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SuSE For PPC
Maktoo writes: "According to MacCentral, the June 2000 issue of MacTech magazine will include a CD containing a 'SuSE for PowerMac' Linux distribution. The full distribution will be available from SuSE at that time as well. It's nice to see SuSE coming to the PPC market!" It'd also be nice to see some less expensive PPC systems.
You can do it at the X Server level or at the kernel level.
To do it at the kernel level (as required by gpm and/or XF68_FBDEV) you can use the adbbuttons=x,x,x kernel argument, the three numbers represent the key you want to map it to on your keyboard -- many use the F Keys for that function.
Some XServers (namely Xpmac) support mapping of second and third mouse buttons, by default Xpmac makes middle equal option-2, right equal option-3. Although this is easily changed by adding arguments to startx.
Then again, you can be like most of the PowerPC Linux users, who end up buying a cheap two or three button mouse.
Just in case you are wondering, there are a few projects out there to port Slackware to the PowerPC.
LinuxPPC developer Ani Joshi has been playing around with Slackware for the PowerPC for some time, he has a bootable system, although I don't know if it's avalible yet on the net.
The offical Slackware project also now has 2 G3s and an iMac DV. So it looks like they may be also working on a port.
Finally Slackintosh is working on another PowerPC port. It appears it is the most complete right now. They started out a year ago with a 7200/120mhz machine, and now they are on a screaming G4 machine. See Slackintosh.Exploits.org for details.
It appears we will be seeing more of Slackware on the PowerPC -- more sooner then later. :)
- Red Hat already has a PPC distribution, albeit an unsupported one. It's on their "Rough Cuts" CD. (A complete list of PPC distros is on the OpenPPC software page.
- There are business problems at LinuxPPC -- I personally had to sue them to get paid for work I did. (Follow-ups in private, please.) In the process, I discovered that their papers of incorporation weren't in order and other irregularities.
- LinuxPPC Inc. has only two assets: (1) A (sort of) well-known name, and (2) connections with the community. I'd argue that the latter is tenuous at best, and that developers would put their efforts behind a Red Hat brand without any money changing hands.
In short, LinuxPPC Inc. adds nothing to the equation.--Tom Geller, co-founder, The OpenPPC Project, for PPC hardware based on open designs.
P.S. I'm talking about LinuxPPC Inc., the corporation, not LinuxPPC.org, the community collaboration. And there are some individuals at LinuxPPC Inc. who are quite good (get well soon, Jason!). But Red Hat would be foolish to throw any money their way IMHO.
Tom Geller
The cost of Macs are usually in the same ballpark with IBM, Dell, and so on. However, the common Slashdot objection is that they can't go buy a $100 motherboard, a $200 PPC CPU, and screw the thing together themselves. People are working on this problem, but nothing yet.
The question is not that PPC systems cost more (IBM designed the platform to be competitive with Intel), it's that they don't really offer a compelling price/performance advantage over Intel-based systems. (The one exception is the Powerbook and iBook which offers a price/performance/battery life combo that kicks dust all over Intel.) The only really compelling thing about current PPC hardware is that it runs MacOS, and of course comes in cool looking cases.
This is a major letdown for a product that promised to always "scale" better than Intel. (Think back to when Apple was selling 604e chips, and all Intel had was Pentium Pros.) People will deal with various incompatibilities and minor hassles on platforms like the Alpha to get the enormous speed advantage. I just don't see the 'win' with PPC based systems right now.
--
Business. Numbers. Money. People. Computer World.
How would you emulate three buttons with a one button Mac mouse?
I'm a loner Dottie, a Rebel.
is now available on PPC. Those Germans are rad! I was actually wondering about this yesterday, lots more people have old PPC hardware lying around that they would like to get some use out of than people with old Alpha hardware (I assume). I think SuSE is a very good system overall, it's more middle of the road than the other distros. It's fairly simple to install (YaST is great for beginners) and it has pretty good security and stability. I admit though I haven't tried Redhat since 5.something or other but SuSE has always been my pal. I'm glad it's on PPC now, maybe I'll take up that offer for the 6100...
I'm a loner Dottie, a Rebel.
