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New Apple Bootcamp Released 106

Posted by CmdrTaco from the mac-attack-is-back-jack dept.
eebra82 writes "Apple just updated their Bootcamp website with the release of Bootcamp 1.1 beta. It adds extended hardware support, including the ability to install XP on any internal disk, built-in iSight camera support, built-in microphone, right clicks with Apple key, more keyboard buttons such as Delete, NumLock, PrintScreen and ScrollLock. Numerous annoyances are no more thanks to motherboard updates, too. This release is 200 MB or so over the previous 90 MB install, which is due to heavier driver support such as included Nvidia video drivers."
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New Apple Bootcamp Released More

New Apple Bootcamp Released

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  • vista (Score:3, Interesting)

    by raffe ( 28595 ) * on Wednesday August 16, 2006 @10:25AM (#15919092) Journal
    Any news of vista suport? Now, I am really thinking about getting a mac.....

    • Re:vista (Score:5, Informative)

      by ironwill96 ( 736883 ) on Wednesday August 16, 2006 @10:30AM (#15919173) Homepage Journal
      Vista Beta 2 runs just fine under BootCamp with a few minor annoyances such as very little power management so battery life is quite poor. I'm running it on my Macbook Pro that I use at work and haven't had any major issues as of yet.
    • "Now, I am really thinking about getting a mac....."

      One dollar for everytime I have to read that line on /. and I could quit work.

  • They recommend an upgrade (Score:3, Informative)

    by Frequency Domain ( 601421 ) on Wednesday August 16, 2006 @10:27AM (#15919121)
    The web page says you don't need to repartition or re-install if you're already running BootCamp, but they strongly advise that you do an upgrade to get the new driver support.
    • You know, I really have to wonder why Apple doesn't do what Cringely suggests here [pbs.org]: perfectly transparent XP emulation, on OS X.

      I'm told Apple has long had this running in the Cupertino lab -- Intel Macs running OS X while mixing Apple and XP applications. This is not a guess or a rumor, this something that has been demonstrated and observed by people who have since reported to me.

      Think of the implications. A souped-up OS X kernel with native Windows API support and the prospect of mixing and matching Windo

      • Re:They recommend an upgrade (Score:4, Insightful)

        by drinkypoo ( 153816 ) <drink@hyperlogos.org> on Wednesday August 16, 2006 @11:37AM (#15919880) Homepage Journal
        You know, I really have to wonder why Apple doesn't do what Cringely suggests here: perfectly transparent XP emulation, on OS X.

        Probably because it's a bunch of bullshit. It's probably Wine, and the people only saw applications that work properly being run, and until I hear something more reliable than Cringely telling me some guy saw it running when they would have no way to know that they're not looking at a canned demo, I'm not going to believe it. Lots of smart people have been working on Windows compatibility for a long time and it's an amazingly hard problem, which is why you can't run (for example) Alpha Centauri for Windows on Wine. (Yes, I know it's available for Linux.)

        • except Apple has the NDAs to use the REAL windows APIs directly. I believe they got those in a lawsuit when MS tried to renig on their deal to co-develop quicktime. They wouldn't be able to mix the code with Wine, but they could do it on their own... They have access to information the Wine people could never, ever see for legal reasons.
          • "Has the NDAs" means that you're more restricted, not less. It doesn't help unless they also have the sources and documentation... And the APIs don't follow the documentation, anyway. It might be more of a hindrance than a help.
      • How is it all that better for security? Don't all the viruses and spyware just run natively in that situation?
      • Right, because what I really want is my OSX installation to have a registry, installers that put files in 40 different paths, APIs that enable viruses and trojans, and of course, no real .NET support, even though more and more software for Windows is being written in .NET.

        Na, I'm good, but thanks.
        • What if the Windows programs only think they have a shared registry, only think they have put files in 40 different paths, but in reality it is all sitting in a pkg file that is only temporarily merged with a virtual and disposable Windows API environment and can be trashed by the user at any time with no repercussions?

          Oh, and fix the vulnerabilities of the API so the viruses and trojans can't run (or at least alert the user), and add (similarly protected) .NET support.

          Basically, put Windows applications in
          • put Windows applications in a sandbox that only appears to be integrated to the OS (from both the user's and Windows application's perspectives).

            If this were possible (i.e., support all Win XP apps with such improvements in the infrastructure) with a small engineering effort, why would MS not have already done so?

            Apple does not have software engineers with mystical powers compared to MS engineers. What allows their greater agility is that they don't need to support legacy decisions made long ago in Redmond
            • >
              > If this were possible (i.e., support all Win XP apps with such improvements
              > in the infrastructure) with a small engineering effort, why would MS not
              > have already done so?
              >
                    Hahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahaha! ...

