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LinuxPPC 2000 - First Boxed Product
Hacksworth writes "LinuxPPC, Inc. has released their first boxed product of their distribution of Linux for PowerPC computers. " Congrats to the guys working there. A lot of hard work has been put in over at LinuxPPC and it's nice to see the progress.
This stuff is somewhat expensive, but if you're looking for a PPC box made by someone other than Apple and capable of running LinuxPPC take a look at: Total Impact mPower systems
I haven't got around to reinstalling it (which I intend to do for fun, having a definite geek gene), but it is much nicer not having to download for 48 hours or so and take up whole HD partitions :) plus I've already worked out the kernel I need to run, which apparently is "vmlinux.2.2.1-VERY-STABLE". So I have a head start at wrestling '99 into useful shape and playing with it.
The packaging for LinuxPPC 1999 is small but _very_ attractive! And ya gotta love that tripped-out-penguin 'Linux Power' graphic. Yow. It looks stunned to be running on a PPC, but nevertheless getting into it ;)
It has OpenSSH 1.2.2 and OpenSSL 0.9.6, iirc.
More importantly, we gave LinuxOne a 1999Q3 CD at MacWorld SF recently (Yes, they were there for some reason).
Um, not really. For one it's a kernel issue, and any kernel works anywhere (BenH's, which LPPC 2k is using, working on debian, lppc, ydl and anybody elses dist for that matter) Also, the original, Well it's booting, was done long before YDL did any sort of patching.
I'd like to second the comment about Debian; it was a little rocky getting going at first, but gnome-apt _really works_. And it seems to work a lot better than linuxppc when installed. The guys at LinuxPPC are very cool; I just wish they would use debian as a base instead!
(currently testing something about signatures here)
I haven't seen any ISO images over at ftp.linuxppc.org yet... but I'm figuring $20 to help the cause isn't a bad idea anyway.
I ordered the previous version last night and it looks like I'll be getting PPC 2000. Sweet. Linux on an iMac. I'll be loving it.
my blog: good times, man, good times
You're displaying your ignorance.
a) The default installation of LinuxPPC has no inetd servers enabled. It doesn't get much more secure...
b) You have now and have always had the option to install with the RedHat installer (rather than the graphical one).
And considering that there were almost no differences at all between LinuxPPC 1999 and YDL CS 1.1, it's hard for YDL to be "more straightforward and easier to use."
I think you'll find that all of the packages in LinuxPPC 2000 are significantly more up to date (performace, bug fixes, features...) than CS 1.1 (or LinuxPPC 1999), which is to be expected in any newer release.
You can do that much. What you can't do is resize partitions.
Actually, FWB has a semi-solution, their Hard Disk Toolkit program (the personal edition's not too expensive, and it comes with just about every Mac hard drive out there).
It can only shrink partitions, not grow them, unfortunately. Well, it can make a partition bigger if it had been previously shrunk, and there's ways to cheat around this limit. But it's still no PartitionMagic.
I believe the old RedHat-style installer is still present (I know it can still be used if you prefer that method of installation). But for 99% of the Linux-using population, the GUI installer is enough, and it's always good to have things be a little easier, if only because it's more convenient.
What version of Toast were you using? For the longest time I'd heard that Toast couldn't support ISO images. As it is I'm stuck with 3.5 for the moment, and I'd like to know if I can use Toast with the ISO before I download the image...
I have a friend who recieved a beta version of the LinuxPPC 2000. His experience is that it is a much nicer install than the 1999 version.
I have installed the 1999 versions and I hope so. I really hate to say it, but it was the most painful Linux install I have ever had to do. (And I have been using Linux since the 0.96 days.)
pdisk is a tool that fits its name. (And just what your dirty mind though of it the first time you saw that name.) It takes all of the power of fdisk and hides it by changing most everything and making the most simple tasks difficult. Want to make a 100 meg partition for swap? Better get out that calculator because you will need to figure out the number of blocks yourself. None of those wimpy shortcuts here!
If it was hard for me to get working, you can imagine what this must be like for the average Mac user. I was brough in to do the install because the normally clued Mac consultant could not get it to work properly.
The PowerPC is almost an afterthought in the Linux world and it should not be. Mac users are just as captive to proprietary OSes as Intel users. Maybe even more so. Hopefully that will change. Hopefully, the LinuxPPC 2000 version is that step.
"Trademarks are the heraldry of the new feudalism."
