And so, for a bit more than €1,000 I got a brand new Mac Mini with the latest versions of the main desktop operating systems. And then I downloaded an image of the installation disk for 64-bit Fedora 14, which is free, of course. I bought a Windows 7 Professional licence from the Spanish Microsoft online store which set me back €309. Unlike Apple with Mac OS X and non-Apple hardware, Microsoft will allow you to install Windows on any computer that can run it. So I decided to go the whole hog and installed the three operating systems.
However, I thought that for my purposes it was safer to have three full installations and avoid any possible pitfalls and glitches due to the emulation/compatibility layer.
There are good emulators like VMWare Fusion or Parallels Desktop, and you can also run Windows programs on a Mac using the Wine compatibility layer software. Note that having a full installation for each operating system is not really necessary in order to run Windows and Linux programs on a Mac. I did this on a Mac Mini, but I expect everything should be the same for other Mac computers. I managed to do this thanks to a couple of interesting articles I found on the web (see the references section below), but I came across a few problems along the way, so I thought I would write down a detailed description of the steps I followed for future reference, and for the benefit of others who may want to do the same. In this post, I’m going to explain how I did set up the triple boot. Now that I’ve been using it for three months, I am quite happy with it, especially because I installed Windows 7 and Linux (Fedora 14) on it, so I can use it for cross-platform development, switching between operating systems without the need to have separate machines. I didn’t really want to get a new monitor and a keyboard and a mouse that would join the stockpile of hardware lying around, so the Mac Mini concept made sense. Now the Mac Mini is just a box that you connect to a monitor, and this was the perfect arrangement for me since I already have a monitor and several keyboards and mice.
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