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Windows on a Mac - Apple releases Boot Camp beta

April 5, 2006 - 9:57am — bmann

I thought that Apple was going to do a big product release of *some* kind on April 1st, their 30th anniversary as a company. But, obviously, releasing Boot Camp, software that lets you easily install Windows XP on your Intel-based Mac, would really have been regarded as a practical joke, so they waited until today.

Dual-booting is really not that interesting. You don't really share files, and you can't switch back and forth without restarting the system and rebooting completely. I've been speculating if Apple will actually support Xen, an open source virtualization technology that lets you run multiple environments simultaneously. Perhaps Boot Camp is just a start -- Apple has already said that it will be included as part of Mac OS X 10.5, aka Leopard, so perhaps that is when Xen support will be rolled into the base of the operating system.

I'll be looking for mentions of Xen as people dig into the details of Boot Camp over the next couple of days. 

Comments

April 6, 2006 - 1:20pm — Richard Eriksson
Richard Eriksson's picture

A Concurrent Virtualization Tool

Looks like John Gruber has come to this conclusion ("it certainly seems like the obvious direction") too:

Right now, it’s a dual-boot situation, which is obviously less than ideal. It’s not hard to imagine, though, that the version of Boot Camp Apple is building into the upcoming Mac OS X 10.5 (a.k.a. Leopard) will be a concurrent virtualization tool — i.e. that Windows (and perhaps any other PC OS) could be hosted within a running Mac OS X session, obviating the rather annoying need to reboot to switch between OSes.

April 6, 2006 - 3:10am — jackwolf

Xen? Q.

I prefer virtualization instead of Dual-booting too. But... 
Why Xen? There's Q ( http://www.kberg.ch/q/ ) already done. And it works!
jw 

April 6, 2006 - 3:50am — bmann

Native speeds

Well, aside from Q, there has long been VMWare etc. But Xen is near-native speed, and has other advantages like being able to shift running environments around a network on the fly.