Slashdot Mirror

If you have a x100 lying around, or a 7200, your options consist of MKLinux or MacOS. Unless developers have made serious progress on that front, and personally, I can't imagine there being much motivation to do so. :)

how does the PowerBook hardware stand up to that 'alternative OS' test? Are there working drivers for the Mac hardware for those alternative OSes, or have you tried?

unless, perhaps, if someone had a Linux distro running on it

I don't follow the PPC world much, but I know of two PPC Linux distros -- Debian and Yellow Dog. I'm sure there are others.

You can set up a GNOME desktop under Darwin, but it'll be a pain and probably won't work as well as under Linux. Darwin is mostly a development platform and isn't really meant to be user-friendly. Try installing a pre-configured Linux distribution, such as Mandrake or Yellow Dog. It should be much, much easier to set up.

When you could have used yellowdog instead and saved some money and gained better performance (on a g3 yellowdog runs much a href=faster than OSX).

I realize there are a few applications that run on x86 Linux and not Linux for PPC for whatever complicated compilations reasons, but can anyone list me some of those applications? I've never heard anyone complain about Yellow Dog Linux (what you'd probably run on PPC hardware). The US Navy didn't seem to have any qualms about YDL.

While you're listing apps, make sure you tell me why you'd rather run them on PPC hardware inside of a $100+ x86 emulator instead of on $300 of true x86 hardware with performance (forgive me, Stevie) TO BURN!! ;^)

This is a front page /. story about something that people are only worried about doing for the geek value, as far as I can tell. Which I didn't say was a bad reason, mind you. Just not a practical one.

Ummm...just so you know...there really is a PowerPC port of Debian GNU/Linux. It's not as up-to-date as the bleeding edge Yellow Dog, but DebianPPC and Debian68K support more Macs than Yellow Dog does.

However, it is probably true that Debian hasn't made it to the Apple ][ yet. Not even NetBSD has taken that challenge on. So you are prolly right about 1337 Apple Zealot being a troll.

They have a monopoly of operating systems running on Macintosh comuputer.

Um, no, they don't.

"Yes, it's going to be a pain to implement code to handle new archs (like the PPC), but there are enough examples of how to do it that it should be possible."

Have you checked out yellow dog linux? Essentially, they have ported Red Hat (including anaconda) to the PPC and from the reviews I've checked out, have done a pretty good job of it.

Anyway, the networking is about as simple in YDL as it is in OS X, and the SOUND WORKS! For years, I saw the sound not work on x86 Linux installations. Surely this has improved, and maybe the x86 box I was using was flaky about the sound, but I'm still impressed with that.

And, with the bootloader that comes with YDL, I have a dual-boot OS X / YDL system, so I can still use OS X when I want to. And as another poster mentioned, the Apple hardware looks spiffy. This may not be the most important factor, but it has value nevertheless!

Seriously though, I can tell you that OS X on a dual Mac is very lacking in power, this compared to a Intel/AMD solution. I have a dual 1ghz Mac on my desk right now, and you know what? I was so pissed off with the performance I bought Yellow Dog Linux. Now this thing smokes, probably faster than my dual Athlon 2000MP machine.

Until Apple and developers start optimizing programs to actually use both CPUs, we'll continue to see Mac's get trounced in benchmarks.

Apple is afraid of Linux and they in No way want to give creedence to it being an acceptable platform for desktop use.

Yeah, right. That's why they officially allow Terra Soft to sell their hardware with Linux preinstalled. Apple is a hardware vendor. As long as they can charge you $2999 or more for a computer, they don't really care about which OS you choose to run on it. Apple always supported the PPC Linux efforts - first with MKLinux (mind you, an Apple-branded Linux distro!), now with their blessing for Terra Soft.

Apple hardware is closed to third party vendors?

I guess that means there are no Mac CPU upgrades from third party vendors... no disk controller cards from third party vendors... no thriving market in third-party optical and hard drives... and I'm sure Apple keeps a lock on the hardware so you can't install Linux or BSD. Yeah, Microsoft would just be doing what Apple do.

Or maybe you're full of it.

Hmm,
Linux or BSD for PPC?

Why, that's crazy enough to work.

