As soon as Apple announced that it is moving to Intel CPUs, the first question on the minds of non-Mac users was, “so, will it boot Windows?” It’s all over my inbox, so I’ll address it as best I can.At present, no, iMac will not boot Windows, and MacBook Pro is the same platform, so it’s also a no. Within 60 days, hackers will have a tedious/ugly procedure for installing Windows on iMac/MacBook Pro and being able to switch between OSes. Eventually, the process will be automated by open source or shareware tools.I believe the process will require using a Windows or Linux machine to burn a bootable image to a DVD, an external hard drive or a network server. The missing piece is support in the Intel Extensible Firmware Interface (EFI) for legacy PC BIOS. The boot ROM in iMac and MacBook Pro are EFI, but they don’t implement a legacy BIOS. That’s understandable; Macs never used a PC BIOS. But Windows expects to interact with a legacy BIOS. The lovely thing about EFI is that it’s open and hackable. Specs, docs, samples and a full reference implementation in source code are downloadable from Intel’s EFI site. Solutions aren’t a matter of if, but when.As far as dual-booting goes, there are lots of ideas floating about, but I’ve got one I haven’t seen: Intel Macs have the ability to hibernate, which Apple calls Safe Sleep. The Mac freezes the system without closing apps or halting processes. It saves the complete contents of RAM plus the machine state to a file on disk, reloads that file into RAM on the next power-up, and sets the machine running again exactly where it left off. That hibernate file is an ordinary POSIX file on a filesystem the Mac’s bootloader loves. Write your custom RAM+state image of a running OS into the hibernate file, set the thaw on reboot flag (or whatever it’s called) and it’ll conceivably load and run whatever’s in that file.If Linux is what you’re after, Linux on iMac/MacBook Pro will take a month, if it hasn’t been done already. Personally, I’d rather skip dual-boot and move straight to direct execution of non-OS X apps in user space. WINE is a fantastic set of headers and libraries that provide a Windows-like foundaton for native apps. Mac On Linux (MOL) hosts PowerPC OS X in PowerPC Linux.Personally, I think this is a job for VMWare. Make gifts of iMacs and MacBook Pros to engineers who have no families. Make VMWare Mac an extra credit, off-hours project. Hell, it’s worth doing as a commercial venture. Microsoft pulls in $379 for Office for every Mac sold to professionals. Most of those professionals already own Windows and Office. So EMC/VMWare can give Mac users a profitable bargain: Customers get the ability to host arbitrary operating systems and their apps on OS X, and to leverage Intel’s virtualization hardware extensions. In return, EMC/VMWare for Mac becomes a de facto add-on for every professional purchase and I’d estimate about a third of consumer purchases. Software Development