                    Wait, you mean that?

            • If this were possible (i.e., support all Win XP apps with such improvements in the infrastructure) with a small engineering effort, why would MS not have already done so?

              There's lots of things that other companies have done and do that Microsoft doesn't. This doesn't imply those tasks are impossible.

              And the ability to isolate software is regularly practiced in computer science and real IT. Chroot jails are an example of this. It's not even that difficult, and now there is software [lifehacker.com] that brings this same

      • You know, I really have to wonder why Apple doesn't do what Cringely suggests here: perfectly transparent XP emulation, on OS X.

        ... because efforts are probably better spent on adding support for something like Xen. Why bother supporting one OS when you can support many? Besides, users have already shown via the purchasing of Soft PC, Virtual PC, Parallels, etc, that they are willing to use "OS in a window"-type software.

        • Why bother supporting one OS when you can support many?
          This is not just "one OS". This is Windows XP we're talking about, arguably the most widespread desktop operating system on the planet, with the most hyped up application base and the most popular Windows OS to date.

          Mac OS X security and desktop environment, on a real Mac, plus all the XP applications you want, minus the cost of the XP license. Dunno, seems like a steal to me.

        • Re: (Score:2)

          by Carthag ( 643047 )
          Why bother supporting one OS when you can support many?

          Do you even know what support means?

          For those not in the know, support basically means, "we will make sure your shit works". How the hell is Apple going to make sure Windows works on their hardware? Honest question. Do you not think that is why they do not support it? The less commitment Apple makes to enabling users to run Windows on their hardware, the less problems they will have as a result of their users running windows on their hardware. This

          • Re: (Score:2)

            by allenw ( 33234 )

            How the hell is Apple going to make sure Windows works on their hardware? Honest question.

            Even from the summary, Apple is already providing drivers for Windows as part of Boot Camp...so they must be doing some sort of qualification already.

            I was looking at it from a different viewpoint, though. Why spend the time building support for APIs that are guaranteed to change with little-to-no warning (just ask IBM!) when you can leverage off of the open source community to provide you with a virtualization la

      • Here's an actual rundown of why Cringely's "Red Box" or "magical transparent emulation/virtualization/compatibility layer" isn't at all practical:

        Unraveling the Red Box Myth [roughlydrafted.com]
        According to proponents of the Red Box Myth, Mac OS X will supposedly soon run Windows software natively, perhaps as soon as Leopard 10.5. They're wrong; here's why.

        Here's why the idea behind running various different types of software doesn't really work in the real world:

        Unraveling the Utopian System that Runs All Software Ima [roughlydrafted.com]

        • Both you (the article you linked at) and a couple of other posters in this thread have mentioned the difficulty of Apple keeping up with Windows XP updates.

          What XP updates?

          First of all, XP SP2 is fairly stable right now. They can take the API and freeze it. (Yes, Apple has the code to XP, including SP2. Read the Cringely article.) No need to upgrade it any further. Most of Microsoft's upgrades are for security reasons anyway, and since Windows apps would presumably run sandboxed in some manner, even a big s

          • Re: (Score:2)

            by DECS ( 891519 )
            Microsoft does plan a Service Pack 3 for XP, which is suposed to be released around the time of Vista. However, SP's are bug fixes & minor updates (similar to Apple's 10.4.n releases). As such, they don't really pose the problem.

            XP isn't difficult to emulate as an "API" because Microsoft is doing updates, but rather because XP is a huge, monolithic, closed uber platform that even Microsoft has lots of trouble updating in a way that does not break somebody's existing code.

            Clearly you didn't read about wh
      • Apple doesn't want it to be perfectly transparent. They want running Windows applications to be possible, but enough of a hassle that most people will prefer to run a real Mac application instead. Also, adding native Windows API support to OS X would require a major effort when it's much simpler just to offer virtualisation.

        Remember how much time Microsoft spends updating their OS? Apple would basically have to duplicate this. Worse, they'd have to do a significant amount of reverse engineering as well, to

  • External drives (Score:5, Interesting)

    by Superblargo ( 953025 ) on Wednesday August 16, 2006 @10:29AM (#15919156) Homepage
    How about support for installing XP on an external drive so that you can use it on more than one Intel Mac or even other PCs? You would think that you could do that already, even though it would most likely have a niche use.
    • I can already here Bill Gates saying "Let's 'buy them out' boys!!!!"
    • That would be so useful! My web development company uses Macs. Obviously we need Windows for testing, so we keep one or two machines running just Windows. It would be so convenient to instead have one or two external drives that we could each bring into our offices as needed. I imagine it's biggest niche would be testers.

