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Installing Linux On The New Apple iBook
Jack Moffitt writes: "I just bought one of the new apple iBooks, which I then proceeded to install debian on. There are some installation problems, but it works well. I wrote up my thoughts and notes here. Sound isn't working, but I've started driver research and work. This is probably the best Linux laptop one can buy right now, so go get one!" He includes an excellent rundown on installing Debian, and talks about what's known (and what's being worked on) to get sound to work. Does this mean that Ogg Vorbis tracks will soon play through the new iBook's speakers?
why is this one of the best linux laptops one can buy if it doesnt even have everything working? im totaly confused.
stuff
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Free Mac Mini
IMHO, laptops are too unconfigurable to be of much use other than business trips. Also, not having sound is quite horrible. Why bother with linux on it when you can just use the preinstalled OS and use linux at home?
Is it really that important to run linux everywhere?
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Sig
So far, it looks like Apple hasn't been all talk in their support of the community, and this may bode well.
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"To hope's end I rode and to heart's breaking: Now for wrath, now for ruin and a red nightfall!"
...unless you want sound and other misc. frivolties.
Who needs sound anyway? Back in my day, we only had sound it put a boombox beside the computer and put in a Wierd Al tape. And we Liked it!
Back in my day, you were considered a god if you had a newfangled computer with a built in speaker that made beeps and boops. And we LIKED it!
Back in my day, the SID chip on a C-64 was only for snobs and rich sissy boys who needed fancy stuff like color and sound on a PC. We didn't need it then and we dont need it now and we LIKE it that way!.
D
Mad Scientists with too much time on thier hands
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My work just got a new iBook in doing the dual boot OS 9/OS X thing. It's a fast little laptop. Much faster to configure for our NT network than even the IBM A21 Thinkpads running Win2000 was.
No, I've not tried Linux on the iBook yet...but OS X was nice on it.
MP3 players like Panic's Audion can already play Obb Vorbis tracks in OS 9 or OS X.
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...or am I missing something?
Forgive me, but I tend to disagree with this quite heavily. While I wouldn't say it's the best, the Dell Inspiron 8000 blows this out of the water for compatability. I'm partial to Mandrake 8.0, but any distribution is supported on this machine, and the ATI M4 Mobility or nVidia GeForce GO video, ESS Maestro3 sound, and Intel EEPro100 onboard ethernet are all supported out of the box. Hell, even the Lucent Winmodem is one of the supported models on www.linmodems.org and works great. Dell's support is great, their options are extremely configurable, and I've been enjoy watching my DVDs with Xine on trips for a while now. I'd recommend this laptop to anyone for Linux use, and would definitely pick it well ahead of an iBook.
Interested in open source engine management for your Subaru?
Wow, this guy has taken the "CmdrTaco School of Loaded Statements". :) There's an adage in the computer game reviewing industry that is summed up nicely in a writer's guideline I received recently: "Do not spend two-thirds of an article picking a game apart and then, in the final paragraph, say 'But it's fun. Four stars.'" A majority of his "thoughts on the iBook2 page" revolves around various parts of the laptop not working in Linux, the (trivial) problems of dealing with a 1-button mouse in X, and the benefits of playing DVD's -- in MacOS 9.
"Even without every piece of hardware being completely functional, this is one of the best laptops for linux use that I have ever seen or used."
Right. Well, my two cents. I purchased an Inspiron 4000 from Dell, installed RedHat 7.1, and EVERYTHING worked right out of the box. Sound card, networking, everything. Didn't even have to go through the command line setups. And getting DVD playback in Linux was easy after downloading a program to do so. And I've got more than one mouse button. :) That's a great Linux laptop, in my mind.
This is probably the best Linux laptop one can buy right now
Is it just me or there some reason an iBook would make a better linux notebook than a G4 Powerbook?
This is probably the best Linux laptop one can buy right now, so go get one!"
:)
How can this be the best laptop for Linux when it doesn't even have sound? I think the best laptop for Linux will actually support Linux for all of its hardware.
