Only in one instance is there a Dual Boot setup. With the growth and improvements to the Virtual SINC Site, a decision was made to drop Dual Booting and have the users launch the Citrix-Virtual SINC Site to access Windows based software absent from the Macintosh catalog. Getting two OSes on the machines and other odds and ends significantly increased our work load, and complexity. TLT has since stopped Dual Booting for the SINC site computers. We ended up choosing BootPicker since we wanted to make sure we could remotely manage our computers and ensure patches were being applied. So advantage rEFIt/rEFInd for speed and how quickly you can get to the Windows OS since you don’t have to wait for a re-boot. However, BootPicker has the advantage for allowing an admin to remotely manage the computer while it’s sitting at the OS choice window. In fact rEFIt and rEFInd all hand off to the respective boot loaders after a selection is made. REFIt, on the other hand, kicks in before the computer fully boots up. Should the user pick Windows, then the computer shuts down and then re-boots to Windows. Should a user pick Mac OS X, then the picker ends and the login window comes up. BootPicker lets the computer boot up to the Mac OS, and before the login window appears, the picker displays your choice menu, and this is where the computer waits for input. Since rEFIt is no longer being actively developed, the rEFIt code was forked into rEFInd.īootPicker works on the premise that administrators want to be able to have remote management over the clients at all times. If you have good Google skills it will turn up somewhere. I’m sure some copies can be found floating around the Internet.

The first program is called BootPicker, originally written by Michael Bombich, which is no longer supported. But how to accomplish this? At the time we came across two products which could accomplish the task, but unfortunately they each had some tradeoffs. We wanted to give users the ability to pick the OS they wanted to use. I am going to focus on the third item listed for this post.

How we get users to pick which OS they wanted to use.How do we keep the respective OS from seeing the other, since a dormant OS is a weak OS.How do we ensure that both OSes are patched regularly.Initially we had many questions we needed to answer before we could feel good about the Dual Boot solution. This can be accomplished in a few ways, either natively on the hardware (also known as Dual Booting) or via virtualization (through products like VMWare Fusion, and Parallels Desktop.)īack in January of 2008, TLT released it’s first set of Dual Boot Macintosh computers in the SINC Sites. One of these features is the ability to run the Microsoft Windows OS on Apple hardware.

By now, many have figured out that Apple’s switch to Intel chips opened the door to some neat things.

Refind mac