[KLUG Advocacy] Apple using Intel chips ...

[Adam Tauno Williams]

> > Then I found a company that sold replacement internal DVD drives for
> > Powerbooks, so I ordered one, removed about a thousand tiny screws  
> > on my Powerbook, replaced the internal CDROM drive with the DVD drive.
> > It's standard ATAPI, so no problem, right?  WRONG!!!  Mac OS-X  
> > (10.3 at
> > that time) didn't see the drive at all.  Since I had my Powerbook dual
> > booted, I booted Ubuntu Linux, and it found the drive without a  
> > problem.
> Yeah, that is a problem, but it comes from Apple only supporting  
> their chosen hardware. Was it a Panasonic, Sony or maybe Fuji drive?  
> Apple mainly uses Panasonic and Sony drives.

A Linux/PowerPC guy told me that the Mac firmware actually contains a
code that indicates the model/revision, etc... And the Mac operating
system uses this as a key to a hashtable to indicate what hardware is
where.  So it doesn't really probe as Linux does - it expects.

Whether this is true, partially true, or my mistaken understanding of
what he said; I don't know.

> >> That's hard to do.  Is VMware seemless?  Is WINE seemless?  Not by a
> >> long shot.
> > I think it can be done.  Maybe "seamless" isn't the correct word.  How
> > about a nice GUI installer (with a lot of usable defaults), and after
> > that Windows [apps] just run ...

I think it can be done too, but doesn't mean it is easy. :)

> It would be lovely to be able to run WIndoze apps on Mac OS X without  
> loading windows first. Right now there is the Darwine project, which  
> is mixing an x86 emulator with Wine, but it hasn't done much, yet.

Thats because it is an enourmous task.  Look at bochs, for instance.