Then you'll get into Windows Setup.

    I should also mention at this time, you cannot reboot Windows. You need to shutdown. If you attempt rebooting it will hang at Windows is Shutting Down screen.
    from mac forums [macrumors.com]

    • Aaaargh (Score:5, Insightful)

      by BeardsmoreA (951706) on Thursday March 16 2006, @10:00AM (#14932334) Homepage
      Every time there's anything on this the first comments are along these lines. Fine! You don't want to play games or do any Windows devlopment - other people do! And this lets them. The end.

    • Re:Why? (Score:5, Insightful)

      by Ford Prefect (8777) on Thursday March 16 2006, @10:05AM (#14932375) Homepage
      Why?

      Games.

      Stuff like VMWare will do a great job of running applications, but for stuff that requires access to modern hardware, dual-booting is probably the only real answer.

      I've been doing it for years on my PC, after all - serious stuff gets done in Linux, but when I want to mess around with modding Half-Life 2 then I quickly reboot into Windows XP, and instantly get 100% software compatibility. If something gave me the ability to dual-boot my new MacBook in a similar manner, then that would be great - I'd essentially have both a Mac and a PC in one shiny laptop case.

      This latest news makes me happy - it's like I bought a very fast Mac, then just over two weeks later I received a very fast PC of equivalent specs for free. What is there to complain about?

      • Re:Why? (Score:5, Funny)

        by The Fun Guy (21791) on Thursday March 16 2006, @10:40AM (#14932725) Homepage Journal
        it's like I bought a very fast Mac, then just over two weeks later I received a very fast PC of equivalent specs for free.

        Not quite free, since you have to buy a copy of XP.

        Um...

        You *did* pay for that copy of XP, right?

    • Re:Why? (Score:5, Interesting)

      by slantyyz (196624) on Thursday March 16 2006, @10:07AM (#14932402)
      Because you're not a Mac user who lives in the Windows world. Some of us who make our money in the Windows world need to run applications that don't run on Mac... yet. I do Cognos development, and I have to provide my own notebook at work. Outside of work, I'm all Mac. Why have two notebooks when I can have my cake and eat it too? Yes, I could get a whitebox x86 notebook and run a hacked version of OSX, as the PC zealots would have it, but seeing how my PC is used for business, I'd like to stay above board. Which I can't do with an illegal version of Mac OSX running on a whitebox notebook.

      • Re:Why? (Score:5, Funny)

        by AnonymousPrick (956548) on Thursday March 16 2006, @10:31AM (#14932631)
        Because you're not a Mac user who lives in the Windows world.

        I'm thinking of writing a book about a Windows guy who disguises himself as a Mac user to see what it's like.

        I call it: "Mac Like Me".

        Sounds cool, huh?

    • Re:Why? (Score:5, Interesting)

      by Total_Wimp (564548) on Thursday March 16 2006, @10:38AM (#14932696)
      1. The first guy to do something gets lots of points

      2. Anybody who does a lot of work so I don't have to gets points

      3. The definition of hard has less to do whith whether the technology looks challenging and more to do with how long it actually takes people to accomplish. This was not instantaneous with a bunch of people piling on working solutions at the same time. This guy stands alone after a significant period of time. That makes this "hard" in a defacto sense of the word and is definately worth some points.

      4. I'm not a Mac user. I'm a Windows user. Of course Mac users love their OS. I don't. After supporting several Mac people and trying to make use of it myself, I've decided I actually dislike it quite a lot (no flames, please, this is just a personal preference). However, I _love_ Mac hardware. I've lusted after the clean, light notebooks and the "cheese grater" G5 desktops are shear design elegance. As a current Mac user, judging this by the fact that you wouldn't want to run Windows is missing the fundimental point that Windows users might like the option of buying great hardware from Apple. From my perspective, this is worth lots of points.

      Add em all up and this guy can redeem his points for several rounds of beer should I ever meet him :-)

      TW

      • Re:Why? (Score:5, Informative)

        by slantyyz (196624) on Thursday March 16 2006, @10:20AM (#14932539)
        It's actually called DarWINE and it's not quite at the level of maturity you see in the Linux world. Codeweavers says they're working on a version of Crossover Office for the Mac, but they haven't posted any news about it recently.

        Crossover Office is pretty good on Linux. I'd rather use something like Wine (provided it worked on 100% of the stuff I need -- wishful thinking) than VMWare. Having said that, I'd rather use VMWare than dual boot.

    • Re:Lawsuit? (Score:5, Insightful)

      by slantyyz (196624) on Thursday March 16 2006, @10:12AM (#14932440)
      Apple is happy. Now all those Windows users who want a Mac (more market share, yippee!) will buy a Mac and dual boot, yet they can still "try" to protect their OS from running a white box.

      Microsoft is happy. They didn't have to spend any of their own money to get compatibility, and if they're lucky, maybe more than 30% of the dual booters will actually pay for a Windows license.

    • Re:A lot more useful! Excellent! (Score:5, Insightful)

      by cgenman (325138) on Thursday March 16 2006, @10:28AM (#14932608) Homepage
      A hack must have been expected, even desired, by Apple. Being able to run both OSX and Win XP (and Linux) on a single notebook would be massive. If you need Wintel, you can buy anything, but if you want OSXP, you have to buy from Apple.

      I, for one, am desperately trying to restrain myself from running out and picking up a Mac Book.

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