I disagree. the PowerPC environment is still growing, playing catchup in a few areas to x86. I, as a user of LinuxPPC, value it for its cutting edge support and aim to be a viable linux solution. Part of this is because LinuxPPC.com is very close to LinuxPPC.org, which focuses on development including the kernel. If RedHat bought LinuxPPC, PowerMac Linux would almost certainly suffer IMHO. For those who want a more server-oriented, supported, with a full blown company behind it, Try Yellow Dog or Suse. But PLEASE, leave my LinuxPPC alone.
Lycestra
Both Yellow Dog and LinuxPPC distributions are based on Red Hat, so so they support Gnome better than KDE (quite a few KDE utlities are missing and so on). Suse should be better for those of us who prefer KDE over Gnome.
Well... as a Yellow Dog CS 1.2 user, this isn't true. Yellow Dog defaults to KDE, not GNOME. Especially with the 1.2 release, Yellow Dog seems to be outgrowing it's RedHat origins. SuSE would be coming from a different angle though, who knows what they would bring to the table? I'm looking forward to it, though, because I've always been a SuSE man for my x86 machines. I love YaST!
Supreme Lord High Commander of the Interstellar Task Force for the Eradication of Stupidity
I'm amazed at just how negative you can be. You want a cheap PPC system? iMacs are pretty cheap. You could also look at a used Powermac as well.
I suppose next I'll hear "Those ultra 30s are sure nice. They should make a really cheap one." Think of all the money you're saving with your "free beer" software. You should be able to buy almost any machine you would like.
The next issue is internationalisation. Being a German company, they stress the internationalisation of documentation and installer, so during the installation you can choose one from dozens of languages, including Turc, Polish, Russian and some even more exotic. And with the distribution you get a lot of material translated into various languages. And you get national fonts, too.
The SuSE users guide is quite comprehensive, so is the SuSE support database, which gets installed (if you choose it) on your local Apache server.
I have heard that the RPM packages are somewhat not as good prepared as the RH ones, but I myself never had problems. The directory structure is different in one aspect - the /etc/rc.d/* scripts sit in /sbin/init.d/ (to quote a character from UF, "It's just plain wrong!").
But overall there are not much differencies. Linux is Linux. I use SuSE because of the internationalisation (being a Polish guy in a German lab).
Regards
j.
Both Yellow Dog and LinuxPPC distributions are based on Red Hat, so so they support Gnome better than KDE (quite a few KDE utlities are missing and so on). Suse should be better for those of us who prefer KDE over Gnome.
It will work on anything that the current PPC kernels boot on, which includes all PCI macs (but NOT nubus, you need mkLinux for that) including Umax, Motorola, and PowerCC clones. (I'm running it on a PCC box with a NewerTech G3 upgrade)
You can use AppleShare IP to get to your files over the Internet from another Mac. Or you can run an FTP or Web server on your mac and get to files from any other computer over the Internet.
All of this can be done very inexpensively. Timbuktu, while it has nicer features (such as built in file transfer), will cost you money.
Those who would give up liberty in exchange for security and DRM should switch to Microsoft Palladium!
Its too bad Apple killed off the clone Mac market and the CHRP (Common Hardware Reference Platform) with it. I'd love to have lots of different architectures to play with but I'm stuck with Intel/AMD lossage. Alpha's too expensive (unless someone out there knows better!) and buying a Mac to run something other than MacOS seems a little 'funny' when you are paying the premium over the Intel hardware so you can have MacOS.
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http://www.connectix.com/co mpany/press_vpc_mar1300.html
Wonderful now that PPC is getting some mainstream support. Hopefully SuSE will have more compatibility then PPCLinux -- but who's to say at this point.
Regardless of what OS you prefer as a consumer/workstation, Linux is unbeatable for remote administration and remote work.
At the school where I go, it's an entirely Mac network, with no way of accessing the network without being connected to their Ethernet LAN.
Hoepfully more support for Linux on Macs will encourage some admins (*cough* I'm looking at you, Mr. Readman *cough*) to give it a try.
I know I'd sure like being able to get work from my home computer to my school account w/o a disk or a hard copy.
Excuse me, but the $7000 G4 happens to have 256 megs of RAM, a 27 gig hard drive, a DVD-RAM drive, a Zip drive, and a 21 inch flat panel monitor. You are not going to find a comparable P3 for $2000 dollars, idiot. Enough said.
-- What I don't have in intelligence, I make up for in a lack thereof.