I'll be the first to give this guy a nod for a cool hack, and the first to recognize that sometimes hacking ain't really about practicality.
But I'm wondering... of what practical use is this, when OS/X is already pre-installed? If you just want UNIX, it's already there... and if you're a you-better-put-a-capital-F-on-it-mister Free Software advocate, you probably won't buy into Apple's mostly-proprietary hardware anyway.
To me, running Linux on an iBook seems pretty silly when Mac OS X is available. Yeah, yeah, I know, it's Linux and it's free and it's the Right Thing to Do, because it Can Be Done... but c'mon, you can get pretty much any software you'd expect under Linux via Fink and the Darwin Ports collection. Run a nice window manager and rootless X, and you can get pretty much any app you like.
:)
And then you can start looking at Cocoa and all the nifty things that are going to be coming from the NextStep/OpenStep legacy... IMHO, Apple's gotten the job done in creating a solid, usable UNIX desktop, as well as a mature, unified app framework.
Blah. Anyway, if you want Linux, don't waste your money on Apple hardware. Just stick with some cheap ol' Intel stuff. Go buy a used Sony Vaio, like my old one I'll be eBay'ing soon.
As for Ogg Vorbis, it's coming out of my iBook speakers right now. I use
Unsanity Echo, and sometimes Audion.
Many people already jumping all over Taco's ass that there are other laptops better than the iBook, but look at the price! For the cost of some of those "better" laptops, you could buy 2 or 3 iBooks!
Reality has a liberal bias
Try a Dell Inspiron 8000.
1600x1200 screen, 1GHz Intel, 512Mb SDRAM, option for 2 32Gb UDMA drives (RAID-0, urgh urgh urgh) and a combo DVD/CDRW drive, USB, Firewire, touchpad and mousestick, internal 10/100 NIC and (Win)MODEM, Maestro 3 sound (in the latest Linux kernel) and GeForce2GO video, all whilst two batteries are installed and leaving the PCMCIA slots free for even more goodies.
Then tell me the iBook is "the best Linux laptop".
You really wanna use a single button mouse in the X Window environment?
I love the look of the ti Book, but compared with the i8000 and the single mouse button of the ti, I just cannot come at the price of it, the Dell on the other hand, can you put a price on a mobile system of this incredible spec!?
War crimes, torture, lies, illegal spying... Would someone give Bush a blowjob, already, so he can be impeached?
Now I can replace my refined desktop interface, hardware support and native applications with LinuxPPC! I've been trying to cripple my iBook unsuccessfully for the past couple months.
/.!
Thank you
Why not check laptop ratings at the Linux Hardware Database? For the most comprehensive resource I've found, visit Linux on Laptops. Individual laptops aren't rated, but you'll learn if anyone's had success with the hardware you hope to use.
Helevius
I use both Linux and OS X, so I feel that I am in fair position to comment. OS X is a great way to have the power of Unix, while not necessarily having the experience of Unix. Linux on the other hand requires a bit more experience, but at this moment in time benefits from a mauch larger user base and availability of support.
Jumpstart the tartan drive.
I agree. I've got both a Compaq Armada M700 and Armada 7800 (Pentium III 700 and Pentium II 300, respectively) and thus far I haven't had a problem getting anything linux-related to work perfectly on them. How can this not-completely-functional Apple be considered the perfect Linux laptop when there are plenty of completely-supported x86 notebooks / laptops out there? I don't understand...
-Steve
The point is, if you do get an iceBook (say, because the hardware or OS X appeal to you), then why not run Linux on it also? Why do those holy wars always have to involve exclusion?
Timeo idiotikOS et dona ferentes
Does Linux support Firewire on those things? Last time I checked the FW in the kernel was still fairly beta - has this changed?
Jumpstart the tartan drive.
