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Mandrake For PowerPC Is Coming
Nikato Muirhead writes: "Need I say more?" and points to this page at LinuxToday which says that Mandrake is preparing a beta -- for PPC. Considering the price of a used-but-decent G3, this sounds fun to get in on. (E-mailing sympa@linux-mandrake.com with "SUB cooker-ppc" in the body will start you on the road to beta-testerhood.)
Part of the problem is that the buyers are pitted against each other. A particular type of item, say a 2 Gig hard drive, will get bid up to 25, 30 , even 35 dollars (US), and then those who didn't "win" the auction rush off to bid up the next 2 Gig drive, and then the next one, and the next one, and new would-be buyers get added to the mob as time passes.
Compare this to the retail environment where Staples and Circuit City and Office Depot and Best Buys and so forth keep offering larger and larger drives at around the $100 price point and the store across the street doesn't wait for the first store to sell out their stock before offering a similar product but offers it at the same time for a few dollars less or with a bigger rebate, or offers the next size up for the same price. They compete for the buyers. In an auction, the buyers compete with each other for the "privilege" of purchasing a particular item, even though there are a dozen or more just like it in auctions ending within 24 hours of each other.
Also, older hardware is competed for by people trying to upgrade older systems. Socket 7 233MHz Pentiums go for the same as or more than Slot 1 233MHz Pentium IIs, Intel Overdrive and Evergreen upgrade packages for Socket 3 486 machines go for prices for which you can buy a Socket 7 motherboard *and* faster Pentium. Hard drives that fit under the 2.3 Gig or 8.4 Gig limits go for more than they should considering what 15, 20, 30, and 40 Gig drives sell for these days. If you want a 10 Gig drive cheap, you get trampled by people who don't know that they could buy a new (as in faster and with a warranty) drive for not much more than what they'll wind up spending and just use as much of it as their system can see for the time being until they upgrade to a new motherboard and/or OS that'll let them use all of it.
I see even classic Slashdot is now pretty much unusable on dial up anymore.
1. Someone, please someone, make an installer that works? I've tried all of them for PPC; there was a LinuxPPC installer (IIRC) that was broken, the FORTH code for the 'blessed' system partition was just wrong. SuSE is on my PPC machines right now because it needed the least work (for me, anyway) to get it running fast.
2. Let's also see some "no MacOS, no way" things happening. I don't want MOL, I don't want to keep System around. I've never had much luck with the "official" method (the 800k Apple_Bootstrap parition trick) for having a MacOS-less PPC box. I have always used Mandrake on x86, and I hope they'll get this one right.
3. Voodoo 3! I have a Mac-ized Voodoo3 gathering dust because none of the kernels seem to work, even the latest 2.4.x. Please, there are people with PPC boxes that aren't running ATI. Let's see some cool stuff happen!
ZOMG I WOULD LOVE TO KNOW ABOUT YOUR FEELINGS ON MACINTOSH VERSUS WINDOWS, VI VERSUS EMACS, AND HOW YOU'RE NOT A DORK
I'd much rather see the effort go into making some of the existing PPC distros actually work. Too many things are broken after install, and it shouldn't be that way. I don't think I've ever seen a PPC linux install that didn't have at least two broken out of networking, sound, and X. You'd think that, given the relatively much smaller range of PPC hardware, making things work out of the box wouldn't be too hard.
I know the old battle cry of the open source zealot, "choice is always a good thing," but when my options are 'choice' or 'quality', I'll take quality. I think the open source world sometimes tends to do too much dividing and not enough conquering. All too often, new projects and distros are born out of internal conflicts between developers or other political reasons, rather than genuine technical necessity. In the infamous words of Rodney King, Maybe I'm being too hard on Mandrake--maybe they'll be the first to make a Linux distro for PPC that doesn't suck and actually works out of the box. Maybe Linus will stop putting out release kernels (not dev) that don't even compile on PPC. Maybe RMS will go work for Microsoft.
This is starting to sound like a troll. It's not. It's more of a bitter rant. I'm bitter that PPC linux has always been a second-class citizen to x86 Linux (despite claims of being a cross-platform OS). I'm bitter that people's efforts on the PPC side seem to be divided for petty reasons, rather than working together to produce one decent distro. I'm bitter that the PPC developers and Linus have such a poor relationship. I'm bitter the open source world can't do much better than imitate Windows when it comes to GUI design (and don't talk to me about skins or custom themes in Gnome or KDE--if you think those are what makes a GUI great, you have much to learn).