"Aside from the CPU and northbridge, the chips involved are standard components, and should be familiar to anyone who knows PCs. This is an early revision, not sporting evidence of Firewire (though there are some mysterious pin-headers lurking about) or RAID, but you can see a Via 686B handling sound and legacy ports, and the usual surface-mounts backing up the Ethernet and perhaps USB 2.0. What's that big one marked 'Radeon?' :-D (Speculation says it may be a Mobility Edition, which would bode well for both power consumption and board size -- those pack their own RAM in the package.) Everything else is definitely wait-and-see; I have to wonder if they really meant 'Cardbus' instead of 'CF.'

"Obviously it's no alternative if Windows is your thing, but Linux is available -- in fact, it's the only option until AmigaOS 4 ships. Debian, SuSE, and Yellow Dog are known to run and have accepted patches for the platform (outdated product pages to the contrary; AmigaOnes have no relation to last-generation APUS hardware), and Gentoo is at least in-progress. Users who like their penguins cool *and* fast take note; benchmarks are thin on the ice right now, and RC5 numbers are by no means a good comparison, but the G3s were cranking those without an unfair boost from Altivec.

you can't help but wonder how much of this is in response to the RIAA's subpoenas

Having just downloaded three Yellow Dog Linux ISOs last night, I couldn't help but wonder if there's some anti-open source something going on here too. But then I remembered: Windows users should be regularly downloading updates, too, which must add up in terms of bandwidth. If "average users" aren't downloading critical updates, does that mean more responsible users won't be allowed to?

YES!!!!

Yes. Yes. Yes. Of course you can, you dolt.

Here's some info about running Linux on Macs:

http://apple.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=77884&ci d=6918320

http://apple.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=03/09/10/ 0259234&mode=thread&tid=106&tid=126&tid=137&tid=17 4&tid=181&tid=185

http://www.terrasoftsolutions.com/

http://www.yellowdoglinux.com/

The Dog is your friend. Moof! Did an install on a Wallstreet PowerBook last Saturday, and after a little fiddling it was smooth sailing.

However, Debian PPC is good for older PPC Macs that Yellow Dog Linux won't run on. And of course, there is Debian 68K. There will NEVER be a Yellow Dog 68K.

Yellow Dog Linux sells Macs pre-installed with Linux. Dunno if they have G5s yet. They also sell G4 based small-footprint machines called "briQs".

Now, to answer your question, I don't think that the G5 is supported yet by any of the distributions. Just give them some time (Yellow Dog is very diligent when porting to new models, and the rest follow naturally). I may be wrong on this, since IBM plans to use the PPC970 on some of their products and they would probably want to launch them with Linux.

At least with MS, you can always format and install Linux

What makes you think you can't do this with Apple's proprietary hardware?

- Tony

On a Mac, I have:

• Mac OS X (who knew?)
• BSD via Darwin or OpenBSD if you prefer.
• Linux (Suse, Mandrake, Yellow Dog and probably more that I've missed).
• BeOS for PowerPC
• And, of course, good old Virtual PC which, despite being now owned by Microsoft is still a great product, and allows you to run *any* x86-compatible OS on your Mac. And since most of the other OSs you mentioned (OS/2, AtheOS etc) are either old or low-resource, there will be negligible speed hit

In fact, I would go so far as to say that the Mac is the most-compatible platform out there. Personally, I have six different OSs on my Mac right now (Mac OS X, Mac OS 9.1, 9.2.2, Mandrake Linux, Win98 SE and PC-DOS). And that's not even breaking a sweat.

Linux is surely available for Macintosh hardware. Yellow Dog Linux, from Terrasoft, is a port of Red Hat specifically designed for the Apple line of hardware.

In fact, you can purchase Apple gear directly from TerraSoft with a dual boot of OS X and YDL at no extra charge, and maintain the original Apple warranty.

I haven't used YDL myself, since I'm happy with the terminal in OS X--but my understanding is that, since, like Apple, they only have to support a specific line of computer hardware, that everything that comes with an Apple machine works out of the box, ie the modem, FireWire, etc.

it seems, according to this story over on the Register that the US Navy is buying 260 Xserve boxes running Yellow Dog Linux for use in nuclear subs. Will SCO take on the Navy?

Now having "generic" white box 970's designed to run Linux is a different story.