Since this is my first PPC machine, I chose to take the easy path and install a PPC-only distribution... I chose Yellow Dog 2.0, and I had an easier time installing than Mr. Moffitt indicates. Everything worked "out of the box" for me (pardoning sound, which as he mentions is still forthcoming) except for suspend, which locked up the laptop on resume. A little bit of web research revealed that resuming the new ATI Mobility chipsets was more difficult than some other chipsets, but the problem had been solved in 2.4.x; I snarfed one of BenH's fabulous kernel trees and built 2.4.6. Suspend was fixed, just like that.
Yellow Dog isn't as up-to-date as the distros I'm used to using on x86, but with a little legwork I'm getting it pulled into mid-2001.
I haven't found any documentation on how to turn off the AirPort card when it is not in use (I'm not sure about these 802.11 cards, but I know that regular 802.11 cards suck battery power like its their job; turning the slot off when they're not in use is a big bonus), but the battery life still seems to be 4 hours or so of light usage, less under heavy load.
I don't have the latch problems Mr. Moffitt mentions, either... The magnetic latch thing is SUPER cool in my opinion. It's cool just to mostly close the lid and watch the hook jump out.
All in all I'm very pleased. Time will tell if my pleasure is well-placed, I guess.
Ethan
While LinuxPPC is a decent OS (I prefer OpenBSD) my LinuxPPC discs went to the back of my closet once OSX came out. Certainly it's a nice hack, but will Adobe make Photoshop for it? (no, Gimp is *not* quite Photoshop, despite what the zealots say)
Apps are what the machines need, once the companies start releasing their flagship[0] Mac products for OSX I think this will be relegated to the "cool hack" pile
grub
[0]- IE is not what I'd call 'flagship' :)
Trolling is a art,
Well since Apple actually runs an open source kernel (and command line stuff) on these machines it does help them a lot to publish the specs for their hardware. Plus even if they don't, you could at least look at the source for the darwin drivers...
So far they have been doing quite well at publishing up to date versions of source of what they said they would. I'm happy. Oddly they have been doing worse at getting the DVD video playback working then I expected.
I'm not sure how well they are doing on incorporating 3rd party changes to their OS though. For example I know people have darwin booting on very old macs, but I don't know if the release version will.
The iBook uses a g3 by IBM, not a g4.
Adam
Are you kidding?
You have to jump through install hoops, the sound doesn't work, and it's only got one mouse button.
If that's the best, then all the rest must suck pretty bad.
Sorry, my Thinkpad 760EL works a lot better than that.
I don't doubt that it's flaming fast for a laptop with that processor, and I'll even give you "the prettiest", although a lot of people find the iBooks to be butt-ugly (I'm not among them), but "the best"? Cut back on the crack, yer startin' to hallucinate.
-
Oddly they have been doing worse at getting the DVD video playback working then I expected.
Rumour has it that most of the problems Apple is having with DVD support in OS X is related to the fact that the MPAA is very concerned about the possibility of intercepting the decoded data stream through their player (since OS X is considerably more "open" for tricks like this with the UNIX layer). I don't know if there's any truth in this rumour but it does explain the serious lag time for DVD support. Playing DVDs isn't that difficult (especially when they already have a DVD player for OS 9) so perhaps this really is the reason why it's taking so long.
Another thing to note is that if you take a screenshot in OS 9 while playing a DVD you get a big magenta rectangle where the DVD screenshot is supposed to be. Is there a technical reason for this or are the MPAA really that paranoid?
- j
My soundcard works fine on the Thinkpad 600e (Linux Mandrake 8.0). Just configure it manually with sndconfig. The autodetect comes up with this Crystal 4280, but choose instead the cs4232 soundcard. Just get all the IRQ, DMA and io settings from ps2.exe before you start.
I used this site as a guide: http://www.pc.ibm.com/qtechinfo/MIGR-4BP6Q6.html?s electarea=SUPPORTbrand=root
One could argue that Microsoft has pulled that off with NT/2000/XP, considering how much stuff they've stolen ... I mean, "borrowed" from Unix. Nah, I really shouldn't say that. I actually sorta like XP.