I wish! No, the partitioner will only do what pdisk can do -- create, destroy, rename, plus a few tricks it can't do like change partition type. There's nothing that can dynamically repartition for MacOS AFAIK. (Hey FWB! ;-)
-- haaz.
I wish! No, the partitioner will only do what pdisk can do -- create, destroy, rename, plus a few tricks it can't do like change partition type. There's nothing that can dynamically repartition for MacOS AFAIK. (Hey FWB! ;-)
-- haaz.
BootX is definately easier for new users. I now have my 1998 PowerBook G3 set up to boot directly from the /boot partition on its hard drive, though.
It's sweet. Push the power button, see Tux appear, watch kernel load, log in. Yes!
This works on all supported (PCI) power macs AFAIK. The pre-iMac machines use a system called miBoot, which is a little less flexible than the yaboot program the iMac/BlueG3/G4/iBook/ Lombard PBG3 can use. But it works.
Loving life,
-- haaz.
Are there ISO images anywhere? I've been unable to find them, and they're soooooo much nicer than downloading all the packages even with rsync, etc.
It might almost be worth the $20 just to get them on two bootable CDROMs rather than building my own (which is a piece of cake with RedHat).
-
-jay
That doesn't sound promising but, then I never got anything useful from their email support, either. Hopefully this will go smoother than the 1999 release, which went out with a number of egregious bugs that really should have been caught.
Having complained about them, though, I have to say that both my R5 systems run beautifully, once I got over the install hurdles (160+ days uptime on the server behind me) and that I'm extremely impressed with how productive they are with limited resources. They bit off a tremendous amount for the R4 to R5 transition, which created delays and some growing pains but they've positioned themselves really strongly for the future. I'll keep buying full-price CD's from them because it's a bargain at twice the price.
What I'm listening to now on Pandora...
That paragraph is just specifically about mac-on-linux
I don't know about the first poster, but I had misunderstood that to refer to the whole distro. Sorry about that, LinuxPPC...
What I'm listening to now on Pandora...
Well shouldn't Darwin take care of 2 and 3?
Au contraire, OF on the PowerTower Pro (in my case, the 225) isn't broken. Well, it is kind of, but you can still get it to work.
I had to configure things in the blind, and probably couldn't tell anyone how to do it, but it CAN be done.
That said, I just use BootX. It's really a nice piece of software.
- Jeff A. Campbell
- VelociNews (http://www.velocinews.com)
- Jeff
I guess some people define stupidity in a different way. You can bang your head against a nail to drive it in, but I think that's kind of stupid: I'd much rather use a hammer.
Which person would you consider more intelligent? The one who finished nailing stuff in an hour ago, or the guy with a bloody forehead passed out on the floor?
I'm a big fan of intuitive, well designed user interfaces. As long as they don't needlessly sacrifice power and efficiency, then there is no harm - UNLESS of course you have more elitest motives, such as being able to call others stupid and make yourself out to be some sort of uber-geek. In that case, your mileage may vary somewhat. Just please, don't bleed on the floor.
- Jeff A. Campbell
- VelociNews (http://www.velocinews.com)
- Jeff
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I'd like to check this out, but I'm not going to use anything with the Apple logo on it.
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Seems like a user issue to me. Apple makes pretty good hardware, albeit for somewhat high prices. Plus, if you ever need it, you are able to run MacOS on it. If that's not a bonus for you that's fine I guess, but I don't imagine you'll get much better of a price on a 3rd party machine simply because they don't sell in volume like Apple does. Why does it matter if it has an Apple logo on it if it's the best supported PPC machine out there?
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Is there any development here? Or can we just drop the pretense and declare that the Mac -IS- the PPC platform, and that's all it'll ever be
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Technically right now, there aren't many options. If you're stuck on not buying Apple hardware, you may be interested in this:
http://www.linuxppc.co m/press/index.php3?archive=totalimpact
You'll have to wait a few months at the very least.
- Jeff A. Campbell
- VelociNews (http://www.velocinews.com)
- Jeff
You won't get an answer, because you're right.
The first argument was that Apple didn't want to lower sales of MacOS, but that didn't hold water. Apple sells boxes anyhow (running MacOS or Linux), and that's where they make their money.
Then, people said Apple had a past of proprietary hardware and software. More or less true, but then Darwin joined MkLinux and LinuxPPC on the platform. Oddly enough, a certain Jean-Louis Gassee happened to be the main proponent of closed systems at his time at Apple. When he left, Macs started becoming more expandable and began using more standard hardware.
