By now, many have figured out that Apple’s switch to Intel chips opened the door to some neat things. One of these features is the ability to run the Microsoft Windows OS on Apple hardware. 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.)

Back in January of 2008, TLT released it’s first set of Dual Boot Macintosh computers in the SINC Sites. Initially we had many questions we needed to answer before we could feel good about the Dual Boot solution. Some of the issues were:

1. How do we ensure that both OSes are patched regularly.
2. How do we keep the respective OS from seeing the other, since a dormant OS is a weak OS.
3. How we get users to pick which OS they wanted to use.

I am going to focus on the third item listed for this post.

We wanted to give users the ability to pick the OS they wanted to use. 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.

The first program is called BootPicker, originally written by Michael Bombich, which is no longer supported. I’m sure some copies can be found floating around the Internet. If you have good Google skills it will turn up somewhere.

The other item was rEFIt. Since rEFIt is no longer being actively developed, the rEFIt  code was forked into rEFInd.

BootPicker works on the premise that administrators want to be able to have remote management over the clients at all times. 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. Should a user pick Mac OS X, then the picker ends and the login window comes up. Should the user pick Windows, then the computer shuts down and then re-boots to Windows.

rEFIt, on the other hand, kicks in before the computer fully boots up. In fact rEFIt and rEFInd all hand off to the respective boot loaders after a selection is made.

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. rEFIt/rEFInd don’t allow for that.

We ended up choosing BootPicker since we wanted to make sure we could remotely manage our computers and ensure patches were being applied.

TLT has since stopped Dual Booting for the SINC site computers. Getting two OSes on the machines and other odds and ends significantly increased our work load, and complexity. 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.

Only in one instance is there a Dual Boot setup. There is a Macintosh teaching station connected to a SMART board. Running the SMART tools with the Virtual SINC Site layered over the Mac OS, proved to be a bit cumbersome. Since BootPicker wasn’t officially supported anymore, to get the user to reboot into Windows, the user uses a special account to log into the Mac, which then reboots the computer to Windows.