boot interface for boot camp?

[JonM1827]

I wouldn't have any idea as to where to start making something like this, but I was wondering if there was a way to make a nice boot interface like the XOM file had or something like refit...

Just make something that you can bless that pics the partition to boot from....
maybe :p

Sorry if thats stupid I honestly have no idea what I'm talking about... just thought something that looked good would be nice

Thanks in advance
-Jon

[bohrhead]

You can just change the icons for your volumes in the finder to anything you want. These icons show up in the boot menu.

[diamondsw]

You can just change the icons for your volumes in the finder to anything you want. These icons show up in the boot menu.

But not for FAT32 or NTFS partitions. :(

[nextrance]

It isn't stupid, but I think most would agree that the last thing we should be doing is hacking Apple's provided solution. If BootCamp doesn't meet your needs projects like XOM and refit still exist.

I'm not trying to trivialize your request, but I think the BootCampers here would be better served by developers investing time in getting Linux and Vista booting first. You go after these kinds of touchups after you have the big stuff finished.

[JonM1827]

No I understand what you are saying...
but I wasn't under the impression that you would need to hack the software...
I just thought that you could make an efi file that you could just bless, and all that file would do is pick a partition to boot from and look pretty :p

I don't know if this is possible, but if it was and if it isn't hard to do.... then it would be awesome, at least I think so...

Thanks in advance for any consideration
-Jon

and also I agree... linux and vista should come first...
I just thought that it might be easy (for the boot loader)... but what do I know

[nextrance]

Who knows.. it may be something simple. I'd actually like some customizability for the bootloader myself, but I'm guessing that there'll be another public beta of BootCamp - before Leopard ships - that'll offer us another taste of what Leopard will do. If I had to place a bet, I'd say the next version will probably make the interface a little more flexible, a little prettier, and come with built-in support for Vista and Linux. When Leopard ships, that's when we'll get OS-level virtualization.

[JonM1827]

If I had to place a bet, I'd say the next version will probably make the interface a little more flexible, a little prettier, and come with built-in support for Vista and Linux. When Leopard ships, that's when we'll get OS-level virtualization.

Thanks a lot for the info... I guess I'm just impatient :p
Im excited to see what both apple and XOM have in store for us...

-Jon

[chrisp]

If I had to place a bet, I'd say the next version will probably make the interface a little more flexible, a little prettier, and come with built-in support for Vista and Linux.
Personally, I don't think we'll see official Vista and Linux support any time soon. Apple has little commercial interest in supporting Linux, and doing so would require quite a lot of work. (The Linux camp tends to have a high proportion of individualists.) As for Vista, there's not much point in explicitly supporting a beta OS right now. A good strategy would be to get the firmware portion right in time for Leopard final, then publish a download of Macintosh drivers for Vista around the time Vista ships to the general public.

Anyway, the current development snapshot of rEFIt supports Boot Camp, but only through a workaround that requires an additional reboot. (It's fully automatic, but it takes some time.)

If you want any EFI application (rEFIt or otherwise) to chain-load Windows directly via Boot Camp, we'll first have to get some technical documentation from Apple. Apple solicits feed back on Boot Camp, so you could ask politely(!) for a developer TechNote that describes an EFI interface to call to activate the CSM.

[diamondsw]

Personally, I don't think we'll see official Vista and Linux support any time soon. Apple has little commercial interest in supporting Linux, and doing so would require quite a lot of work. (The Linux camp tends to have a high proportion of individualists.) As for Vista, there's not much point in explicitly supporting a beta OS right now. A good strategy would be to get the firmware portion right in time for Leopard final, then publish a download of Macintosh drivers for Vista around the time Vista ships to the general public.

Agreed. My understanding is that Linux distros will work fine, once they deal with the disk partitioning correctly (either ignore it or at least read it and modify it properly). Gentoo is already up and running, and that seems to be just because the install process begins after disks are set up, whereas any other distro tries to handle that itself (and fails). Probably won't be in Ubuntu 6.04 or Fedora Core 5, but I'll bet that Ubuntu 6.10 and Fedora Core 6 support the Intel Macs and their new firmware fully.

[h2oboy]

I would like to find a way to stop the boot process much like the xom.efi did at the selection of OS instead of having to hold down option on startup. As a lab admin, this would be an easy way for my users to select which OS they would boot into.