linux/unix
04/05/2006, 8:15pm, EDT
Wednesday, April 5th
eWEEK reviews Apple's Boot Camp
eWEEK has posted the first review of Apple's 'Boot Camp', a beta technology released on Wednesday that will be included with the next release of Mac OS X Leopard. The review talks about the file format choices for users, but notes that data exchange between the operating systems is limited: "When we installed XP on our Mac, we had the option of choosing between the two, but we stuck with NTFS. Windows XP operates just fine on FAT32, but Microsoft defaults to NTFS with good reason—NTFS supports more granular access rights, built-in file compression and encryption, partitions larger than 32GB and file system journaling, among other features. Once we'd completed our Mac-to-Windows-and-back journey, we could read our NTFS-stored files, but we could not change them or write new files on our Windows partition. The Linux kernel ships with read-only support for NTFS, as well as and experimental read-write support." The review concludes that despite the limitations, Boot Camp offers Apple hardware buyers more choices: "We welcome this gesture of openness."
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If you are planning on dual-booting and sharing files, wouldn't it be prudent to use FAT32 for your filesystem?
If I needed this Boot Camp feature, it would be to run a necessary app that ran only in Windows XP. I would boot back into Mac OS X as soon (and as often) as possible, so this limitation with NTFS would not be an issue.
"We welcome this gesture of openness."
More like a gesture of removing the last excuse for people who like Macs (and want to buy one) but are afraid to make the leap up to Mac OS X because of their real or perceived dependence on Windows.
As for these comments:
that is read/write from both Mac OS X and Windows XP, can't you just make a third partition that is "FAT32" for shared data? Perhaps that would be difficult to do "on the fly" without trashing the current partition scheme.
No need for a partition, just use a USB thumb-drive.
I thought macs were supposed to be intuitive and make you more productive. These solutions sound like something MS would come up with. If you were running both, do you really want to have to perform multiple steps just to open a file?
Hell, if you're going to say these options, why not the obvious. Buy another mac, set it up to share directories to all users, and treat it as a file server you have to copy the files between.
The key that makes Macs so great is the fact that their awesome OS JUST WORKS on great hardware.
If you use the two OS's separately (no file-sharing), you can use the superior NTFS format, right?