I think my main complaint with OS X is that the minimum hardware requirements were way too low. I purchased it for my original iMac (upped to 128 MB RAM) and it still runs excrutiatingly slow. It's all the window manager. Of course, the funniest thing I've seen is killing the window manager in a terminal window and not being able to get it back in OS X (in that OS, the window manager is everything). :)
I think it does support your point. I agree- a huge majority of those x86 Linux people out there have some flavor of Windows on another partition, but they seem to be in denial of it. On my G4 (selling it soon to buy an iBook), I have Mac OS X, Mac OS 9.1 and Linux installed. They can co-exist, and there's no reason for them not to!
Working toward a usable PDA environment in the spirit of Newton OS: Dynapad
And that's one of the biggest reason's I'm buying one! While I prefer Macs, when it comes to a portable computer, I want something that can get good battery life. The iBook has a great battery life (I wish it was more!), but if I could get a StrongARM machine running reasonably fast, with an even better battery life, harddrive and all at a decent price, I most likely would reconsider.
Working toward a usable PDA environment in the spirit of Newton OS: Dynapad
This is the kind of moronic drivel I hear all the time from Mac weenies.
WHO CARES who makes the processor.
Can it run the apps that you need? Does it run them fast enough for you? If so, congratulations! The computer is right for you. Whether it runs Intel, Motorola, or Bumblefuck-Chip.
If you write assembly language or machine code for a living, OK.. you might have some reason to care. If you are any one of the other ~4 billion people on this earth, you just sound like an idiot.
Is there a free rootless X server? I've been using VNC, but a rootless X would be nice...
iBooks come with a proper unix already installed. What would be the point of running linux on it?
That's like buying a BMW and replacing the interior with that of a twelve-year old nissan bluebird with minor fire damage.
"Look! It looks like a Nissan!"
"You are a dumbass. Please drive through."
The real problem with Linux is, due to the hardware manufacturers miscommunication of their specs, it is quite hard to have up-to-date stable drivers as soon as some new product is available.
Hence the lack of sound on this iBook.
I just checked its price on http://www.apple.ch and it is comparable to 14 or even 15" TFT screen-PC laptops.
So, how much do we pay for its design too (and maybe for the *bundled* OS and apps which you won't necessarily want to keep) ?
OK, we've got the battery life and... well, it seems it is all.
I personnally went for an "old" (one year old) PC Laptop with a P3, 3-hour battery life and DVD (dezonable) laptop.
Debian Linux installs itself automatically and anything I have tried worked immediately.
So, my advice on choosing a good laptop for Linux would be that if this is your first Linux laptop, just take a not-so-old second-hand one that might be very cheap and have fun.
Now, if you feel like experimenting and kernel hacking, well, OK, this is the best machine you may find.
I'd have really appreciated to read a proper description of what this guy does with his laptop : coding, surfing, whatever else ?
Maybe this'd have helped a lot relativizing his superlative point of view.
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Trolling using another account since 2005.
as I understand it, this is pretty common. the dvd software is using an "overlay" function of the graphics card to stick the moving image there, kinda like a chromakey. it does this for efficiency and speed but normal screen capture program's only capture the normal screen and not the poverlay unless they specifically know about it.
this is kinda how I understand it, any more expeienced ppl please chime in.
dave
And, by the way, why should I be using Windows on that particular notebook? My company could give me a separate desktop machine for breeding Outlook virii and playing Solitair.
Nothing wrong with tinkering and getting more hardware supported, but is it a good idea to recommend that anyone choose a new iBook as a machine to run Linux on?
Let's see. Out of the box you get a pretty laptop that comes preloaded with OS X, which is an open source BSD variant down low, with a lot of polished sophisticated commercial goodies up top like display PDF, the most seamless GUI/command-line config synchronization ever done on a Unix, and, well, the elegance that is the Mac UI. And you can run any legacy Mac software at near full-speed simultaneously.