This is going to get me some angry KDE or Gnome zealots, for sure. People are going to accuse me of being wowed by the eye candy in OS X while being critical of KDE/Gnome for the same. For starters, OS X has better eye candy
Used PowerMacs (at least anything less than 3 years old) are horribly expensive. May as well buy a new Cube or iBook. Then you can at least swtich-hit and work with Linux, Mac OS X, and Mac OS 9.1.
If you're pricing one from the Apple Store, be sure to check out their refurbished models, they often have some really good deals that're only around for a day or two. Keep in mind that you can use any cheap USB keyboard, so you may consider selling the stock keyboard and mouse on eBay for about $90 for the pair. The original OS X and 9.1 CDs can get a fair sum, too. Probably want to keep the (very cool) diagnostics CD.
"It's called 'information research' - look it up!"
It's called 'satire' - look it up!
umm...no, you didn't select everything. finger and telnet are most definitely still included in mandrake 8...i'm telnetted into 3 different boxes here at work right now from my manrake 8 machine. the v8.0 packages you want are:
telnet-0.17-7mdk.i586.rpm
telnet-server-0.17-7mdk.i586.rpm
finger-0.17-3mdk.i586.rpm
finger-server-0.17-3mdk.i586.rpm
I, like some of the other posters here, am an OS X user - in fact, when I heard about OS X Public Beta, despite being a poor university student, I was so excited that I specifically went on eBay and bought myself an older iMac, just to play around with it. The GUI is gorgeous, and I instantly fell in love. Wanna know why?
.gtkrc, try to figure out the name of the GNOME configuration control tool, or load GNOME, which I don't particularly want to do. And then there's Netscape, and emacs, and xterm, which means editing .Xdefaults over and over and over (and over) again, until I find a color scheme that is acceptable.
I used to be a frothing at the mouth Linux advocate. I ran Linux exclusively (Mandrake 7.2, as a matter of fact - which I found to be an excellent distro) on my PC, and swore by it. However, after a year of running Linux, I constantly felt that I was always waging some kind of war against my computer. There was always sys admin to be done. And worst of all, so much time was spent configuring, and not enough being productive. For instance, say one day I want to change the theme of my entire desktop (and I'm running KDE, let's say). So I select a KDE/Qt theme, and all is well. But wait - I'm also running a few GNOME/GTK+ apps. This means that I've got to find a decent GTK+ theme, and find a way to change it - and the only ways I know of doing this are to edit
Anyways... I got sick of always battling my computer. I just wanted something that worked. Mac OS X works. You know what? I loved the Public Beta so much that I ran out and bought a new iMac the day that the final version was released. I installed it, and you know what? There was no fighting with sound, USB, etc... settings. Everything just worked. The OS X GUI is absolutely gorgeous. And after having installed XFree86 and XonX, With a couple keystrokes, I can switch my screen to an X server and run all my old, familiar Linux apps.
Despite the fact that I absolutely loathe Microsoft operating systems, I must say that IE is the best web browser I've ever used, and Office is an excellent office suite. Guess what? Now that I run OS X, I can run both of them.
Anyways... my biggest beef with Linux and *BSD is that the USB support is still not up to par. Due to the fact that I have a P3 and an iMac, and I switch between them frequently, I bought an excellent mac USB keyboard, a MS IntelliTrackBallthingy, and a USB hub. Thus, by flicking the switch on my hub, I can have the mouse and the keyboard active on whatever workstation strikes my fancy, right?
Well, partially right... Certainly, if I'm running Windows, BeOS, QNX, or Solaris, then everything runs well, but if I'm running Linux or *BSD, it ain't gonna happen. On Linux, if I'm in an XFree86 session and I switch the USB switchbox to my mac and then back again, my trackball refuses to function. If I CTRL-ALT-F1 to console mode, then switch, then switch back, and CTRL-ALT-F7 to X mode, then about 75% of the time everything works as expected. The other 25% of the time, neither my mouse nor my keyboard is detected (at which point, they are never detected again). This means pressing the reset button and waiting for fscks. I wish that I could run FreeBSD on my P3, but BSD is even worse in this arena.
A friend of mine put it well... (not to get flamed - this is the way I feel) - he said that Linux has the feeling of a big shareware project that never gets finished.
So in conclusion... when I have a breathtakingly gorgeous OS that has the ability to run all the Linux apps (with the installation of an X server), and can run all the mainstream apps (such as MS, Adobe, etc... products), why would I even consider switching to Mandrake on my G3?
If only Apple used standards like AGP, PCI, IDE, SCSI, USB, IEEE 1394... then we might be able to get somewhere with those crazy undocumented machines of theirs.