This isn't even mentioning a certain investment by Intel in Be. Did that have anything to do with their current policy regarding PPC? Maybe not. Either way, Be has handled it TERRIBLY. If they didn't find enough marketshare in the PowerPC space, they should have come outright and said so, instead of blaming Apple or letting Be/PPC customers wonder if they would be supported or not.
...of course, now Be is abandoning their desktop market entirely (except as a development platform for their IAs), and the cycle continues, leaving even more desktop users in the cold. Oops.
(note: Be's software is superb, and their coders are anything but incompetant. This is an internal politics issue, not a technical one. I wager they could have BeOS running on a G3/G4 within 2 weeks maximum)
- Jeff A. Campbell
- VelociNews (http://www.velocinews.com)
- Jeff
Cool! Now we can start seeing boxed Linux distros sitting next to Mac OS 9 in stores! I'm psyched! I've been tinkering with LinuxPPC for about a year and I like what they're doing. Keep up the good work!
XenoWolf The Original - Since 1993
Debian for PPC does, so I don't see why it wouldn't (most packages seem to rely on the existence of RH packages from my brief play with LinuxPPC). LinuxPPC is nice, though; automagically dealt with a lot of crap (console settings, xmodmap etc) that Debian didn't. And hey, I like the RH boot messages in colour, too ;)
Tried it on my 7300/180 and was very impressed. Dying to get it on the G3. Debian has quake-lib-stub packages for PPC, but I thought linux quake was only available for x86 - any ideas?
AFAIK it's currently a 256 meg limit for memory hard coded in the PowerPC Kernel (with an define), and can not be changed by a kernel argument. The reason for this, was one of the kernel hackers felt that more then 256 megs of RAM caused stablity on many PowerPC Linux machines. Once this problem was fixed it is to be remove.
<p>See the linuxppc-user list for were this is found (I have forgetten already).
BootX works correctly on my machine running 7.5.3. It is suppost to support all 7.5 and newer Macs, and will probably stay that way since their is no real reason to change this.
<p>At any rate, any Mac that can run System 7.5/7.6 (both 3 years+ old) should be able to boot using open firmware / quik, so you really don't have to use BootX at all.
This is slightly OT, but I was wondering if somebody has a helpful answer to a question concerning big/little endian. At work, we run a mixture of HP's, SGI's, Sun's, and Intel-based Linux workstations; the linux are a relatively new addition. We also have a lot of our data stored in binary format (shorts, ints, floats, and doubles). Needless to say, the X86 linux computers have had problems with the binary data generated on the other nix boxes. I have mentioned to the pro-x86 crowd that using LinuxPPC on a mac would be nice, but I'm woefully outvoted in this regard.
What is the best solution to this problem? All my code has been converted to use xdr so I don't have any problems. But is there another better solution to this (and no, converting to ascii is not an acceptable solution).
Anyway, congrats to LinuxPPC. Can't wait to see a LinuxoOnePPC in the future.:-)
Since the compiler is key to speed on a linux platform.. how good is gcc support now with the PPC instructions?
Man, I just installed YDL CS1.1...looks like I'll be getting LPPC2K! With the built-in Mac-On-Linux support (I'm having trouble with MOL on YDL), RH6.1, and the GUI installer, I'm wicked impressed.
I remmeber getting a few of those in at a (very) former jobsite. "Hey look ! A cable-ready Mac ! With a remote !" Very handy for watching TV while the backups ran.
Veteran, Bermuda Triangle Expeditionary Force, 1992-1951
Be careful there, I searched on Deja.com earlier today, and found reports of problems if you mount the image before burning it if you're using OS 9. I just burned an .iso about 15 minutes ago, I DID NOT mount the image first, I just selected Disc Image as the type of CD I wanted to make, then I drug the .iso file onto the data area of the window, and blammo, I churned out both a Corel Linux and a Linux Mandrake CD in no time flat, and they both work. This was using toast on a B&W G3.
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When in danger or in doubt, run in circles, scream and shout. --Robert A. Heinlein
Man, this must be a record of some kind.
:-)
I ordered LinuxPPC 1999Q3 for my 7200/75 and an ADSL line from Bell Atlantic at the same time last year.