      • Re:External drives (Score:3, Insightful)

        by avalys ( 221114 )
        What you need is a virtualization product, like Parallels Workstation or VMWare, that lets you run Windows in a window under OS X.

        You can move and copy the virtual machines to however many machines you want.

        • You can move and copy the virtual machines to however many machines you want.

          Or better yet, just leave the VM image file sitting on a file server somewhere so there'll be absolutely no worries about licensing issues (assuming you've licensed the software in that image file).

        • Re: (Score:2)

          by Senjaz ( 188917 )
          Yes. Virtualisation is the best solution to this problem. Remember Internet Exploder is tied to Windows so you can only have one version of it installed at a time. Being able to run multiple copies of Windows each with it's own version of IE is very useful.

          If you want to run multiple versions of Safari on Mac OS look here: http://www.michelf.com/projects/multi-safari/ [michelf.com]
          There is hosted self-contained builds of Safari using all the released variants of the rendering engine. Credit to Michel Fortin for doing thi
      • I havn'ttried this myslef, but: http://www.dualbootguru.com/bc%20-%20booting%20ext ernal%20hdd.shtml [dualbootguru.com] Only bummer is that you have to create a small NTFS partition on your internal drive. It seems like it is not necessary, but apperantly Windows won't create a pagingfile on an external drive.
        • Windows will create a paging file on any non-networked volume that can be recognized at boot time. However, last time I looked you couldn't turn off the one on the system volume, only reduce it to a megabyte or something. Older versions of windows will let you disable all paging files, but they can't actually run without one. (Hooray for Microsoft.)

          • Re: (Score:1)

            by tag ( 22464 )
            However, last time I looked you couldn't turn off the one on the system volume, only reduce it to a megabyte or something.
            XP gives you three radio buttons in th Virtual Memory settings: Custom size, System managed size, or No paging file. So yes, you can turn it off. It may complain that you won't get debugging info, but I just tried it on my test PC.

            Older versions of windows will let you disable all paging files, but they can't actually run without one.
            98SE can. I've disabled the page file, reb
            • Older versions of windows will let you disable all paging files, but they can't actually run without one.
              98SE can. I've disabled the page file, rebooted, defragged, enabled it & rebooted. No sweat.

              Sorry, I made a serious omission, I meant Windows NT.

        • if you have ram do what you do for a live cd.. disable page file.
      • Parallels Desktop is the logical way to do that.
    • You've got it mixed up. Boot Camp allows you to boot your Mac from a Windows installation natively. Therefore, its hardware dependant, just like a windows installation on regular windows pc. Transplanting one to the other won't work because of the driver differences between the two macs (assuming their not identical macs) Parallels (or some other virtualization) is what you're thinking of. *Virtual machines* can be trasplanted, but not Boot Camp installations of Windows. Interesting to note however, that
      • Crap. Sorry about the formatting guys, in my mac-evangelistic frenzy I must have forgotten about the breaks...
      • Don't forget Product Activation. Assuming you had like hardware that would not cause issues when moving between computers, the activation would prevent this functionality. Unless you had a specially-licensed version of Windows, in which case you are better off buying parallels for your testers and passing a single windows virtual machine around on the external hard disk as you suggested.
      • You cannot boot a G5 from a G3/G4 boot volume, or vice versa. There are different, incompatible files that are installed by the OS installer depending on the CPU in use. For the most part, however, your point that a Mac OS X boot volume will boot several different hardware sets without difficulty is correct, and one of the nicest facets of the Mac from the tech support POV. The only gotchas I have run into are the G4/G5 divide mentioned above, and the occasional new devices which require drivers not include

    • How about support for installing XP on an external drive so that you can use it on more than one Intel Mac or even other PCs?

      XP doesn't support booting off USB, because swap can't be on USB. There are some hacks to do it, but it isn't pretty. Firewire is better, but still not ideal. Also, XP is liable to be extremely unhappy (licensing-wise) with switching to completely new hardware all the time, unless it is the 'corporate' version...so your bit about switching between different intel macs is mostly

    • Agreed; but I think that the whole goal of BootCamp is to lure more people to purchase Apple products by giving them a chance to use the OS that they are used to and to slowly explore OSX in the process.

