Three days in, I can say with certainty that Boot Camp not only works as advertised, it sets a new standard for dual-boot solutions. Dual booting is too gearheaded, too ugly to set up for Joe User to get his mind around, and yet where the Mac is concerned, Joe belongs to one of the groups most in need of Boot Camp’s capabilities. Yes, I know that Windows and Linux “automate” dual-boot. No, they really don’t, at least not with the class, completeness and simplicity of OS X’s Boot Camp Assistant.I made an error in my previous entry on this topic. I said that Boot Camp Assistant creates a partition that doesn’t show up in Disk Utility, prompting all kinds of questions in my mind about just how Apple did it. In a briefing on Wednesday, Apple cleared that up: The partition is genuine Apple native partition, but it doesn’t show in Disk Utility until it is formatted. I learned from onmac.net, which beat Apple to the punch on booting Windows XP on a Mac, that the Mac’s partition table isn’t compatible with the PC BIOS/DOS standard. onmac’s solution required maintaining two partition tables. Apple makes this painless and automatic.Boot Camp’s dynamic, non-destructive repartitioning is more than a slick trick to support installing and booting WIndows. It’s the essential foundation for building logical volume management into Leopard. The ability to grow and shrink HFS volumes is a desktop convenience, but it’s an enterprise necessity. The required firmware update installs a plug-in for the Intel Macs’ Extensible Firmware Interface that mocks up the old-fashioned BIOS and device discovery that Windows, and most other x86 operating systems, require. Apple explicitly decided not to include this compatibility layer in its EFI implementation, with the reasonable justification that the Macs would never need to boot anything but OS X. If you wanted Windows, Apple said, you’ll have to work that out yourself.The onmac project had it worked out, but not cleanly enough to trust in production use. Boot Camp is trustworthy because it doesn’t rely on hacks to Windows to work. Whereas onmac requires burning a special Windows XP install CD with the hacks in place, Boot Camp boots the standard-issue Windows XP SP2 install disc directly. The after-install driver disc that Boot Camp Assistant burns prior to the install contains drivers for the Mac’s odd gathering of devices. That driver disc is packaged as a Windows MSI, so it’s a double-click install that uses Windows’ own Installer.Snags that hung up the onmac project–the lack of open-source drivers for the Macs’ Radeon X1600 chips, the non-standard Delete key (which is where Backspace should be) and the failure to develop support for brightness keys–are all addressed by Boot Camp. I was pleased to find that the video drivers on Apple’s Boot Camp driver disk are ATI’s standard Windows set, replete with the chip-specific added tabs on the Control Panel’s Display Properties dialog. All you need to take away from this is that Boot Camp works. Moving Windows over to a friend’s Mac is now as easy as dragging out a partition, installing Windows and using Windows migration tools to pull in the other machine’s files and settings. Let them flip between Windows and OS X, and soon, their exploration of OS X will turn wiping out that Windows partition into your next requested migration task.Honestly, people. Boot Camp overcomes the Windows objection. And what Boot Camp doesn’t do…(read the next entry) Software Development