Linux came. I installed it (Just make sure that you RTFI TWICE before you think you can install it. There's a "gotcha" for all those who skip the instructions. But apart from that its great.) I hooked it up to my home LAN to my other Macs and the occasional PC Laptop and iBook, got to play with it (its greal BTW), took a course in e-business, found clients, installed shopping carts and the databases to drive them, and now LinuxPPC2K is here and I'm going to buy and install it.
AND I"M STILL WAITING FOR BELL-ATLANTIC TO DELIVER THE #&$^%#& ADSL LINE.
Hey man, I'm Pissed! I should be sucking up pages from an ADSL fat pipe through my Linux server and instead I'm sipping through a 56k modem (HA! Like it ever hits that,) straw on my G3.
But LinuxPPC is just great. I wholeheartedly recommend it over committing your older Macs and iMacs to the landfill.
MSBPodcast.com The opinions expressed here are my own. If you don't like 'em... Think up your own stuff.
According to that release, the MOL support requires you to obtain a MacOS ROM file. They include a ROM grabbing util, but they also say that MacOS 8.6 and higher CDs have a MacOS ROM file on them, my question is this. Will this allow the use of MacOS on CHRP systems? Or any other Non-Apple, but supported by LinuxPPC machine?
LK
"Hi. This is my friend, Jack Shit, and you don't know him." - Lord Kano
I am curious as to what exactly the new boot process is, but i will tell you that you NEVER needed a mac os partition for linuxppc to happily boot. All you need to do is set the Open Firmware boot settings to whatever ext2 partition you want, and OF will handle it all for you. The way to do this is very extensively, if somewhat confusingly, documented at www.linuxppc.org.
They suggest you use BootX because it is the easiest way, not becuase it is the only one. You could always write a LILOish boot switcher in Forth (very difficult), or choose your OS to boot into through using the Boot Variables app, or typing raw Open Firmware commands at the OF command line. Of course, none of these ways is particularly easy at _all_, and if you are unlucky enough to have one of the early PCI macs-- say, the 7200-- you will have no display drivers in the OF. meaning that you will be typing commands into a command line interface you cannot see. Which is not fun, even though the "commands" are likely to just be a one-line boot command.
The crucial line is, i think, "And you don't have to be a programmer to be able to use the new software." This is a major step-- whatever this new boot process they've come up with is, if it doesn't require you to wait for the macos to boot its basic stuff like bootx does, and it doesn't require you to read ten pages of technically-oriented documentation like the OF methods do, and doesn't vary from machine to machine like the OF methods do.. well, that's a very good thing.
Irritable, left-wing and possibly humorous bumper stickers and t-shirts
MacOS is .. um .. nice for its intended uses, and I wouldn't dream of flaming it. :-) But the fact is, if you're not going to run MacOS, then it's wasteful to buy a Mac, since MacOS' amortized development cost is certainly factored into the price.
So where the [expletive] is POP?!? How many more years is Motorola going to let x86 keep marketshare uncontested? Sheesh, Motorola! If you build it, they will come!
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As copyright owner of this comment, I authorize everyone to defeat any technological measure which limits access to it.
I have an old 6300 sitting around, same problem. It used to be in my dad's closet, and I said, "Hey, gimme that dusty PowerMac, I'll stick some Unix on it and use it as a firewall." Everything I've tried to do with this box has resulted in failure. Running Linux or BSD is out of the question because it's so screwed up, and even adding Ethernet (and getting it to work under MacOS) is gonna be a bitch.
Here's a nice list of Mac models to avoid, including your 5300 and my 6300. These are the worst boxes Apple ever made. No future at all. Depressing. *sigh*
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As copyright owner of this comment, I authorize everyone to defeat any technological measure which limits access to it.
The page says it's just a boot from CD & graphical install. Doesn't seem like it'd be an issue.
So what's the story with the Java 2 platform on PowerPC? I recall that Sun dumped it when they wrested the Linux Java efforts from Blackdown a few months ago...
Ease of use just makes the hard jobs easier to do. This is not a bad thing because it brings home users. With home users come commercial applications (like games) for the rest of us to use. And it also saves some poor souls from having to use Windows. :)
BeOS does not run on the PowerMac G3s and above (read: anything with color on the case) and Be has discontinued development for the PowerPC because Apple is keeping the hardware specs closed, which makes it mighty hard for developers. I have been using Linux\PPC / MkLinux for about 3 years now and have seen it grow from "Let's see if we can make this work" to "Let's see how well we can make this work" to "Damn, let's kick some ass." Keep up the good work. :)
Is the partitioner able to reorganise existing partitions without requiring them to be removed, like PartitionMagic?
