Is Mac Mini support IBM PC compatible?

Hi,

use the free VirtualBox http://www.virtualbox.org/ for that as it supports quite a large number of guest OSes http://www.virtualbox.org/wiki/Guest_OSes

Natively apart from using Apples BootCamp http://www.apple.com/support/bootcamp/ to install Windows there are ways to install Ubuntu Linux https://wiki.ubuntu.com/MactelSupportTeam/CommunityHelpPages on a Mac.

MS-DOS to my knowledge cannot be installed but rather be used with DosBox http://www.dosbox.com/

After all the Mac uses a different partition scheme as (GPT - GUID Partition Table) than MS-DOS or Windows (MBR - Master Boot Record) and thus cannot handle Extended Partitions which limits the number of MBR-compatible partitions on a harddisk to four.

From these four partitions two are already used by OSX itself.

Regards

Stefan

Natively only if the OS knows of and can handle the Mac 'specialties' like GPT and provides the needed Drivers for the hardware components of the Mac.

With VirtualBox (or the commercial Parallels and WMWare Fusion) there are more useable OSes.

Stefan

wilsur,

It is not as if you are installing three different OS options on three separate partitions and then in the setup menu selecting which boot partition to use. With a Mac, you are booting into the Mac operating system and then using translation software.

The whole idea behind the Mac was ease of use. The whole idea behind a PC was to allow technicians to tinker all day. Smart individuals can configure a computer to do just about anything. Dumb people like me just wanted to get a job done with out memorizing Bill Gates' magic commands. "Bad Command" says it all for us old timers. That is why we bought Macs 25 years ago.

The fact that PCs became prevelent was low cost, not efficiency. Consumers went with the lowest cost and not ease of use. So, with the history lesson aside, what is your goal for running PC software on a Mac?

Ji~m

An Intel chip powered Mac can run pretty much any operating system in a Virtualisation solution such as VMWare, Parallels, or VirtualBox. It can also boot directly (using what Apple calls 'BootCamp') in to Windows XP SP2, Windows Vista, Windows 7, (presumably) Windows 8, and most flavours of Linux.

Once you have Windows up and running you can open the normal Command (DOS Prompt) window.

Due to the already mentioned limitations of hard disk partitioning schemes, you cannot have all these operating systems available for direct booting on the same hard disk. You could have them all available via a Virtualisation solution and even have them all running simultaneously in a Virtualisation solution. If you are wanting to directly boot in to an operating system and you have for example Mac OS X and Windows 7, then you can choose which to boot in the following ways -

• In Mac OS X open System Preferences, then click on Startup Disk and select either the Mac OS X or Windows/Linux partition.
• Immediately after turning on your Mac, hold down the Option (Alt) key on the keyboard and keep it held down until you get a list of bootable drives on screen, then select the one you want.

Note: It is also possible on a Mac to boot from a CD or DVD containing an operating system, in Linux speak these are called LiveCDs. You would hold down the letter C (for CD) on the keyboard immediately after turning your Mac on.

John,

Nicely summarized!

Ji~m