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.

Comments

Re:One interesting thing about this

[Darchmare]

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)

compiler?

[Signal 11]

Okay, my question is simple - what's the compiler technology like for PPC? Is gcc highly optimized for it? For x86 gcc is great - but for other architectures, it seems lacking (alpha comes to mind).

Since the compiler is key to speed on a linux platform.. how good is gcc support now with the PPC instructions?

Mac On Linux pondering...

[Lord Kano]

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

Road Apples

[Sloppy]

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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My 2 bits

[chainsaw1]

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).

My LinuxPPC experiences

[zpengo]

We've got an old PPC at work, and few of the linuxheads around here decided to repartition the harddrive and toss LinuxPPC on it, just to see how it would work. On the whole, I was rather impressed. It actually performs better (IMHO) than the MacOS 8.5 that occupies the other partition. I've been using LinuxPPC almost exclusively on this computer now, only booting into MacOS when I have to retrieve a particular file or run a certain application.

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

Re:Install

[friedo]

Not really. The reccomended booting method is via BootX, which loads as an extension during the MacOS boot. Click Linux, and the kernel is loaded from the current Mac partition. You can also boot directly via Open Firmware and skip MacOS altogether, but OF is broken on a lot of Macs and I've never gotten it to work exactly right on my PT Pro.