Filed under: OS, Software, Hacks
Triple boot your MacBook Pro
Booting only two OSs on your MacBook Pro is, like, totally so last week. Aside from earlier reports, it apparently is possible to bring a third OS to the party, as OnMac.net has posted a how-to wiki for booting WinXP, Mac OS X and Linux on a MacBook Pro via Boot Camp (so far, this is untested on other Intel Macs).
Gentoo is the version of Linux used in the how-to, but the Slashdot post where I found this is confident that it would be simple to get other flavors of Linux working.
But forget all this triple booting stuff... when is someone going to crack the 4 OS barrier? I want a quad boot with Microsoft Bob running on a MacBook Pro!
_thumbnail.jpg "Take a stroll down memory lane")
Reader Comments (Page 1 of 1)
Buthidae said 12:08PM on 4-16-2006
That's pretty nifty!
But am I the only person who think's that pic should be the Apple logo with a bootcamp-style Windows logo inside it, and with a Tux inside that? :-D
Reply
Craig Nelson said 12:10PM on 4-16-2006
now if only these machines could run OS 9 ...
Reply
Stefan Constantinescu said 12:13PM on 4-16-2006
This will prove highly useful when Windows Vista comes out. To give a fair comparison of course.
Pretty soon a proper boot loader will be released and then you can have 100 OS's on your desktop! We all know you're only going to use one or two tho haha.
10.5 better/should have virtualization built in, because like Woz said "why should I have to reboot?"
Reply
Mac2 said 12:15PM on 4-16-2006
Microsoft Bob wasn't actually an OS, technically it was a (terrible) shell that ran on top of Windows 3.1. Theoretically it might work in XP. I might just have to try it for sheer shock value. :)
Reply
Taylor Williams said 1:10PM on 4-16-2006
Just a heads up...you misspelled *weak*.
Reply
Taylor Williams said 1:11PM on 4-16-2006
There should totally be an edit comment. I am retarded in the last post.
Reply
Eric said 1:17PM on 4-16-2006
this news is last week as well
Reply
Udayan Tripathi said 1:32PM on 4-16-2006
This was cool news a while back, I guess its good that people are doing it and Linux distros are nice, however it does seem more like something used for novelty than actual day-to-day purpose.
Reply
commiepenguin said 1:49PM on 4-16-2006
I think someone got bob running...I'm sure I stumbled onto it in flickr.
Reply
mayo said 1:51PM on 4-16-2006
what's the 4 OS barrier? I had 5 OSs booting on my wntel box for a long time now.
Reply
mayo said 2:17PM on 4-16-2006
I spoke too soon, sorry. You can potentially fix this limit with Grub (not so user friendly though) and you can do some magic with the Grub commands and get around having to have primary partitions for OSs. unfortunately I don't have a Intel Mac to play with this.
Reply
fero said 2:52PM on 4-16-2006
Here you go David: http://www.flickr.com/photos/jpiper/127943484/
Close enough?
Reply
David Chartier said 4:29PM on 4-16-2006
Beautiful fero. Creepy, but beautiful.
Reply
lakiolen said 4:34PM on 4-16-2006
What about Solaris? There is an x86 version. That's what i thought of as the 4th of a quad boot.
Reply
bufflo said 7:14PM on 4-16-2006
This is starting to feel like the porn industry. "The MacBook Pro. DVDA anyone?"
Reply
multibooter said 7:26PM on 4-16-2006
mayo, if you read the article, you would have noticed that Grub can't be loaded (as it conflicts with GPT).
Solaris will probably be bootable on intelMacs, but they currently have some problems with boot managers, and it will probably take time.
BSD, BeOS/Haiku, Syllable, there are lots of possibilities for the brave.
Reply
Reg said 8:16PM on 4-16-2006
Craig> "now if only these machines could run OS 9 ..."
There's an Intel Mac compilation of SheepShaver (which is a derivative of the Classic compatibility engine that would have been used if in an alternate universe Apple had bought Be instead of NeXT). It offers emulation of a PowerPC G3 running Mac OS 9.0.
http://www.gibix.net/dokuwiki/en:projects:sheepshaver
Reply
agency said 11:30AM on 4-17-2006
"...But forget all this triple booting stuff... when is someone going to crack the 4 OS barrier? "
Hey dawg, but Sun Solaris works on intel Macs. I thought you knew... betta ask somebody!
http://osnews.com/story.php?news_id=14335
Reply
Doug said 9:20PM on 4-17-2006
I saw Windows XP running on an iMac at a CompUSA, and my first impression was confusion. Then came fear. Then came acceptance. Then came apathy. Sure, a lot of people will benefit because of this, and yes, this is a big tech leap, but all in all, it's not that exciting to me. Games are silly timewasters, and OSX has everything I need. I can't be the only one who feels this way. A Mac is good enough on its own.
Reply