Lest you think the team at OnMac.net (you know, the crowd that brought us the original Windows-on-Mac bootloader) would pack it in now that Apple has moved into their turf with Boot Camp, they've come back with a new hack that allows Boot Camp to be used to triple boot your Mac. That's right: no longer are you limited to a mere two operating systems when you start your Mac. Now, you can have a choice of OS X, Windows XP and the Linux distro of your choice (they went with gentoo). Their solution for this turns out to be fairly straightforward: rather than attempting to hack Boot Camp, they've chained the lilo bootloader to run off of the Windows loader. So, Boot Camp still shows you just two options -- OS X and Windows XP -- but if you choose Windows, you then get a second set of choices, which lets you pick Linux or XP. Now that this is done, we're waiting for someone to go to four: we really want to be able to boot into OS/2 Warp, and we suspect the solution is just around the corner.

So what do you do to followup the launch of both HD DVD and Blu-ray Disc machines? Drop a couple of ultra-portables into the mix, naturally. No, not ultra-mobile PCs, Fujitsu's talkin' ultra-portable with their latest P70S, T70S (pictured) and T70S/V line-up. First up, the P70S which pumps an Intel Pentium M753 (1.20GHz) processor to drive XP Tablet PC Edition on that 8.9-inch display. Rounding out the specs is a 30GB disk, 512MB of RAM in lightweight 990g (2.18-pound) package. The T70S, meanwhile, foregoes the touchscreen but brings a bit more power to the show with a Pentium M773 (1.30GHz) CPU, 512MB RAM, 10.6-inch 1280 x 768 screen, DVD-burner, 60GB disk, and Intel 915GMS video card. The T70S/V then gives the same specs but throws in an external digital (DMB we think) TV tuner for Japan. All-in-all, just a modest bump in specs from what they delivered last year in the T70K/T models. Picture of the T70S/V after the break.

 

We didn't think it was anything but a matter of time, but hey, for those closely monitoring the progress of Windows on Macs, it looks like peeps on the OSx86 Project forums have fully done the deed with Vista on an iMac. We're not about to suppose we could fully get into the nitty gritty right here and now, but it sounds like the trick is to get Vista to stop trying to kill the OS X partition when installing with Boot Camp, an urge which it sounds like can kept at bay by taking out the 200MB EFI partition. But if you're the type of person how wants to go for the gold and not just read about this stuff (which you probably are if you've gotten this far), we suggest actually looking into this a little further before knocking around partitions on your Mac just to get a beta Microsoft operating system up and running, mkay?

[Thanks, Mike and Jon]

While it
probably won’t get nearly as much hype as href="http://www.engadget.com/2006/04/05/boot-camp-lets-macs-run-windows-officially/">Apple’s Boot Camp, the new
beta of Parallels Workstation could actually prove to be more useful for Mac owners than the Apple boot manager.
Parallels Workstation 2.1 Beta for Mac OS X creates a virtual machine on an Intel-based Mac, allowing the owner to
install any guest OS compiled for X86, including Windows XP, Linux or MS-DOS (hey, why not?). This could allow Mac
users who need to run an occasional Windows app to do so without having to reboot first — though they’ll need enough
RAM and processing power to run both OS X and the virtual machine simultaneously. While other apps, including
Microsoft’s Virtual PC, have offered similar functionality for Power PC Macs, they required processor emulation,
seriously undermining performance. By contrast, Parallels Workstation (available as a free beta) is said to provide
"near native" performance, which might be enough for users who need to run Visio, Project,  or one of
the many other Windows-only productivity apps — though gamers will probably still want to use Boot Camp and keep just
one OS running at a time.

[Thanks to everyone who sent this in]

If you want to run Windows on your Intel-based Mac but found narf and blanka's solution a little too intimidating, you now have another option -- and this one's from Apple. The company has released a public beta of a technology called Boot Camp, which will be included in the next version of OS X. As its name implies, Boot Camp is essentially a boot manager, and allows Mac owners to install Windows XP and choose whether to run OS X or Windows at startup. It also includes a selection of Windows drivers for common Mac hardware, along with a utility to let you burn a CD to run the installation and partitioning tools. Yes, you still need your own copy of XP, but it looks like Apple's taken most of the pain out of dual-booting. Great job Steve, but we're sorry to tell you that the $13K bounty's already been won.

[Thanks to everyone who sent this in]