To the editors: your English is as bad as your Perl. Please go back to grade school.
Whether you call it Firwire , IEEE 1394 or iLink, (I personally like Firewire) I would like to know whether support for this technology has been added to Linux, or whether there is project committed to this?
Jumpstart the tartan drive.
Whether you call it Firwire, IEEE 1394 or iLink (I personally like Firewire) I would like to know whether support for this technology has been added to Linux, or whether there is project committed to this?
Jumpstart the tartan drive.
been using my Kensington Turbomouse, No problem. I set it up in WindowMaker, works real nice. G3/266 running LPPCQ3 and OS8.6.
:))
I will upgrade, may even spring for the Tee shirt. My wife would look good in it.
photosMy Photostream
I've got a 5300, and sit in the same sorry situation. Well, until I discovered that all hope is not lost for some form of Unix on these Macs! The answer, of course, is MacMiNT (MiNT is Not TOS). This is a port of the MiNT OS for Ataris to the 68k Mac. Suprisingly, it runs fine on PowerMacs, too... Apple did an amazing job with 68k emulation. The only catch is this: it hasn't been updated since 1994. It includes gcc-2.5.8. No network support... but since it runs inside the MacOS that's not really a problem. It's slow as mollasses on my PB5300, too... but it's better than no compiler at all! I guess... Oh well, just thought I'd point out it's existence. Do a search on Google or something, you'll turn it up eventually.
Your G3 has the newer (good) firmware. Check out this page for a list of the versions in Power Computing computers. I'm sure there is more info at the apple tech info library about other computers.
(When you're looking at the chart, version 1.0.5 is the "broken" one. 2.0 should work fine.)
Also, as a general rule, anything after (or at least as recent as) the G3 will boot without problems through OF.
I could figure out why both Yellow Dog and LinuxPPC cause my powerbook to forget it has an extra 128 megs of ram... After rebooting, it goes away. I can't explain it, but if I got back to macos for a week or so, it will suddenly recognize it again... This is the only thing that actually keeps me from using linux on my powerbook...
I ended up purchasing the LinuxPPC CD because I couldn't get the downloaded stuff to work right. (this was LinuxPPC 1999 with all the installer problems) but I'm not sorry to have spent a little cash for the CD. It arrived very rapidly and has been working flawlessly both at home (on an old PowerComputing PowerWave) and at work (on a PowerMac 7200/120). I plan to buy the 2000 version as well. (I was cheap and didn't get the free upgrade)
Umm, how is OF "broken"? I remember hearing about OF and thinking how cool that would be.
Some Powermacs don't have support for graphics inside Open Firmware, which means you have to configure it through a serial terminal. Others kindly put the Open Firmware framebuffer in the same place that the kernel gets loaded into (I've seen at least one APUS that did this). None of them seem overly happy about booting off floppy (the first 4 times it won't work. Then it'll work. Then it won't work again for three weeks, then it'll work every time you try it over a two month period. Then it'll stop again. No matter how new the disk, or how much it's been tested as being good.).
However, they have the astonishingly wonderful feature that holding down the "N" key during boot causes the Mac to TFTP a file off a server and execute it. If you make this file a second-stage loader of some sort (YaBoot, for instance) then you can boot Linux over the network without having to touch the local hard drive. Grab a root file system over NFS and you have wonderful X terminals that double up as Macs. The main problem once you reach that stage is that the mice Apple ship are absolutely dreadful...
> to choose an operating sytem that works on both PowerMac and x86 hardware.
Aren't we forgetting NetBSD?
True, you can't buy it off the shelf most places, but it's been running on more different platforms (including PowerPC and Intel) for quite a while now.
If you want NetBSD in the first place, you probably couldn't care less whether you can have MacOS on the same drive or not anyway.
Wasn't there recently a big flap about people tweaking Quake source code to build cheats into the client?
Or was that a different version?
Anyway, some Quake has source code available. From there it's simply a matter of porting.
Why not spring for a 3 button USB mouse?
I'd do it anyway just to avoid the damned round mouse. What were they thinking?
Post may contain irony: discontinue use if experiencing mood swings, nausea or elevated blood pressure.
What I meant to say is enter the mem param in BootX. No LILO on PPC. It's been a while, and those damned Linux boxes are so easy to admin I forget these things.
