MacOS 9, OS X And Linux On An iBook?

zoltanse asks: "As I am changing jobs, I have to return my company notebook, so it is time again to think about new hardware. Given the recent hype around OS X I am considering buying an iBook to give it a try. More important of course is my day-to-day productivity, so being able to run Linux is important, too. Does anyone have experience with this kind of setup? What are the pitfalls of running MacOS 9, OS X and Linux side by side on well equipped hardware? Is it possible at all, practical, or painful? What about the supported add-on hardware, like wireless LAN?"

Comments

powerbook

[Anonymous Coward]

If you're going to be using this machine professionally, spring for the real powerbook. The smaller screen on the iBook can only do 800x600. Powerbooks have 14.1" screens that can do 1024x768.

If you use it a lot, its really worth it.

Re:powerbook

[n0cturne]

Agreed. The iBooks are great machines for some things; running OS X is not one of those things. All the iBooks come with 64MB - you'll have to at least double that to even think about OS X. The iBook has only a 256k L2 cache.

Even the base PowerBook comes with a 1MB L2 cache, and it makes a noticeable difference. The bus runs at 100MHz versus 66MHz on the iBook. The extra screen real estate (1024x768) is also something you'd miss.

I'd suggest the base 400MHz PB upgraded to 128MB or more.

Avoid the most recent models

[ebenson]

If you wish to run GNU/Linux on Apple hardware your better off staying away from the most recent machines, pretty much every time apple makes a revision on thier hardware it takes at least a couple months before the support makes its way into the kernel and stabalizes. If you find an older revision you will have alot better luck. However, do be sure to get the so called `Newworld' era machines, (pretty much anything 1999 and on) the `oldworld' (beige etc) hardware is much more difficult to run OSX on, and is much harder to boot GNU/Linux without MacOS.

As for running GNU/Linux, OSX and OS9, this is quite possible, you just need to think ahead when partitioning, `newworld' Apple hardware needs a small 800K "Apple_Bootstrap" partition to hold the yaboot bootloader. see my partitioning doc at http://penguinppc.org/usr/ybin/doc/ ; ; ; along with the yaboot-faq. my bootloader installer (ybin) also lets you create a boot menu for the 3 OSes.

For newwer (G4 era) Apple hardware the best kernel source tree to use would be Ben's: http://ppclinux.apple.com/~benh/

I recommend the Debian distribution for powerpc hardware, in my experience its the most complete and stable.

--
Ethan

Consider VPC

[maggard]

Consider running Virtual PC from Connectix. While it's not as fast as running directly on the hardware it's stable, well documented, and generally fast enough for most folks on any reasonably modern Mac.

One of the advantages I appreciate about it is the ability to keep my Mac environment while popping in & out of others at need, no reboots required. At various times I've had RedHat & Mandrake installed, Netware, Win9x, and several NTs. Double-click - I'm running NT. Double-click - I'm in Netware. Double-click - hey it's Linux! Click - I'm back to my MacOS which never stopped running. No messy partitions, no boot managers, no shut-down-everything-then-reboot-into-whatever.

Moving from hardware to hardware is simply a matter of reinstalling VPC then copying the settings & disk image. I keep a small hub on my desk so I can drag these images between my desktop & laptop without burdoning the office LAN (routinely copying a 1 GB file on shared media isn't really a nice thing to do to one's office-mates)

Tips for running VPC: Memory and disk space, you can't have too much of either. A stock iBook would be crowded with VPC, really consider bumping up whatever you get as much as reasonably possible.

The hackers highjacked grammar nazi's account!

[blameless]

The real grammar nazi would have combined the first fragment with the sentence that follows. Like this:

Although the iBooks are nice looking computers that do have a good purpose, they do not have as much utility as a Powerbook.

Also, he would have said "...there are no Svideo...".