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Nope. The 9200 in the G4 Mini is onboard. It's actually mounted on the underside of the system board. There is no way you could fit a card inside that little box with all of the other stuff that's in it, it's pretty much filled to capacity.

Linky: here

Thanks for checking for "The Lost 1984 Mac Video"

You can try a time sliced download here, and if this is overloaded (it probably is), there are mirrors at macnews.de, php-schmiede.de, ppcnux.de, ftp.ppcnux.de, MacTechNews.de and elbewerk.

And now that the US are with us, you guys could back us up with some mirrors. Thanks bunches to all the folks who are helping us out!

Here are pictures of the inside.

Indeed. The Airport Extreme card is a regular Airport Extreme card, but you ALSO need an adapter - which is not available separately for the time being.

(From http://www.macnews.de/news/57984 (German))

They only show the outer and the motherboard, not how it all goes together. I'm not sure if the beast is fanless, or takes a standard sized HD
http://www.macnews.de/gallery/thumbnails.php?album =16&page=1

The graphics-card is lame, the bus-speed is lower compared to G5, but overall... the design. It's just plain boring. When was the last time that apple-addicts were bored when a new machine was introduced?

Yes, Apple, I'm bored. The G4 iMac was a lot more interesting to look at than this machine. And design is what apple-addicts are really looking after.

Here's some nice examples for great iMac designs: http://www.mackompass.de/

PLUS: no heating problems here? Picture from iside: http://forum.macnews.de/forum/show?mid=8894.1839.- 5159

That is not the only site that hints of iMac G5's in the future...I found this site, apparently some type of encoded announcement site for Apple that they call "macnews.de". Anyway, there is news about G5 imacs and I could also make out "G5 powerbooks". The rest was too well encrypted.

Perhaps there is a code breaker out there who can decypher it.

I tried a bit of Shakespeare:

O, for a muse of fire that would ascend the brightest heaven of invention! A kingdom for a stage, princes to act, and monarchs to behold the swelling scene. -- Henry V, I:1

and

Can such things be, and o'ercome us like a summer's cloud, without our special wonder? -- Macbeth, III:4

Now, mind you, it sounded like a TV weatherman reading it, rather than anything like a Shakespearean actor (no, not even Kevin Costner ;-) ) -- but if you think that this is intended to be a generic male voice...hey, maybe they could take Ian McKellen's or Patrick Stewart's or Emma Thompson's or (God forbid) Keanu Reeve's voices. Who knows?

Well, I'm impressed...

Now, if you want to have some fun, try some Bushisms with it. ;-)

cya

Ethelred

It's pretty odd that Apple did the Cube at all, really. Anyone remember the original four-box strategy that they implemented to prevent themselves from going overboard on models, like they used to?

In the old days, Apple had Quadras, Performas, Centrises and Classics, and no one could tell from the name or even case design which Mac was which. Futhermore, within each line (Centris/Performa/Quadra) there were myriad variations that made little sense, and often there was overlap. This confused both customer and sales team, and caused a lot of trouble.

Enter the four-box strategy:

Consumer portable: iBook
Consumer desktop: iMac
Pro portable: PowerBook
Pro desktop: G3/G4

This strategy worked just fine, and then Jobs got a wild hair and decided to add the Cube, which was neither cheap enough to be a Consumer box (like an iMac) nor powerful and expandable enough to be a Pro box. Sure, it looked great, but it was just a bad decision (unless they had cut the price dramatically, but then they would have run into problems with the Cube cannibalizing iMac sales).

They should stick to a simple product line, like they started to do, much in the same way that carmakers recycle chassis designs and parts to keep things simple and costs down.

For all the coolness of the Cube, it was simply a blunder IMO.

Ethelred

Granted, the G4 towers are a lot bulkier than the Cubes, but OTOH they are also amazingly quiet. I've been pleased with my dual 450 G4 in that regard -- it's the quietest computer I have, even quieter than my Powerbook (which, while it has a fan, only rarely turns on the fan).

For that matter, the iMacs are also very quiet. My family-in-law has an iMac DV, and it's also very decent (though it does crash a lot... ;-P ).

My Duron 800, though, is just *loud*...

Ethelred

Think about it. PGP just turns a message into "gibberish"; a spamified PGP would turn it into (admittedly rather long) halfway intelligible spam messages, only decodable by the recipient.

Now THAT would be cool...

cya

Ethelred

Whatever -- e-mail GUI programs tend to look alike, and that's not really a bad thing. At least people recognize what's going on immediately and don't have to familiarize themselves with it too much -- especially when you're trying to replace/compete with Outlook (*including* the database and back office functions), it doesn't hurt to be a little familiar.

