Stephen Withers
Tuesday, 29 July 2008 13:09
Opinion and Analysis
Page 1 of 2
"The lady doth protest too much," said one of Shakespeare's characters. So what are we to make of RSOL PC saying that even though its Jive Series PCs will run a modified version of Mac OS X, customers shouldn't do so?
RSOL PC (that company name seems an unfortunate choice to anyone with a British or Australian ear, even if it doesn't have the same connotations in its US home) has announced a series of computers based on generic components but is playing up the potential for running a variety of operating systems.
The specs are pretty typical - 2.4GHz Core 2 Duo, 500G hard drive, DVD burner, 2G RAM, nVidia GeForce 7300GS video card, Gigabit Ethernet and so on - and the only operating systems the company is actually selling are Windows XP and Vista. Fedora or Ubuntu Linux are available as factory options as a service to customers.
The RSOL Jive is priced from $US628, excluding monitor and operating system.
In an apparent effort to distance the company from Psystar's legal woes, a RSOL spokesperson said ""We've made it clear that our company and Apple, Inc are not affiliated in any manner, and anyone wishing to run Mac OS X is best advised to buy an authentic Mac computer from an Apple authorized retailer. Our computers are not 'Mac clones', and RSOL PC does not market them as such."
Fair enough. But the press release announcing the Jive Series also said the computer "has been tested to be capable of running all major operating systems like Windows XP, Windows Vista, popular Linux distributions of Ubuntu and Fedora, and even the modified version of Apple, Inc's OS X 10.5 Leopard, commonly known as 'OSx86'."
And how exactly do they know that? Please
read on.
