It is official: There is a community-developed and tested, unsupported hack that sets up an Intel-based Mac to dual-boot between OS X and 32-bit Windows XP SP2 and, it’s presumed, Windows 2003 Server as well. It isn’t hard to do; the most involved part is burning the bootable install media.The home site for the dual-boot hack is very detailed, with lists of tested applications, downloadable drivers and procedures for working the hack from a requisite second machine running Windows, OS X or Linux/BSD. Variations in the procedures and outcomes highlight the fact that Intel-based Macs are not identical.I can’t lay out the details any better than the site does, so I won’t try. I will, however, explain why this isn’t something for non-gearheads to get excited about just yet: You’ll lose data, now and later. You wipe the disk clean going in, create two partition tables, one overlaying the other, and alter your legitimate copy of Windows XP so that the Mac can see it and boot it from its Extensible Firmware Interface. Oh, and fixes and version upgrades released by either Microsoft or Apple can break the hack. That will probably make Windows vanish as a boot option. There are no drivers for display backlights, keyboard backlights, cooling fans, Mac’s weird Delete key, and worst of all, the ATI display adapter in MacBook Pro and iMac. The ATI GPU apparently functions in framebuffer mode, though, and on a 16-lane PCI Express link the performance isn’t bad. But 3-D rendering is software-only, and OpenGL isn’t there at all. Nobody’s figured out how to install Windows to an external hard drive yet. I can imagine a shortcut to a solution to the ATI driver muddle, if one hasn’t already been found. Windows gamers have a patcher that tricks the installer for ATI’s universal graphics driver, which covers all Radeon models, into seeing a Mobility Radeon as a desktop card. ATI distributes Mobility drivers only to OEMs, and they’re always several releases behind ATI’s best. Perhaps a similar hack could fool the ATI universal graphics driver intaller into seeing the Macs’ OEM GPUs as one of ATI’s mass-market models. The Windows patch works beautifully. There’s nothing unlawful about this dual-boot hack, but its vulnerablity to ordinary OS fixes makes it impractical beyond experimentation. If you do execute the hack, install XP on a FAT32 partition so OS X can read and write it. That way, when an OS fix takes Windows off the Mac’s boot menu, you can recover the data. Software Development