Lastly, nobody's stopping you from contributing to Aethera's further development. If you wanna help out, please do so. :-)

cya

Ethelred

Presently, it's either Apple or nobody. There were shining hopes for something better, but it never appeared.

Actually, there are many non-Apple PPC computers that run Linux (though admittedly *new* non-Apple PPC hardware is hard to come by).

For example, there's the RS/6000 IBM boxes, BeBoxes, Amiga APUS, and Motorola and Bull boxes. And, of course, TiVo and other embedded platforms.

Check out http://www.linuxppc.com/about/hardware/ for a complete list of supported hardware.

Still, the OpenPPC.org bit has been a bitter disappointment so far. Ah well, keep your fingers and toes crossed...

HTH

Ethelred

So does a Mac truck only have one wheel? ;-)

(Should be Mack truck, BTW...)

cya

Ethelred

For one, Macs still have by far the easiest and most transparent GUI (though this could change for the worse with OS X -- though I'm keeping my mind open on that). No GUI currently comes close to the elegance of the Mac GUI in terms of how you can use it. For one thing, the Mac Clipboard, for example, works far more powerfully than any other comparable "clipboard" on any other OS that I have seen, given its ability to convert data on-the-fly, depending on what program you copied from and are pasting to (or, even better, are dragging and dropping from or to).

Another point is that, yes, the original Mac team in the form of Eazel is working on the GNOME desktop -- but they have a *long* way to go before it even comes close to the Mac GUI and desktop. There are many areas that have nothing to do with GNOME that also have to be improved -- colorspace models (and the ability to quickly and easily calibrate and configure them), fonts and font administration (installing fonts is still a pain on Windows and Linux, and previewing them on Linux is a *major* pain), transparent media format support (video, audio, pixel formats) and so on. In other words, much of what is tied to the Mac's old strengths -- desktop publishing, video and graphic design. Most of these weaknesses are tied more to XFree86 than they are to anything else.

Yet another major weakness of Linux is still the lack of desktop apps that match or exceed the quality of those on Mac OS and Windows. This is changing, of course, but you have to remember that that Mac OS community (and the Windows community) are moving targets. The lack of hardcore standards on the Linux platform also tends to hurt application development -- what libraries do I support? What desktop version? What kernel version? -- and I see no plausible solution for all that.

In the longer term -- some years down the road -- it would also be interesting to see if Linux continues its rapid upward climb. At the moment, this is taken as gospel, but remember that Linux is done mostly voluntarily -- it may be that someday the "coolness factor" wears off, and Linux withers into a twilight existence. I doubt that Linux will ever "die" -- in fact it's almost impossible, unless we have some titanic global catastrophe -- but OTOH it's not hard for me to imagine some scenario where the developers working on Linux simply lose interest someday, or a major fork happening (the GNOME vs. KDE war has the ability to cause that), enough to damage Linux's continued growth and development. I don't suggest that this *will* happen, but that it is a real possibility.

I use Linux, and do so quite happily. I use it mainly as a server OS, but sometimes also for gaming and website development. I also actively support Linux's development by working for various Linux companies (Loki, theKompany.com, LinuxPPC), mainly by doing website design, packaging, press releases and other promotional work.

And Linux has many, many strengths, and may indeed surpass Mac OS in many areas. It already has in stability and efficiency -- technical areas, in other words. The fact that Linux is a free OS (as in speech) also has a very strong appeal to me, though its weaknesses keep me from going to Linux entirely. The question is, will Linux -- given its divided approach -- ever have the singleness of vision that drove the Mac's development? For all the Mac's technical faults, that singleminded hardcore approach for the _overall_ vision of the OS is what makes it good at what it does (graphics, GUI, media).

So I would say that, even if Linux "overtakes" the Mac as the main "opponent" of Microsoft, it's not really a sign of the Mac's demise. True, anti-MS sentiment is a lot of what keeps many Mac fans true to their Macs -- but that's hardly the only reason they use their Macs so faithfully. Nor is it proven that Linux will indeed kill off MS _or_ Apple. I'm far more inclined the believe that all these OSes will continue to coexist -- indeed, I believe that they days of one-OS-fits-all (if they ever existed, in spite of what MS tries to claim) are over.

Sorry for the rambling, but that's a lotta stuff I had to say... ;-)

cya

Ethelred

Try www.rpmfind.net or ftp.wesmo.com for LinuxPPC precompiled RPMs. Note that these should work fine with LinuxPPC 2000, YDL CS 1.2, and MkLinux R1, but not necessarily with SuSE. If you use Debian/PPC, you should be able to use alien to install them.

