Testing Operating Systems
I have been working with both Vista from Microsoft and Leopard from Apple in recent days. Now I can’t comment on what is inside because I am bound by NDA’s on both fronts. But while installing Leopard this weekend I noticed how much easier they made it to test with one machine.
With my Vista testing I took and extra machine I had laying around and installed Vista on it. I had to do this because it likes to take over your system. I might have been able to figure out some kind of dual boot scenario, but didn’t want to mess up my machine trying.
By contrast I downloaded Leopard, plugged in an external usb hard drive. Booted the installer and installed the OS to the external USB hard drive. No chance of messing up my production work environment. Just plug in the USB Drive hold down ALT when I boot and choose the external USB drive and boot Leopard. Reboot and choose my old Tiger volume and I’m back to my production box again. Not to mention I have bootcamp’d my Macbook, so I can boot Windows also.
Takes notes MS, that’s how multi-boot should work.
November 16th, 2006 at 6:19 pm
We here in the office have a little project that we are going to look into doing. That project is try to get OS X installed on an intel system. I did some research and the only way i found to do it is by using Virtual PC or a similar program. My question to you, is can it actually be installed on PC hardware w\o virutallization?
November 22nd, 2006 at 11:28 am
I have heard of OSX being install on standard PC hardware if you have the right hardware. Getting it to run on a Dell you bought a year or so ago, probably not going to happen. Since Apple has converted to the Intel platform though, you could invest in new computers being Mac and dual boot them to windows or run parallels to boot OSX and Windows at the same time. Parallels is kinda like Virtual PC except you can actually dedicate a core of your dual core process to it, and it is supposed to run pretty fast.