Hmm...or IBM branded, consumer or corp grade desktops, with 970s, running Red Hat, Yellow Dog Linux, or IBMnix? I think the big advantages would be IBM QA and warranty on the hardware, and a linux optimized for the 970. Commodity parts, no M$ tax, the processor at cost since it's being sold by the fabber=cheap cheap and powerful. Say, $4-500 for a very competent office/workstation machine.

I can see these on a lot of desktops moving from Windows to Linux...I wonder if IBM knows any?

Does anybody who knows, know if they will be using Yellow Dog Linux as the distro for these machines, or will they roll their own? I presume IBM, when they say linux-on-intel, mean "Red Hat", and I've heard that YDL is pretty much RH but on PPC. So does it stand to reason that that'll be their choice, or are they going to reinvent the wheel?

Sure would be big boon to YDL if true, methinks.

The reason why there are no RH 8 or 9 ISOs for PPC is that basically they are leaving development of the PPC branch of Red Hat to the makers of Yellow Dog Linux. Which, right now, is G5 ready and is basically RH9 for PPC. http://www.yellowdoglinux.com/

Heck, I'm not an Apple fan (in fact I tend to really dislike the UI in the mac os) but yellow dog linux has had some good clustering solutions for smaller clusters, both for high availibility and computation. They had some pretty nifty software (though last time I saw it it had some severe scalability problems with thier UI - but then again they were not selling multi thousand node clusters and it has been a couple of years since I last checked that closely).

See http://www.yellowdoglinux.com/

Yes, it does.

So I welcome this move towards a unified ports system for Darwin, it was definitely needed.

"...it is wrong for Apple to exert this sort of control over basic hardware, and also to irrevocably tie its hardware to its software..."

While this seems like a valid point it really is not. Let me explain.

Ignoring the fact that Apple does not irrevocably tie its hardware to its software [yellowdoglinux.com] there are many reasons why this is flawed thinking. First of all if I made a product and wanted to sell it for a higher profit above what my competition sells something akin to it for it is my right to do so. If customers don't like it they don't have to buy it. If then I decide to sell parts to replace parts that might go bad in my product and I specify that it's for repair only again it's my right. If people don't like it they don't have to buy it. That's how a free market works: it doesn't matter if it's fair/competitive or not.

I would love for things to be competitive and I agree there needs to be someone to fill in the cheaper market. I don't agree Apple should be cheaper than x86 pc's. The ppc architecture is much better than the x86 one: so much so that I traded straight up my 1.2ghz 512ram x86 hp laptop for 600mhz 256ram ppc iBook laptop and have never looked back. It's not Apple that I'm crazy for and if someone else made decent systems on this architecture I would take a serious look at it (so if anyone knows of a manufacture please tell me). Yellowdog Linux is more than a capable OS for the ppc arch. However that is all personal preference and not at all the point.

The point is that the contract should be abided by or not signed at all. If it's not signed then eventually Apple will have to change it to survive or not survive at all. The customers and sellers have that choice; and some are taking that choice to heart. I feel that the same goes for all MS stuff too even though I loath the company.

Actually, you can run Linux on a Mac. There's Gentoo and Yellow Dog Linux available. BTW, Gentoo runs quite well on Macs.

Mac's already come with the best desktop *nix on the market. If you really want to, you can boot Darwin into console mode, into x, or into x over aqua in rootless mode, so there are various levels of geekiness you can choose from. If there's some linux app that you really have to have, well then there are versions of linux that will run on an mac, and macs that you can buy preinstalled with linux. You can even run OSX over Linux. I think in a year or two, there will be more porting to OSX and therefore less motivation to bother with this.

OSX does support two and three botton mice so you can punt what ever it comes with as soon as you get home. Theoretically, carbon can handle as many as 65,535 buttons. With one button, it's option-click or ctrl-click to get that functionality.

Have you tried Yellow Dog Linux? Did you even try Google first?

Yellow Dog Linux home page, here's a review on OS News.

There really are no problems running Linux on Mac hardware. :)

Ever heard of Yellow Dog Linux? Why? Is Unix-based not good enough for you?

being a bit more Maclike and locking Linux out of the desktop market.

"Yellow Dog Linux 3.0 Hits Mirrors" ...a handful of people rejoice! :-)

Just apply the patch. ;-)

Once you have both partitions set up, holding down option when booting will bring up OpenFirmware and will let you boot into Linux or OSX. Check the Yellow Dog site for details.

