[Ham-Mac] MacOSG.com and Intel based iMac

[N1OFZ]

I also ordered a new Intel Mac (17" iMac) and I've been reading the  
thread with some interest.  I also was interested in the dual boot  
aspect but after some research I've come to some conclusions:

- It will be possible to dual boot but not right away.  The new  
machine will have EFI instead of the standard Wintel bios or the  
venerable Apple Open Firmware.  32 bit XP will not work with EFI nor  
does Microsoft have any plans to implement it, however the 64 bit  
version of XP does support EFI as will Vista.  Of course the Core Duo  
chip in the new Mac's are 32 bit so 64 bit XP is out for now.  Grub  
(one of the standard Linux boot loaders) supports EFI so if we can  
get it installed and recognized by EFI it may be possible to get both  
OS's on one drive.  To start this will probably involve setting the  
drive up on a Linux box with grub and moving it back to the Mac later.

- Why do we want to dual boot?  After quite a bit of thought the best  
of both worlds is going to be able to run Windows in an emulator  
without the penalty of emulating the Intel processor.  The best  
(early) bets are going to be VMWare and Wine.  I've run Windows apps  
with Wine (under Linux) with pretty good success and little if any  
speed penalty.  The advantage of this vs. dual boot is that you never  
have to exit the OS X environment to run a Windows app.  I've drawn  
the conclusion that if emulation does not work well, it will be  
better to have a cheap dedicated Wintel PC rather than having to get  
in and out of OS X each time.

Now to throw out a question, anyone know what kind of audio chipset  
these new machine have?  This is going to be very important.   
Currently the majority of the apps I go back to Windows for are sound  
card based applications.  If Apple has chosen a chipset that does not  
have Windows drivers neither dual booting nor emulation is going to  
solve the Windows issue.

Anyone else see it this way?

Dana  N1OFZ