Dual Boot?, Full story at http://www.physorg.com/news9754.html

http://www.physorg.com/news9754.html

So will we be able to use windows and linux on this system?

It would be almost impossible to prevent Linux, Windows, BSD... from running on these machines it's more of an issue of will they be ported and how much work is necessary.

I don't have any specific knowledge of the HW in the new Mac's to make any more then a guess... but I would suspect that at least Linux & *BSD will be ported (This should happen very quickly I'd guess, as the HW is at least superficially similar to PC) Windows is another thing! If MS ports windows (if porting is even necessary) to the Mac platform it might hurt MS more then help, as more IT shops will be able to "try" a Mac with the option that they can always fall back to windows if it fails! allowing more companies to try a Mac. Apple also has a technology to run windows binaries on on a Mac without windows installed. They say Office (MS's cash cow) runs fine this way.

Personally I think the Mac is a much better system the a windows PC to begin with, but who knows?

Kreagan

PS. I am a Mac/BSD user so my opinions are biased to begin with

yes you can run Linux/Windows and any other x86 os you wish on these machines.
(Solarisx86, BSD, etc.)
and you can do this with un altered versions of those OSes.
The only issue might be hardware driver compatibility which is probably going to be a little harder to provide as Apple will probably not make the necessary drivers for things like its trakpad, firewire, airport and other in-house hardware. (although not an issue for video drivers already provided for Linux/windows by ATI or nVidious.)

This was not completely an issue before on the PPC hardware as Yellowdog linux team was able to reverse engineer much of it, so maybe some of that work can be used towards this purpose.

This is a great thing though cause now you will be able to run the best OS most of the time unless you need to use a windows only piece of software like Autocad.

Huzzah!

Actually they didn't have to reverse engineer much. Darwin (The BSD Unix OS which OS X is made from) had most (if not all) of the hardware drivers source code freely available.

If Apple continues to release Darwin (I have no reason to believe they won't) then that is another Unix type OS available with no porting necessary.