01/17/2006, 10:05am, EST

Tuesday, January 17th

OpenOSX ships WinTel 2.0 for Mactels

OpenOSX today began shipping its WinTel 2.0 emulator software with Universal binaries, bringing nearly native emulated x86 performance to Apple's new Intel-based Macs and allowing Mac users to run Microsoft Windows with increased speed. WinTel is designed to be an easy-to-use solution for configuring and utilizing the open-source Bochs software, which allows x86- or Pentium-based operating systems to run on Macintosh computers. OpenOSX WinTel includes 10 ready-to-use disk images of open-source x86-based operating systems which FreeBSD, Red Hat, Linux, FreeDOS and others. WinTel 2.0 has been successfully tested running Windows 95, Windows 98, Windows 2000, Windows NT 4.0, and Windows XP Professional. Wintel 2.0 requires Mac OS X 10.3 or later and is available for $25 via download, while upgrades from previous versions are priced at $15.

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eswinson

Emulate away

01/17, 10:46am, EST

Interesting that it is still "emulating" x86.

Has anyone tried any of the EFI aware linux distibutions on the new Core Duos?

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piracy

OpenOSX is very shady

01/17, 10:54am, EST

They take open source products, package them up (sometimes taking someone else's packaging work), and then sell them, without acknowledgment.

See http://fink.sourceforge.net/pr/openosx.php for an example. Also, I highly, highly doubt that their "Wintel" product is taking anywhere near native advantage of the Intel Macs.

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realestateHunter

It's MacBochs!

01/17, 3:49pm, EST

From the screenshots, WinTel 2.0 is just repackaged MacBochs. I know it was unusably slow on 1 GHz+ Powerbook and I'm curious to see if it really runs that much faster on MacIntel.

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ex2bot

Mactel Emulating?

01/17, 5:40pm, EST

As I understand it, all virtualization software emulates part of the system, even if you are running, say VMWare on Windows "emulating" a version of Windows. The virtualization software creates a virtual machine, so that the operating system thinks it has the machine to itself.

There is a version of Bochs for X86, and likely this version of Mactel for X86 would be near full speed.

I'm not recommending it, because I don't know for sure. I also don't know about the legitimacy of the company, which some people have complained about.

ex2bot

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macentric

It Works, but slowly...

01/18, 10:36am, EST

Well I bought the software yesterday and waited a day to get the link for the download. I am currently attempting to install a copy of Windows XP right now following their tutorial. It does seem to be working, but I am pretty positive that it is working nowhere near native speeds on this brand new Intel iMac.

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ravenz

Installing it right now..

01/18, 1:02pm, EST

Watch this thread for updates.

http://forums.macnn.com/showthread.php?p=2842568&posted=1#post2842568

Photos posted at:

http://homepage.mac.com/ravenzachary/PhotoAlbum1.html

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macentric

Performance Update

01/18, 3:05pm, EST

Its SLOW...... I have been installing Windows XP for the last three hours. I can confirm that the MacBochs binary is an Intel binary. The WinTel front end is not. The performance is not even remotely close to native. Seems like these guys are at it again.

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