| Coming soon: The Linux Mactel |
Jan. 18, 2006
It's kind of funny. Everyone is excited about the new Intel-powered Macs, but perhaps the most excited of them all are the Windows users who want to run Mac OS X and Windows together on one.
Can they? Can't they? They don't know, but boy do they want to find out.
For XP users, the problem is that Apple uses Intel's EFI (extensible firmware interface) rather than a BIOS. Windows, generally speaking, can't run on top of EFI.
"EFI?" you ask? This is a layer that sits between your operating system's boot loader and your computer's firmware and hardware. It's meant to make computers both easier to manage and configure.
It's also being turned into an open-standard under the name, UEFI (United EFI). And, we all know how allergic Microsoft is to open-standards, don't we?
As for Linux, though, Intel has already provided a native Linux bootloader for EFI: ELILO (EFI Linux Boot Loader). With this you can boot Linux, even Linux that isn't EFI aware, without much trouble.
In fact, while EFI is a major problem for users who want to run Windows on Mactels, ELILO supports multiple Intel architectures. This should make it easier not just to boot Linux on Mactels, but to port any particular Linux distribution to Pentium IV, Itanium, or X86-64 architectures.
It's really all rather neat, since ELILO removes a lot of the headaches of having to probe a system for its exact hardware configuration on initial boot.
Now, that doesn't mean you can just throw Ubuntu on the 17-inch iMac with its 1.83GHz Intel Core Duo processor and its 667MHz bus, 512MB of RAM, 160GB hard drive, and 8x SuperDrive, and expect it to run. But, it won't be long before you can.
Besides EFI simply being a lot more Linux-friendly than Windows-friendly, we've already long had Linux distributions for the PowerPC Macs. I've long been fond of Yellow Dog, the best known of the Mac Linuxes.
I mean, come on, we're Linux users. We port Linux to everything, including some things -- say the Z80 family) -- that perhaps should have been left in computer museum vaults.
What about Virtual PC, Microsoft's Windows emulator for OS X? While Amanda Lefebvre, marketing manager for Microsoft's Mac Business Unit, recently told eWEEK's John Rizzi that "We are committed to moving forward with Virtual PC," I wouldn't count on seeing it anytime soon.
That's because Virtual PC is mostly built with Metrowerks's CodeWarriort environment, but the main tools that are available to get applications running on Mactels are Apple's Cocoa Objective C framework.
I'm sure we will see Windows running on a Mactel... someday. It may be when Vista finally shows up, since it should run with EFI, or perhaps when they get Virtual PC 8 out, but long, long before then, we'll be able to run Linux and Mac OS X on the same Mactel box.
Now, as always, Linux remains the most flexible of all operating systems.
--Steven J. Vaughan-Nichols
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