EFI was developed by Microsoft Corp. and Intel as a faster, less complicated successor to the 2-decade-old BIOS technology used on non-Apple computers. However, apart from servers and workstations running Intel's 64-bit Itanium chip, most PCs today continue to come with BIOS installed.

Linux has been able to boot on Itanium machines using EFI for a number of years using a bootloader program called ELILO. According to Brett Johnson, a software engineer who maintains the ELILO open-source project, tweaking ELILO so Linux can run on 32-bit EFI systems such as the new Macs is possible, though he isn't working on a solution himself.

"ELILO should just work, and load the Linux kernel just fine," Johnson, who works at Hewlett-Packard Co.'s open-source lab in Fort Collins, Colo., wrote in an e-mail. "There will probably need to be some work done in the kernel itself to recognize the IntelMac hardware though (like for providing a console, etc.)"

Johnson declined to comment on whether he had been contacted by any Linux vendors, though he noted that traffic to his SourceForge project's Web page tripled in January from the month before.

Barth agreed with Johnson that the problem is not hard to solve. Mandriva has used ELILO to boot its Linux onto IA-64 machines as well as 32-bit PowerPC-based Macs. With the Mactel hardware, the company's engineers have identified potential problems only "in some small hardware parts like fan control" as they look to make Mandriva compatible, he said.