Post may contain irony: discontinue use if experiencing mood swings, nausea or elevated blood pressure.
That paragraph is just specifically about mac-on-linux, which is an independent project whose gpled software is getting bundled by LinuxPPC and heretofore has not been a normal part of the distribution. It'd be like RedHat bundling Apache and saying "If you have questions about Apache, please direct your questions to the Apache website or to this mailing list we have set up over here." LinuxPPC's support in general is quite decent.
I'm only saying all this because your post was ambiguous as to whether you knew they were just referring to mac-on-linux.
"If one is really a superior person, the fact is likely to leak out without too much assistance" -- John Andrew Holmes
Actually, the other poster who also replies to this addresses this point with more knowlege than I have on it, and says that it doesn't work on the later (current) Macs, like G3s etc.
But in truth, I had forgotten about that.
timothy
jrnl: http://tinyurl.com/c2l8yr / foes: http://tinyurl.com/ckjno5
is that when this is available in your friendly neighborhood CompUSA, Best Buy, Fry's, or whatever the local equivalent is, a happy situation will have made itself manifest: a customer will be able to choose an operating sytem that works on both PowerMac and x86 hardware.
Remember when (real soon [then]), the Mac OS was going to run on Intel? Remember when Win NT was going to be everyone's multi-platform solution?
Despite announcements and promises by the above-named, a month from now guess which OS Joe Everyman will actually be able to purchase, in real time, in real life? Linux. Interesting that the non-UNIX workalike with dozens of semi-competitive / mostly-friendly distributors manages to pull off that feat of convergence, while centrally planned behemoths faltered in their own giant footsteps.
Just thoughts,
timothy
jrnl: http://tinyurl.com/c2l8yr / foes: http://tinyurl.com/ckjno5
A couple quick question for you Hazz.
first, when will I be able to install it off the net? Also, will I have to download the entire RedHat folder? My setup is currently for YDL, since they had the first support for B&W G3s and they didn't make you dowload the entire RedHat folder, so I didn't allocate the HD space to make installing linuxppc 1999-q3 possible. I hope that all I will need to do is download a kernel file and a ramdisk file, just like old times. The install procedure for 1999-q3 was a step back from the older way, imho. Thanks for your time.
-Dan
--- Don't ever trust a woman until she's dead- B.B. King
Ok, so you'll probably have to put a bunch of bullshit settings back in the control panel. If this works you will at least have your memory back. If that works then you can use something like Tech Tool Pro to save the contents of your MacOS sane PRAM. After a Linux session just use Tech Tool to put the correct PRAM settings back.
(I realize this was a troll, but I will respond anyway...)
LinuxOne doesn't need to rip anyone off.. they can just use the Linux/PPC Developers' Reference Release. See www.crashing.org for more information.
The purpose of the Linux/PPC Developers' Reference Release is to allow any company/individual to make their own distribution based on Red Hat with little work.
--Mark
The part I was most impressed by was the fact that BootX is not required. I think BootX is a great tool (and that Ben Herrenschmidt is One Cool Guy for writing it), but I like the idea of not needing a Mac OS partition.
It looks like IBM is finally getting their POP board spec finished. With any luck we should be seeing dirt cheap non-Apple branded hardware before too long.
LinuxPPC has been working with IBM on software for the POP systems, so it is not too surprising to see their distro targeted towards these machines. However, YDL has some kind of a contract with IBM, so I would not be surprised to see them supporting the new hardware pretty soon as well.
Well done, LinuxPPC! If I weren't downloading an ISO of mkLinux right now, I'd be grabbing the new release already.
Well, actually this is really not that good an idea. NetBSD is more efficent in some respects but it has several failings compared to Linux/PPC:
1) Poor user base. Hey, it's a good system, but more people with Power PC's use Linux/PPC than NetBSD and that means a lot, especially in terms of support for the macintosh hardware.
2) NetBSD can't read Apple Partition maps. That's right, kiddies! If you want to install NetBSD on your box you need a dedicated drive. No MacOS for you. Compare this to Linux/PPC which even gives you Mac on linux and it becomes obvious which one will get more users to migrate.
3) No support for Linux/PPC binaries. This is just a matter of no one getting around to doing it yet, but it illustrates an important point: There simply isn't as much support for Power PC users in the NetBSD community as there is in the Linux community.
4) 8-bit XServer - Blah.