Have you ever heard of these machines called...ahh...what was it...ummm...APPLE!?

Seriously though, OSX is already a *nix, and from what I understand you can run a number of flavours of Linux ( Yellow Dog is one...) in/under/over/though OSX which means you can still do things like use the dvd reader/burner and use the firewire port etc, etc. If you're not with in Apple's price market, you could always buy an old cheapy one and run Linux on it without the OSX overhead. Or even build your own.

Also it looks like you would have the option of 64bit architecture within 6 months or so (courtesy of IBM's PPC 970). And although there wouldn't be any 64bit apps to start with, how long would it take the Linux masses to fix that?

ps - please don't give me any grief like "we don't need 64bit - it's only for GODS - not meer mortals like us" because you people can just go a use your AI/particle renderer/speech recognition/hand writing recognition/bloody mp3-4 player on that AT286 over there - ok?

Does it run Linux? :)

It does, in fact, run Linux.

It's not that much more expensive for what you get for your money, but let's not get into that one!

Fraser will be the first third party to make a Mac since Apple shut down its three-year experiment in clone licensing in 1997

http://www.wired.com/news/mac/0,2125,58310,00.ht ml

What about things like the Terrasoft briQ? That runs YellowDog and can't they run OSX? It is a PPC after all... but I don't have one so I dunno...

I agree that this is a good way to go -- using a update tool that can use mirrors, it's what YellowDog does, for the new version they have apt and yum.

Personally I use apt with RedHat and YellowDog, but I might try yum some time.

One of the best reasons for a distrubted, free, updates system is that it aviods the potential problems of people not updating.

In the medium term using P2P for ISO's and updates might make most sense, though I also think it's cool that people do want to pay for Linux :-)

YellowDog offer early ISO's to people who pay as well, I guess it's a result of the fact that people mostly download GNU/Linux distros these days?

My brother has my old Bondi iMac 233mhz running the 10.2.4, and its still running great.

This just goes to show how expectations differ. I bought an iMac a few years ago to test web pages out on the browsers on that platform. It's a G3 400MHZ with 512MB RAM. I couldn't believe how bad OS9 was - I mean, crashes every few hours at best. So once OSX came out I snapped it up.

Now that was a painful experience! OSX (the first version) was worse than running Gnome+Nautilus on a 486 with 16MB of RAM! Dragging/resizing windows was horrifyingly slow. As I say, it was only there to test pages, so it wasn't really that much of an issue. So I upgraded to 10.1. Still dog slow. There was no way I could use that every day as a primary machine.

Anyway I wiped it last week and installed Yellow Dog Linux (the install is cake, BTW - couldn't be easier). I actually enjoy using the machine now - if I want to just do some browsing, or read email I often use it instead of one of my Athlon PC's. It's really nice to be able to browse with no fans whiring away in the room. I can honestly say I'm converted. I only usually use Linux on headless boxes (I do have one PC linux workstation, but don't use it much) but I like using the little iMac now. I'd urge anyone else who finds OSX too slow to give YDL a go!

Amateur ballooning can be quite a bit of fun. There is a small but active ballooning sub-hobby within the ham radio hobby. Ham radio is an ideal medium for transmitting telemetry from balloons, since we have access to cheap high quality (and high power) equipment.

I participated in a balloon tracking experiment not too long ago. The students of Timberlane Regional High School of Plaistow NH launched several high-altitude balloons carrying APRS transmitters, as a part of their CAPSAT (Coordinated Algebra (II) & Physics Simulated Satellite) project. I was able to track two of them. The balloons carried GPS receivers and ham radio Automatic Position Reporting System transmitters.

The launch was from Hopkinton NH. The first launch went well, and we received good signals from the balloon all the way out into the Atlantic ocean. This was quite a bit farther than they expected the baloon to travel, they had planned on recovering and reusing it :o It was still cool IMHO. Check out this kick ass map of the balloon's track.

The second launch was also a success, and the baloon only traveled about 50 miles before touchdown. Map is here.

The third launch went up with the GPS receiver turned off :/ At last check, it was at 00.000N 000.00W. They didn't launch any more balloons that day.

My tracking station consisted of a Kenwood TH-D7 radio and a PowerMac 7500 604e-180 running XASTIR on Yellow Dog Linux. The full results of the day (and APRS logs for the entire hamfest) are here.