Its kind of funny. Everyone is excited about the new Intel-powered Macs, but perhaps the most excited of them all are the Windows users who want to run Mac OS X and Windows together on one.
Can they? Cant they? They dont know, but boy do they want to find out.
For XP users, the problem is that Apple uses Intels EFI (extensible firmware interface) rather than a BIOS. Windows, generally speaking, cant run on top of EFI.
“EFI?” You ask? This is a layer that sits between your operating systems boot loader and your computers firmware and hardware. Its meant to make computers both easier to manage and configure.
Its also being turned into an open-standard under the name, UEFI (United EFI). And, we all know how allergic Microsoft is to open-standards, dont we?
As for Linux, though, Intel has already provided a native Linux bootloader for EFI: ELILO (EFI Linux Boot Loader). With this you can boot Linux, even Linux that isnt EFI aware, without much trouble.