If I had another drive, I would install NetBSD, but I don't think I am going to give up Linux/PPC any time soon.
--
Lagos - White Rabbit of Linux
Let's try to solve this mouse problem, shall we?
.Xmodmap and try Option-2 and Option-3 as middle and right buttons respectively.
Hmm. Well, in the 2.2.6 kernels I have used, I think you can use '=' on the keypad as the right click and 'clear' on the keypad as middle click.
Of course, you can also try these items:
1) Add the line "clear mod2" to your
2) option-click for middle and option-control-click for right. I think this is a KDE thingie, though.
I'm not going to say not to download it, but if you can afford to buy it, please do. We need to support these companies that are doing a lot of work to make installing and using Linux on all kinds of different platforms really easy to do. They are also the companies that are funding development of the kernel and user space packages that make Linux (the best OS) even better. I've already ordered my copy. . .
:)). I encourage others to do the same. Prove the pundits wrong - make Linux profitable :)
I for one am going to start buying all my distributions (now that I have a good job
What really upsets me are these Revenge of the Nerds success stories. Who cares if they are smart? I think that thinks aren't worth doing unless they take a little bit of sweat and cruelty.
:-)
Christ, it saddens me to hear someone who probably considers themselves a "jock" or at least a bully say shit like "Well, I was going to de-pants him, but his belt was fastened too tight...". Do people realize that they are effectively calling themselves wimps and geeks by saying shit like this?
Oh well, not everyone can beat up geeks and get all the girls like me
I suppose I'm not too threatening, presently, but wait till I start Nautilus
High-end IBM servers, ancient BeBoxes, Mac clones, embedded systems :v) .
But most importantly, POP. The PowerPC Open Platform is allowing many companies like Prophet Systems (they were the first, I can't remember the others...) to develop their own motherboards based on the CHRP standard originally designed to support a wide variety of processors. These are not available yet, but when they are, they will be dirt cheap (especially considering that G4's are less expensive than Pentiums).
Where is my mind?
mfspr r3, pc / lvxl v0, 0, r3 / li r0, 16 / stvxl v0, r3, r0
Check out Project Upper/Mute, an all-around awesome compiler fra
Ben Herrenshmidt (I think I got the name right) wrote the kernel for the new motherboards, winning instant fame and popularity...
He got it all working a while ago, so it should be included in the friendly GUI install included in this new LinuxPPC distro. Speaking of which, I just ordered it for my G4 Sawtooth!
Where is my mind?
mfspr r3, pc / lvxl v0, 0, r3 / li r0, 16 / stvxl v0, r3, r0
Check out Project Upper/Mute, an all-around awesome compiler fra
Yes, and it's very simple to do so. Under a menu, there's a Mount Disc Image option. Select that, and select the .iso file you want. Then, just click the 'Data...' button, and select the mounted image, not the .iso, and hit Write CD. You should be golden.
A quick, off topic Question.
Can Toast for the Mac use ISO images? I'd love to burn a few ISO's I've seen but I don't want to download a 600+ meg file just to find out I can't do anything with it.
Thanks,
Fyre
- Apple Computer......proudly going out of business for over twenty years.
Is the install process pretty easy? From what I hear it takes a little to get around the standard Mac boot process.
LinuxPPC 1999 which I ftp installed included ssh, so I would guess so.
---CONFLICT!!---
We've just received a RS6000 F50 and nobody at the office seems to be interested in it for the next couple of weeks. I was wondering if I could install Linux on it and play with it for a few days before the machine gets its final OS.
For one, does PowerPPC 2000 support RS6000?
Then what about YDL? It seems they support it, but the note from their site says something like this:
What hardware is officially supported by Yellow Dog Linux?
[...]
- IBM RS/6000 B50, 7025-F50, and 43P model 150 (in "unimode")
What's unimode?
I would like to remind everyone that LinuxPPC, like RedHat, Debian, et. al. is downloadable via the web for free. Check out linuxppc.org and for help, most HOWTO's are accurate. Also there is a LinuxPPC listserv. Also for help try the FAQ OMatic for more info. LinuxPPC 1999 had an installer program that ran after you downloaded it For those of you people who own old PCI Mac's I highly recommend trying it. The TCP performance blows the doors off of OpenTransport 1.3 (MacOS 8.1) on my StarMax. It also lets me use slave IDE devices for bulking up on storage, which MacOS 8.1 does not :). The only sad part is LinuxPPC, like Linux x86 does not support HFS Extended yet, so if you want to save data you have to convert drives back to HFS (unless they updated this for Linux 2000).