  • One more sale for Apple today :) (Score:3, Interesting)

    by Rude Turnip ( 49495 ) <valuation AT gmail DOT com> on Wednesday August 16, 2006 @10:40AM (#15919276)
    Well, the enhanced keyboard support will seal the deal for one of my co-workers who has been asking me about my experiences with XP on my Macbook Pro and about the computer in general. That will be three sales under my belt!
    • you try installing XP without any SP or with SP1? i have an XP CD not sure if it includes SP1 or not but i dont want to upgrade to SP2 and get the WGA tool. i only use windows for 1 game anyway everything else i use OSS or free software for. their website says SP2 only however i was wondering if that was just "we support sp2 only" or if it was "install will fail unless you have sp2"

      • Re:One more sale for Apple today :) (Score:1, Informative)

        by Anonymous Coward
        i have an XP CD not sure if it includes SP1 or not but i dont want to upgrade to SP2 and get the WGA tool.

        SP2 doesn't include WGA. If you update through Automatic Updates with the "Notify me before downloading and installing" option you'll be given the opportunity to clear the checkbox for WGA.

        • SP2 doesn't include WGA. If you update through Automatic Updates with the "Notify me before downloading and installing" option you'll be given the opportunity to clear the checkbox for WGA.

          This is true, but with the caveat that only automatic updates will work if you don't have WGA; you can't use the windows update website. Thus if you want any updates you have to set it to download and notify or only notify and then disable installing WGA every time - or you will end up with WGA.

          • I believe you can check off Updates to not ask you to install WGA (until MS decides to change it) as I recall doing that a while back.

            Additionally, you can have your swap file on any partition and it doesn't have to be on your System partition with XP. You just have to set it to No Paging file for the C: drive (assuming XP is on C:)
          • Wait...someone please explain to me what's Evil about WGA. I understand that it has a false positive and false negative rate, and I understand that even though this should be expected of all tools, in the case of WGA any false results is a Bad Thing, but why, if I run WGA and it considers my install legitimate, should I worry about it?
      • It's more of a "we don't support this at all" and "install will fail unless it's SP2".

        I'm not sure what makes the difference, but something does. You can slipstream SP2 into a SP or SP1 disk and reburn it using a program like nLite (http://www.nliteos.com/ [nliteos.com]).
        • "we don't support this at all" - may or may not work. we cant give details. we cant release any information stating we are working on this or have worked on this or tried to see if it works

          "install will fail unless its sp2" - we tried SP1 and if does not work at all. or we made a decision in our design process which stops sp1 from working.
        • A word of caution on using an XP disc that is slipstreamed to SP2...this is what I initially did with my old Dell XP (pre SP) disc...not a "recovery" disc, but an actual XP installation disc that Dell provided. I used Nlite to create an SP2 slipstreamed disc to install Windows XP on my Mac. The installation would only go so far on the Mac and then freeze up, even after updating various components based upon numerous message boards. It's possible that the problem arose since Dell may have rearranged some
      • Boot camp is only "guaranteed" to work with RETAIL XP + SP2, no other version is supported by Apple.
    • The lack of way to right-click using the trackpad, and the lack of a standard Delete key, were my main misgivings about Windows on Mac, and I figured Apple would fix that before final release of Boot Camp. We're buying laptops for all of our full-time faculty next month, and a bunch of the Windows-using folks have already requested MacBook Pros. Now if Apple can just add an Insert key somewhere...
  • I can't wait for the next release, it will be 2 gigs large, crash all the time, and infect your machine with tons of spyware/malware! Just like the real thing! (dux)
  • Any word on better support for Windows 2000?

    I would love to support Win2K and downgrade from WinXP. Something to be said for stability at end-of-life. :-)

    • Re:Windows 2000 support? (Score:1, Informative)

      by Anonymous Coward
      I think the problem is that apple switched to SATA, which is the reason why SP2 specifically is needed, that was the first version to ship with sata drivers and without a floppy drive, you have no other way to get the thing on there.

      I suspect that if you got win2k installed on there with all the appropriate drivers (pull drive, use sata-to-pata convertor, install, install sata driver), then it should at least boot, though the mac driver disk may not.

      • I suspect that if you got win2k installed on there with all the appropriate drivers (pull drive, use sata-to-pata convertor, install, install sata driver), then it should at least boot, though the mac driver disk may not.

        If you used a SATA-PATA bridge, then the drive would be in a different location, and you would get INACCESSIBLE_BOOT_DEVICE when you switched back because NT is stupid like that.