For other such questions, I suggest the new LinuxPPC.org site or the LinuxPPC mailing list archives.

cya

Ethelred
(who knows that he's risking an Offtopic mod but is begging and pleading for clemency)

How so? I really don't see how. What made Amiga so revolutionary wasn't just that it something new, but that it was something new that was awesomely powerful with the existing hardware technology at the time--and cheap. That's what earned Amiga the adulation that it got (deservedly so).

But all that I read of Tao doesn't strike me as being all that wonderful. I really don't see any particular benefit. Yes, it's interesting to see a proto-OS able to run with other OSes, but what about the hardware? Yes, it's interesting to see this proto-OS idea (or maybe meta-OS is a better word), but there are other concepts out there like microkernels (Mach and HURD) as well as more exotic things like exokernels, but nothing to say definitively if they are The Answer(TM). Feel free to disagree, but I'm very skeptical.

Read what I say with the background knowledge about TAO's products and you too will know why traditional operating systems (including Linux of course) are living out their last of their days as the best tools for the job.

Whoa there. Hold on. "Living out their last days"? That's a tad extreme. There is nothing to suggest that there is a need for a type of OS software like Tao on a mass market. Yes, Elite is intended to be highly portable and connectable, but Linux, for example, already is quite portable, even to handhelds or smaller devices. So is Mach. If you want _really_ high levels of modularity, you've got the exokernel idea. Yet with increasing processor power and decreasing size and power use, the need for extremely slim clients starts to unravel--and consumers want extra bells and whistles for consumer devices (otherwise, why are Pentium IIIs and Athlons selling so well, even though most people don't need that kind of power?), so that added power will be needed. And available.

So the Tao idea sounds interesting, but I honestly don't see how on Earth it should hasten any conceived "extinction" of a traditional operating system. Some of them will die out anyway, like the old MacOS (not OS X). Maybe Windows, too, in the long run (ten years or so). But we already have a high degree of portability and modularity with existing UN*X kernels and low-level layers, so why do we need something as new and different as Tao?

The desktop OS paradigm also has quite a lot of life left in it, if it ever dies at all. There will always IMO be a need for a central workstation, which will need a traditional OS. Interconnected devices are nice, and so is the idea of ubiquitous computing. But I don't believe at all that you can get away from using a more traditional computing device in some form--with a central "desktop" (or whatever you prefer to call it), documents, storage volumes and so on. All that will be networked, sure. The physical computer device may also vanish. But there will still be a need for the OS in the end.

And none of this really explains why it makes sense to use Tao for the new Amiga-named thingie, nor does it explain why the new Amiga-named thingie will be a compelling alternative to existing OSes.

We have RTOS versions of Linux, for example. We may even see RT versions of Mach (and therefore OS X) in the near future. What is the compelling reason for the mass market to switch to Elite?

(Consider this an open invitation for a sales pitch. ;-) )

cya

Ethelred

To create a new consumer OS from the basis that they are using is tantamount to creating a new OS from scratch. Elate is merely meant to be a core, not a whole consumer OS.

Quote from their site:

It has been designed to run very fast as both stand alone and co-existing with host operating systems across any kind of processor.

That doesn't sound like a complete OS to me. It also sounds like it won't work with any existing mainstream OS without a wee bit of work. Doesn't sound like a recipe for success IMO.

Furthermore, it still isn't an Amiga.

Back to you:

Perhaps you ought to actually LEARN before you slag off, eh?

Perhaps you ought to sit back, relax, take a deep breath and join a civil discussion rather than resorting to flames and posting AC. (And yes, I did read up, long before posting--or long before this was posted on /.)

Rather than questioning my integrity, perhaps--just perhaps--you should try to support your own argument like an adult.

Feel free to convince me. But please don't behave like a fool.

Ethelred

It also doesn't have a parent company to provide it with capital. If the "new" Amiga is to have any success at all, it will need that above all.

If Amiga were to seriously succeed, it would need a parent company that gives a damn. Amiga hasn't had that for years (if ever).

Furthermore, it would be more beneficial to everyone in general if those working on the Amiga would work on existing OSes to improve them, rather than creating yet another OS trading on the name of a once-revolutionary-now-in-twilight OS.

I just find it to be hard on those wishing for Amigas to return, when the "Amiga" returning isn't an Amiga at all--there will never be another true Amiga IMHO, because its active OS development went into a weird twilight long ago. This looks, feels and smells like another mirage.

I would have far more positive feelings about it if Amiga were contributing to something else: BeOS maybe, or Linux. Maybe make an alternative kernel and/or windowing system that works with Linux software. Just some ideas. But to create something new from scratch now strikes me as singularly quixotic.

cya

Ethelred

Besides, what does this have to do with the "original" Amiga? Nothing but the name.