- Sig
I would be running this so fast if it supported the 5300. Unfortunately, the hardware is screwy enough that I'm locked out of Linux support. Last I checked, MkLinux supported the 5300 but did not support the SCSI port or the PCMCIA slot -- which means no network connectivity and no CD-ROM drive.
Sorry :o)
Got Rhinos?
So far I've had no conflicts between the OSes. Upon startup, a dialog comes up asking which OS I want to boot into (Mac is the default, which activates after a few seconds). All I have to do is press the Linux button, and then I'm in Linux as if this were any old '86.
At first I thought that LinuxPPC was sort of a gimmicky thing ("Oh, lets see if we can get it to run on a Mac too"), but so far I've been nothing but impressed with its performance.
The only thing that bugs me is that I only have a single-button mouse. There's supposed to be a key toggle that activates a right-click, but it doesn't work for some reason. I've had several linuxheads try to remap the key combo, but it just doesn't want to go -- thus rendering the Gimp and some windowmanagers useless.
Oh, well. :o)
ZP
Got Rhinos?
'That version of *BSD' you refer to is probably MACHTEN by tenon intersystems (http://www.tenon.com/products/machten/) -- I think it's one of the best solutions around for MacOS heads who want to learn UNIX, hack perl scripts or whatever. Hell, if you get confident enough you can even replace the system file to get the mac to boot straight into MACHTEN. Shame it ain't free.....
Is it just me, or has this not yet hit their FTP servers? I've been putting off upgrading my installation until they unveiled their next major release, but this still doesn't seem to be up there. The closest thing I can find is the installer for their last release.
CVS is teh suck. Use Vesta instead.
When I first started using LinuxPPC this was a big issue for me (being a long-time X user). I specifically went out and bought a Kensington Thinking mouse and it works great. It's an ADB device with 4 buttons. (Unfortunately, LinuxPPC only recognizes the first three, and I was so looking forward to binding actions to MB4. :-) You may have a hard time getting your hands on one though, as their website says that it's been discontinued. Supposedly you should be able to use their ADB Turbo Mouse (a trackball also with 4 buttons), but I can't vouch for that.
If you read the ADB specs, there are actually two pointer protocols: the original one and a newer multi-button protocol. Theoretically, LinuxPPC will work correctly with any device that supports the new protocol (handler 4, if I remember correctly). Of course, you probably will have a difficult time finding out if a particular product supports this without just buying it and trying it.
USB devices are a different thing altogether (about which I know very little).
CVS is teh suck. Use Vesta instead.
It is also the first distrib to contain packages from miguel's company Helix Code. The packages are of course of GNOME. The Helix Code crew saw it fit to include my favorite window manager sawmill in with their packages!!
Real men dump cores! Read my journal, I am neat.
"LinuxPPC Inc. will not be providing technical support for the software. Instead, the company will set up a new Mac-on-Linux mailing list, which will be available for users to assist other users in setting up the software. "
Technical support on a mailing list? You gotta be kidding me. The mailing list will be technical, but I bet confusion will reign instead of support.
If they want Technical SUPPORT, they better wait for the Mini-HOWTO
I need a TiVo for my car. Pause live traffic now.
yeah tried all them but they don't work, anyone tried anything else?
well there is a Debian Linux for PPC as well
or i could try a USB mouse as i got Linux on my iBook, just that i actually *like* the round mouse!
OK, so they have a new graphical installer. I remember the last graphical installer was a usability disaster. Where are the screen shots?
So it comes with new GNOME packages "from Helix Code". How is that different from the regular releases?
So many buzzwords...
I'm running LinuxPPC 1999 Q3, and ssh came with it. I get the following: $ ssh -v SSH Version 1.2.27 [powerpc-unknown-linux], protocol version 1.5.
Yes, I downloaded the ISO-Image from SuSE, put it on a CD, bootet with BootX and used a special kernel I found somewhere on linuxppc.org. I had to download the Xpmac X-server, I couldn't get XFree-Fbdev to work. (I could boot with a kernel from SuSE, but the network didn't work) Now everything except the soundcard works, including X11, Ethernet and a 3-button mouse I bought because I didn't like the IMac-style mouse ;-) I had a very hard time configuring the swiss keyboard ;-( Stefan
Let me think... no.