New Mac Os 10

[ichigosbankai7002]

Chris Pirillo on his youtube page said that the New Os 10 that's out can

run windows and Linux inside of it. There's some program that let's you

run it on there Os . I was thinking, Do you think Linux that has been around

since the stone age works better inside of another Os?

Let's hear what you think. By The way Chris Pirillo was the Guy on Tech Tv.

For Myself I think that it might work alittle better inside of another Os, but you

never know.

[YoruichiToRukia]

It's not strictly true that OSX can run other OS's inside it. Rather it allows other Virtual Machine emulator programs to run that, in turn, run the second, hosted, OS.

Even old non Intel Macs could do this[1] however in this case these emulators (such as Virtual PC and Apple's own Motorola 680x0 chipset emulation software to allow PowerPC macs to run pre Power PC programs) the emulator had to do hardware emulation (that is the emulation software presented to the hosted OS a "pretend" software abstraction of the Intel hardware required to run WIndows or Intel Linux). This was always an option of last resort as the need to do hardware emulation meant that the hosted OS (windows/Linux) ran at less than 50% (and in my experience less than 30%) compared to running it natively on it own "real" hardware.

These days there are a number of options for hosting alternative OS's on Intel Macs that, unlike hardware emulation ... how shall we say? "kick arse"? "totally rock"?, "fully sick"????

Firstly there is Bootcamp which is NOT virtualisation but a true native hardware boot environment were the machine is actually booted directly in to Windows (or Linux) exactly the same way as any normal non Mac Intel machine. Of course while your doing this you don't have any access to the Mac OSX environment. However you DO get full 100% optimised performance from your Windows/Linux operating system, i.e. it will run just as fast as a similarly spec'ed non Apple box.

The second is Virtualisation and there are a few ways of doing this.

1: "Parallels" is the most common Virtual machine program for mac, the other is "Fusion". Both of these programs trick the hosted OS to think it is being presented a "clean" exclusive hardware environment while protecting the host OS (Mac OS X) from it's influences (in fact Mac OSX thinks Parallels is just another program that makes all the normal program requests - "hey I need memory", "hey I need access to the network" etc, etc, etc)
The performance hit of this is about 15% to 20% which means that within the virtualised environment your hosted OS and it's applications will run a little slower than if it was running natively one the same hardware (ie through bootcamp). This is more than tolerable for most users and if you have decent amount of memory in your machine and a faster MacBook/iMac it will run faster than a budget whitebox Intel.


2: The second type of virtualisation (which is NOT emulation[2]) does away with the concept of emulating a clean hardware environment and actually uses reverse engineered Windows API hooks to "trick" Windows applications in to thinking they are running in Windows (well written user programs should really never actually talk directly to the hardware or the core OS rather they "negotiate" with it via API's (Application Programming Interface).
The two options here for Intel Macs that I know of are "WINE"[2] and "Crossover".
In theory if a program written to run in Windows ONLY uses standard Windows API's to talk to the OS and request resources such as hardware access and you can reverse engineer ALL the API's that that program needs you can actually, for real honest to god (well almost), run Windows applications inside Mac OSX on an Intel Mac - this is pretty much exactly the same process that WINE on Linux does and many Linux users use WINE to use/play Windows only applications (office) and games (WoW, lineage) further more it can even allow Linux to use Windows drivers for hardware that Linux doesn't have native drivers for (Our Linux box at home uses WINE to run a Windows Wireless card driver to access our WiFi base station).
It's cool, it's fast and it has infinate geek creadability :p :p ;)
There is a catch though..... the list of programs you can run under API environments is limited to the number (and quality) of the non Microsoft written, reverse engineered API set, so while, say, Office might run Adobe Photoshop for Windows may not launch, or may launch then it may crash in a burning heap if at any point it tries to access a non existent or poorly writen API.... BTW: that's a theoretical example, maybe Photoshop For Windows DOES run fine under WINE (ohhhh poet and I didn't know it) AND the list of supported applications grows by the day as they increase and improve the API sets included




[1] in fact in the case of early PowerPC Mac + OSX combinations this was the only time Apple OSX really DID natively run an OS emulator - this was for running the old pre OSX Mac OS 9 to allow you to run Mac "classic" applications that had not been ported to OSX. OSX will also run X Windows but as this is part of it's BSD heritage it's not strictly speaking "Virtualisation"

[2] WINE is one of those nerdy self referential acronyms so beloved by the sandals and beads set of the computer sciences scene... WINE = WINE Is Not an Emulator", as it does not emulate either the hardware or the full hosted OS

lastly.... Emulation and Virtualisation are soooooo not new ideas or even remotely a recent technology ..... VM ware exists for all the major OS's and has done for years, Run Linux inside Windows... sure thing, run Linux inside Windows inside Mac OSX? ah huh but only if you like waiting and waiting and waiting.

and just to show you I'm one of the forum's "Old Farts" when I started in computers in the early/mid 80's the first machine I programed on was an IBM mainframe computer running IBM VM 370 operating system that was first released in 1973 - the VM in VM370 stands for Virtual Machine as every application ran in it's own virtualised environment. VM 370 was developed from VM 360 that was written in the mid 1960's (before I was born BTW, old fart I maybe but not THAT old)