For those of you who really love your classic Mac setup, you can run MacOS 9 on an Intel Mac thanks to a program called Sheep Shaver by Gwenole Beauchesne. This isn't that new (Sheep Shaver has been around for a while, and the Intel transition's been covered a lot), but for those of you who need a tutorial, you can read the steps here (just click on the Full Article link below).

Of course, performance may vary depending on your system.

And here's a bit more about Sheep Shaver from its documentation:

• SheepShaver runs Mac OS 7.5.2 thru MacOS 9.0.4
• PowerPC G4 emulation on non-PowerPC platforms, direct execution otherwise
• Basic but portable JIT engine (x86, x86_64, mips)
• Copy and paste of text between MacOS and the host OS
• File exchange with the host OS via a Unix icon on the Mac desktop
• Color video display with support for run-time resolution switching
• Run-time depth switching from 1 bpp to current host depth settings
• Native QuickDraw 2D acceleration for BitBlt and FillRect operations
• CD-quality stereo sound output
• Networking: SheepShaver supports Internet and LAN networking via Ethernet and PPP with all Open Transport compatible MacOS applications

Download: [Sheep Shaver]

A new version of the popular relational database application for Macs has been released for those of you running a Mac with an Intel core processor. The Firebird 1.5.3 SuperServer version for that platform was released just a couple of days ago, with those who own Intel Macs probably jumping up and down when they heard the news.

Firebird is a relational database offering many ANSI SQL standard features that runs on Linux, Windows, and a variety of Unix platforms. Firebird offers excellent concurrency, high performance, and powerful language support for stored procedures and triggers. It has been used in production systems, under a variety of names since 1981.

With the success of the Intel Macs it's hard to see why it has taken so long for Firebird to be Intel Mac compatible, but we cannot complain as the moment is now here.

Download: [Firebird v1.5.3 for Intel Macs]

If you're living on planet Earth, regardless of whether you are a Mac fanatic or not, you most probably have heard of Boot Camp. If you haven't, well, welcome to planet Earth and let me brief you on what you've been missing.

Boot Camp lets you install and run the Windows XP operating system on Mac. This ingenious application will burn a CD with all the Mac-specific drivers for Windows - graphics, networking, audio, AirPort wireless, Bluetooth, the Eject key (on Apple keyboards), and brightness control for built-in displays. This CD will also install a Startup Disk control panel for Windows.

Now that you have knowledge on what the community has been buzzing about for a while, here's another news for you and the whole Boot Camp lookers-on as well: Apple has just released a new Boot Camp public beta installer.

Sadly, Apple did not divulge what was new in this release. If you do get to try this out, please be kind enough to share the updates with us all via the comments below.

Needed to run Boot Camp are the following:

• Mac OS X 10.4.6 or later
• Intel-based Mac
• The latest firmware update for your Intel Mac
• A genuine installation disc for Microsoft Windows XP, Service Pack 2, Home or Professional (no multi-disc, upgrade or Media Center versions)
• A blank recordable CD

Download: [Boot Camp public beta installer]

iPartition is an application that repartitions your Mac's HD without reformatting it. This way, you don't lose valuable date or spend a lot of time backing them up. With its intelligent partitioning, there is no need to manually reorganise your HD to make space to enlarge a partition.

iPartition supports all types of hard disk, including removables like Zip disks and external FireWire or USB disks. It also works with Apple and GUID partition schemes with the ability to convert between the two schemes.

iPartition reorganizes the HD for:

• Installing other operating systems
• Performing a rolling operating system upgrade
• Separating data and applications
• Limiting disk space usage

System Requirements for iPartition:

• Mac OS X 10.3.7 or later (including Tiger), 450MHz PowerPC or better or Intel Mac, 512MB RAM.

iPartition is available via download for about $50.00and comes with the iDefrag Lite disk compaction tool. It is compatible with Boot Camp on Intel Macs and won't break bootable OS 9 partitions.

CodeWeavers has recently announced the arrival of their newest product, CrossOver Mac. In case you aren't familiar with CrossOver, it is CodeWeavers' latest Windows-compatability product  intended for Intel Mac OS X machines. This one will allow Mac users to run their favorite Windows applications seamlessly on their Mac, without the need for a Windows OS license of any kind.

Pricing will be at $59.95 for single-user licenses, with volume and educational discounts available. CrossOver Mac will support a number of Windows applications to run natively within Mac OS X using Wine, enabling the user to run Windows applications without having a copy of Windows installed on their system. It will ship between July-August 2006.