        On the other hand, if you hit F6 right after setup loads, and install a "third-party driver", then I don't

      • you can always add driver support into the 2k install cd.. it isn't that hard
    • Boot Camp is only intended for Windows XP. At least officially, and at least for now. While I'd expect Apple to support Windows Vista once it's left beta I don't expect them to put much effort into supporting Windows 2000.
    • Windows 2000 runs beautifully in Parallels, and the MUCH smaller footprint is a big advantage there. Parallels is quite efficient, why reboot when you can run both concurrently?

  • iSight camera support (Score:3, Interesting)

    by jeffphil ( 461483 ) on Wednesday August 16, 2006 @11:12AM (#15919596)
    Presumably, iSight camera support means that there are windows drivers now.

    Anyone tried an external iSight camera [apple.com] plugged into any old windows machine with the bootcamp driver to see if that works, as well? Previously, the external iSight cameras were OSX only. This may open more sales of iSight for Apple on these items, too.

  • It appears that support for some Mac specific hardware - like the built in iSight cameras in Mac Books, and right-mouse-click functionality with the track pad are big usability improvements in this release.

    Since you won't have to repartition or reinstall to upgrade, this looks like a great update for Mac laptop users
    • So we got right click functionality with the track pad now? So I can 2 finger tap on macbooks and 2 of the 3 macbook pro's and get right click?

  • Apple Boot Camp FAQ updated (Score:4, Interesting)

    by swid27 ( 869237 ) on Wednesday August 16, 2006 @11:57AM (#15920104) Homepage
    The Apple Boot Camp FAQ [apple.com] has also been updated; it has a list of drivers included in 1.1 and notes that several miscellaneous quirks have been fixed (most notably for me, Windows now remembers the correct time settings).
  • Has anyone tried using Boot Camp to multiboot a Mac between Mac OS X, Windows XP, and Linux or other options?

    My new Mac Pro should be arriving this week. I plan to use both Boot Camp and Parallels with it. I'd like as much flexibility to run different OSes as possible.
    • Boot camp is nothing more than a set of Windows drivers. The BIOS emulation layer, which allows other operating systems to boot, is part of a firmware update. Newer machines like the Mac Pro most likely come from the factory with this firmware. So your ability to run Linux or other operating systems will depend on the drivers available for them.
  • Can anyone comment on XP still working fine on the upcoming 64-bit Intel (Merom?) chips that Apple is due to put in their Macbook Pros soon?
    • Still working? Why would XP stop working on Core 2 processors?
      • I'm wondering about the issue of Windows XP working on a 64-bit processor. Would you need to get 64-bit XP or would the regular one run just fine? I'm talking about a machine that would be used in a professional environment among otherwise standardized Dell desktops--so it would have to "just work".
        • The regular WinXP should run just fine, as it has on the wide variety of EMT64/AMD64 processors Intel and AMD have released over the past several years. Core 2 is backwards compatible with IA32 just like every Athlon 64 is. Programs running under standard WinXP aren't be able to use the 64-bit extensions or the additional registers (doing so requires "Windows XP x64 Edition").
  • BootCamp FAQ [apple.com]

    Can I toggle Insert functionality if my keyboard has no Insert key?

    Yes, you can toggle Insert functionality on or off with the Help key if your keyboard doesn't have an "Insert" key.


    Now if only OSX would support the insert toggle in native editors...
    • From the same FAQ:

      During installation, the Windows XP installer asks me to format the Windows partition using NTFS or FAT. Which should I use?

      If the partition is 32 GB or smaller, you can use either FAT or NTFS. If it's larger than 32 GB, then you can only format it using NTFS. Mac OS X can read and write FAT volumes, but only read NTFS volumes. Refer to the Windows XP documentation if you are not sure which best suits your needs.

      Another source [mcmcse.com] says that while Windows XP won't format a volume larger than

      • Here's a partial solution (note I have no Macintosh, so my struggles are Windows Linux):

        IFS ext2/3 drivers [fs-driver.org]

        It's free, it's solid (I also have another driver that I use to convert my Linux swap partition into a usable partition under Windows, where its swap is stored too), and it stores files up to, what, 2 TiB?

        If there's a Mac ext2/3 driver (and there's gotta be, eh?), this might help you out.

        HTH

        -Ed
  • Is it "hold the right apple key and click the trackpad button", which sounds awkward?

    Or is it "tap the right apple key for a click", which sounds, well, why the hell won't they let us do that in OS X? The "two finger tap" trick on the trackpad is cute but, like the Mighty Mouse, it feels like a kind of passive-aggressive assault on people who are still resisting the cult of the single button mouse.

    (STEVE: IT'S OK, PEOPLE DON'T HATE YOU FOR HAVING TWO BUTTONS ON THE NEXT)

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