I remember using an Amiga 500 with a friend and being knocked sideways by its sheer power. I remember an innovative system that in many ways was too good for its time. But please, this is starting to border on cruelty -- every few months there is a new apparition on the horizon, and old Amiga users look up in hope, only to have those hopes dashed.

Face it: this won't be an Amiga. There is little to no chance that it will be as revolutionary as the original Amiga; at best, it will have a few nice things but will mostly be hard to find a reason to buy it (short of the name).

Pin your hopes on something else that does have a chance of success: Linux, or maybe Mac OS X, or maybe BeOS, or *BSD. Whatever strikes your fancy. But a bird in the hand is worth two in the bush...

cya

Ethelred

Not to mention the specs. Built-in DVD (as a slot, not as a tray), decent 3D card, great monitor (awesome picture quality, at 117 Hz), built-in video mirroring, 400 MHz PowerPC G3, 100 MHz bus, 100BaseT Ethernet, Airport. When anyone thinks an iMac, especially in its latest incarnation, is therefore "useless", then they must be beyond bothering to try and convince (though I will anyway ;-) ). Especially when you consider what you get for the price.

I also recently heard the new iMac's Harmon-Kardon speakers. They kick serious tookus for their size. The old iMac speakers sucked, but these are great. :-)

And if I can run Linux on it, so much the better. I like having a choice of OSes, and I happen to use both MacOS and LinuxPPC. I have a lime iMac DV 400 on its way to me, so thanks to the guys at iMacLinux.net, now I can use it with Linux as well.

Mind you, I'm not wild about the iBooks, mainly because of their lack of external video--a major minus for me. I also wish they had G4s in the iMacs and iBooks, but oh, well.

But the main point is this: don't go slagging a computer because you don't happen to like its looks, or imply that it somehow isn't worthy of running Linux. Both are ridiculous things to assert. The iMac's hardware is as demonstrably as good as any on the PC market in its price range, and just because it happens to be bright and colorful doesn't mean that "serious" OSes shouldn't run on it. In fact, the converse is true. ;-)

Anyway. 'Nuff venting my spleen fer t'day. :-)

Ethelred (he of LinuxMac)

Other possibility: you could try getting in touch with Groupe Bull or Motorola Computer Group (at http://www.mcg.mot.com/) about that. Both make PowerPC-based boards and computers, though AFAIK they only sell to vendors and not to little saps like us. ;-)

For that matter, if you wait a little, IBM's open hardware specs ought to also generate some interest amoung hardware manufacturers.

Last recommendation: Get in touch with Yellow Dog Linux or LinuxPPC about it. They'd be happy to help you out in finding something, I'm sure. Both are pretty quick in supporting new hardware, as well; though AltiVec is not yet supported (the code has to be "vectorized" first), meaning only that its advantages won't yet make a difference in Linux, that development is already starting to get underway.

Oh, and if you're looking for news and info about Linux for PowerPC Macs, check out my site at http://linux.macnews.de/. :-)

Ethelred

I already have a copy of Civilization: Call to Power for LinuxPPC, and it runs great. (You can read a review of it that I wrote at http://linux.macn ews.de/articles/29061999.loki.shtml?lang=english.) Even the sound works, and it was a thrill to see movies in the thing that actually both looked nice and worked. ('Course, I cheated a little and went through and looked at all the movies on the CD. Damn, they're cool.)

The game was a little slowish at times, but on the other hand I have yet to get 100% real genuine accelerated X going (on a beige G3), so it's probably more my fault than anything. :-/

It's especially ironic that Mac users who want to play Civ:CTP have to install Linux to do it. :-)

Can't wait for Myth II...

Ethelred

I realize this is somewhat off topic, but is anyone else having problems installing R5? I've tried both the X installer and the redhat one, and it likes to lock up my system about fifteen percent into installing the packages...is this just me? any help would be greatly appreciated. The most common cause is that the installer doesn't check to make sure that you have enough space on each of your partitions before installing (at least this was the case with R4/4.1 and Yellow Dog 1.0). So it will merrily go on until it runs out of room and then lock up. The only solution is to either reduce the software to be installed (you can, for example, turn off many things you most likely won't need, like DNS/named, etc.) or to combine or rearrange your partitions to make enough room. You especially need to make sure that /opt and /usr get enough room if you install a lot of stuff. If you really aren't sure how big to make your partitions, but do know what software you want, just make one big root partition (naturally along with /swap). That's the easiest way to go. Check out my website at http://linux.macnews.de/ for other tips and news about Linux for Macs. It ain't much, but I try. :-) click and be happy