Text 52014, 42 rader
Skriven 2008-12-21 20:59:15 av Alan Zisman (1:123/789.0)
Ärende: PC Operating Systems on Macs
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I know Charles S. and maybe some others here have Macs and are interested in
running Windows- and other PC operating systems on them.

(Note to Jean: this is not a comment on shortcomings of the Mac operating
system... I'm interested in the topic for the same reason some people climb
mountains: because it's there).

Apple's Boot Camp allows owners of Intel-powered Macs (not Jean's wife's
PowerPC-powered Powerbook) to non-destructively re-partition their Mac, and
install Windows (XP SP2 or later or Vista) and multiboot either Windows or Mac
OS X. It does not directly support other PC operating systems such as Linux-
perhaps because the Intel Macs use EFI rather than a traditional BIOS for
startup (and earlier Windows, for instance, lack EFI support), but also, I
suspect, because Apple doesn't want the bother of supplying drivers or other
support for the relatively lower number of users of Linux or other PC operating
systems.

As an experiment, I thought I would try the feature in Ubuntu 8.xx that allows
it to be installed from within a running copy of Windows on my Boot Camp'ed
Mac... this installs Ubuntu into a folder in C:\Program Files, adding it to the
Windows boot menu (rather than the Linux-style GRUB boot loader).

Any way, the short version is that it worked- quickly and easily... now, if
setting the Mac to boot to 'Windows', I get a menu asking if I want to boot to
Windows or Ubuntu. Both work well. Even without Apple-supplied drivers, the
Ubuntu installation recognizes the video, ethernet, wifi, bluetooth, and sound
hardware (though not the iSight webcam)... and works fine.

Googling 'Boot Camp Linux' or 'Boot Camp Ubuntu' gets lots of hits offering
complex command line ways to set up a Mac to boot to Ubuntu.... this worked
with virtually zero complexity.

Now do I ever need to boot my Mac to Ubuntu? Or even to Windows? Not really.
But it was nice to find that I could if I wanted to.
-- 
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- email: alan (at) zisman (dot) ca
- website: http://www.zisman.ca
(running on Mac OS X)

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