Codeweaver's solution differs from solutions like Apple's Boot Camp and Parallels Desktop since it does not require a copy of Windows to run the Windows applications. Also, applications will be able to run side by side with their Mac OS X counterparts, whereas virtualization solutions must be contained within a "Windows window" or the machine must be rebooted in the case of Boot Camp. The bad part of the bargain is that only a limited number of applications will be supported, whereas dual booting can support any Windows application, and virtualization can support most non-3D intensive application.

You read that right. At least that's what CNET's Daniel Begun says. He ran a series of tests comparing the performance of Windows XP SP2 on an Intel Mac using Apple's Boot Camp Public Beta (which gives users a dual-boot system), Windows XP on Parallels Desktop for Mac (which allows users to run both OSs at the same time and seamlessly switch back and forth between them), and Mac OS X Version 10.4.6. All these were installed on a 17-inch MacBook Pro with a 2.16GHz Intel Core Duo processor, 2GB of DDR2 SDRAM and an ATI Radeon X1600 graphics chip.

The CNET labs ran a few of their own benchmarks on the MacBook Pro to see how the three compared in terms of how the applications ran on each. Their test comprised attempting to process images using Photoshop CS2, running Microsoft Office 2003, encoding iTunes, playing Quake 4, and just plain booting each of the systems up.

I'll spare you the gory details; suffice to say that XP-on-Parallels only beat the others in the boot time test. But as Begun says, "This also just goes to show the danger of drawing too many conclusions from this type of testing... If we spent more time tweaking Parallels, we probably could have beefed up its overall performance." Begun and the lab testers were won over by Parallels' overall stability, usability and the ease of switching between OSs it affords users - its performance shortcomings were negligible given its advantages. Sounds A-OK to me, what do you guys think?

Do you like booting into windows for the occasional PC program but hate how hard it is to hold the option key down? Well then today is your lucky day because govdavid has released Boot Camp Sargent v.1 Beta. Boot Camp Sargent is an Applescript program that reboots your mac into either Mac or Windows. It also comes with a script to reset your start up disk to Mac OSX so you don't have to go into your system prefs to do it.

All you have to do to install these scripts is to Drag them to your computer, and into the dock (or other launcher) if you wish.

[Download Boot Camp Sargent .1 Beta]

For a select few, that is.

Most of those who installed Warcraft III in their Intel Macs experienced game crashes. Sometimes the Frozen Throne expansion crashes.

jlukas tells us how he was able to install Warcraft III and play it without it crashing. He had previously tried installing it but like most Intel Mac users experienced, the game crashed. He saw a notification message from Console.app saying that loading LiveType.component failed.

What he did was delete LiveType.component for Warcraft III to work. He also did some debugging and did these steps to make the game work:

• Navigate to /Library/Quicktime/
• Create and Archive of LiveType.component
• Delete LiveType.component
• Empty your trash

Hopefully this will work for some Intel Mac users dealing with the same problem.

A couple weeks ago I posted about my Boot Camp Fantasy. It seems that someone has hacked a similar functionality. Linked below is the video of it on YouTube. Basically they used Parallels to run the 'other' operating systems within their OS X environment. Then they fiddled with Virtue - an open source Virtual Desktop app - so that a cubed transition to a next desktop would reveal the operating system they want to work with.

Looks pretty sweet! I wonder what the hardware specs are on the Intel Mac Mini they're using. I'd imagine the RAM is way up there... Anyhow - looks cool, and I bet it works pretty nicely for them as well. Thanks for making my fantasy a reality (sort of)!

An engineer from Apple Computer pointed out that we should not put much hope on easily running Windows on Intel Mac.

Although the Mac fans have been hoping that the incoming Windows Vista would be able to run on a Mac easier than the Windows XP, since Vista will be introducing the support of EFI (Extensible Firmware Interface) besides the normal BIOS support, Apple Senior Software Architect Cameron Esfahani said he only know that the EFI will be present only in 64-bit versions of the Windows Vista. However, the current Intel Macs are all equipped with 32-bit Intel CPUs. Also, he pointed out that the implementation of Mac's EFI doesn't have much legacy support for the Windows system.

Apple won't stop users from trying to run Windows on Macs, but users should not put any hope on Apple's support on this. And on the other hand, Microsoft has stated that the initial release of the Windows Vista won't have EFI support at all.