I havent used SuSE and happen to be one of those BSD is better than Linux dorks. What does SuSE have over the other distributions and what are its drawbacks?
Commodore Sloat
See The OpenPPC Project to get in touch with the community. The mailing list is essential for those interested in this subject.
IBM has basicly given to any serious takers the full specs for their reference ppc board.
Not yet, they haven't. Because of problems with the Northbridge, they've held off on releasing the all-important Gerber (layout) files. The schematics are there, though.
--Tom Geller
Co-founder, The OpenPPC Project
President, Pop Computers (to build motherboards based on open designs).
Tom Geller
They've got linux booting on it now, and the process is takin time, but once a real board hits the market, we'll probably see several ambitious pc board makers jump on board trying to differetiate them selves in this commodity market. Now, as this will clearly have lower volume than the x86 board market, we should expect relatively higher prices, but as people come to realize that powerpc without apples pricing is actually very price competitive, and the initial costs are recovered, the prices ought to come down a bit.
I've been looking forward to a ppc board market similar to the x86 board market for awhile. Fortunately the one-two punch of linux's cross platform compatability, and the fact that most of the apps that run on linux are open source means that having linux on ppc become more of an equal to intel and alpha linux is a realistic goal on the short term. That was the biggest problem with NT on non-intel platforms, sw companies had to invest resources in porting their x86 centric apps to non-intel, and then attempt to support them on very low volume platforms. With open source, the user community can ensure that the apps have cross platform compatibility and support, while the developers have the option of doing that work, developing new features, or even doing nothing. The code lives on regardless.
so, I'll get off my risc soapbox now, but I hope i've made the point that we can expect to see much broader support for linux on powerpc real soon now, and who knows, with the kind of performance you could get from altivec with intensive apps like encryption, packet filtering, compression, rendering, etc should make it easy to see that there are genuine advantages to working with alternative technologies. appliance wise, you would think that one of these security vendors would jump all over the opportunity to make a high performance security appliance that can do some serious vpn-ing at a relatively low cost, or even if you think about Be selling ultra low overhead (and cheap) rendering farms of dual G4s to graphics designers or digital animators or whatever they call themselves these days. That would be fscking cool! (never mind the mandatory references to beowulf clusters, or even just seeing natalie portman straddling one of those bad boys ;)
Red Hat buying LinuxPPC would be a very wise move, I think, especially considering the fact that the ppc linux reference release is based off of RedHat source packages. There would hardly be any work left to do to turn it into a real RedHat release. I'd be looking forward to more sane support for X. Right now there are 2 different types of X you can run. You can run Xpmac, which is older and tested, but I have no idea what sources it was originally based on. There's a more recent XFree86 port to PPC, but it's fairly flakey and lacking features that are typically needed on the Mac (like 3 button mouse emulation). I think I'd be very pleased to see a real PPC port of RedHat.
I think that if SuSe finally decided that they should port to PPC, Red Hat will soon be following. I don't know if they will port themselves, though. Maybe they'll just buy LinuxPPC. Seems like a logical move to me.
GNU/Linux. The Freshmaker.
It's been said many times here. Here we go again:
/.ers are going to admit to wanting to run Windows? ;-)
PPC systems are NOT significantly more costly than their Intel counterparts.
By the time you factor in the fancy case, motherboards with actual engineering (!) and the exotic (and in many ways superior) microprocessor, how exactly are you paying so much more for one of these machines? The iBook is the best example. The closest thing to it in terms of features and performance is a certain ThinkPad model, which costs several hundred US dollars *more*.
Of course, if you want to run Windows, you don't have much choice. But how many
You can run NetBSD or Linux on a Mac. Some poster above felt native Linux didn't run much faster than emulated Linux... I want some of whatever he's smoking. egcs produces the best-optimized code for the PPC architecture (as well as most others), and all of LinuxPPC is compiled with it (since origina-flavor gcc generates brain-damaged code for PPC). It's *really fast*. I know it's meaningless, but close to 500 Bogomips on my wimpy old upgraded-to-300 MHz-G3 box, with teeny 512K cache and slow 45 MHz bus.
I bought this machine in 1995, and have only spent a couple hundred bucks on upgrades to stay fairly current. Anyone playing Q3A on their 1995 PC? If so, let's hear from you.