And if ease of use and closed-source software give you hives regardless of how good they are, you can load up XFree86 and a swiftly growing number of your favorite "Linux" apps while you're at it. You've already got Perl, gcc, Emacs, vi and their friends ready to run. Don't like tcsh? Load up bash. Don't like their terminal-window app? Load up another. Want to recompile their (well-configured) Apache? Go ahead. And you have solid Firewire support and the most hassle-free USB plug-and-play support around, bar none.
But then you load up Linux and drop the sound support, the decent video playback, the easy CD burning and video editing, the display PDF, the Mac application support, the polished configuration tools, the decent web browsers, any hope of running a usable office suite any time this year or next (since you're not on an x86).. and the only UI that works well with the one-button trackpad you've got. There are dozens--maybe hundreds--of x86-based laptops out there in all shapes and sizes that are better-suited for running Linux than an iBook.
This is a nice hobbyist project, and certainly getting the new hardware supported by Linux is a good thing. But it's a lousy use for a new iBook.
"Another thing to note is that if you take a screenshot in OS 9 while playing a DVD you get a big magenta rectangle where the DVD screenshot is supposed to be. Is there a technical reason for this or are the MPAA really that paranoid? "
br.I have an older mac, from 96, with a tv tuner card. It does the same kind of thing when you try to take a screenshot. You end up with a black square basically I think. From what I understand tho, this has more to do with the way the card bypasses the normal system routines of drawing than any kind of copyright concerns. Of course this was 96, before dvds were real big and the mpaa was some kind of unstoppable force, so the reasons you cant take a screenshot may have nothing to do with the technical aspects anymore.
Time for some tasty Shiner Bock!
> Another thing to note is that if you take a screenshot in OS 9 while playing a DVD you get a big magenta rectangle where the DVD screenshot is supposed to be. Is there a technical reason for this or are the MPAA really that paranoid?
It has less to do with MPAA paranoia than the bandwidth of video being sent down the bus.
From the rec.video.dvd FAQ...
[4.4] Why can't I take a screenshot of DVD video? Why do I get a pink or
black square?
Most DVD PCs, even those with software decoders, use video overlay hardware
to insert the video directly into the VGA signal. This an efficient way to
handle the very high bandwidth of full-motion video. Some decoder cards,
such as the Creative Labs Encore Dxr series and the Sigma Designs Hollywood
series, use a pass-through cable that overlays the video into the analog
VGA signal after it comes out of the video display card. Video overlay uses
a technique called colorkey to selectively replace a specified pixel color
(often magenta or near-black) with video content. Anywhere a colorkey pixel
appears in the computer graphics video, it's replaced by video from the DVD
decoder. This process occurs "downstream" from the computer's video memory,
so if you try to take a screenshot (which grabs pixels from video RAM), all
you get is a solid square of the colorkey color.
Some decoders write to normal video memory. In this case, utilities such as
Creative Softworx, HyperSnap, and SD Capture can grab still pictures. Some
player applications can also take screenshots.
Easy does it!
This comment has been submitted already, 276865 hours , 59 minutes ago. No need to try again.
Sounds like the best of both worlds, if you ask me. A mature and mainstream GUI with a healthy number of commercial apps on top of that old, familiar Unix we all love.
Sounds to me like ripping all that out to run LinuxPPC is a downgrade, unless simply having the name "Linux" is the feature you most look for in an OS.
Hmm - you did? When I finally got my ibook triple installed with OS X, OS 9, and LinuxPPC, I tried re-booting into Linux, and it died. Not kernel panic, not crash... just shut off. I couldn't turn it on either. No - the only way to recover was to unplug the power, remove the battery, and try again. Now I have to re-format the linux partition.
- passion
As far as wasting money on Apple hardware is concerned, the point is that the iBook is actually cheaper than any comparable Intel based laptop at this point, and is an all around great little box.
Runs Linux too
As of Perfs, It'll leave you blazing horrified in comparison to your G something.
Of course the price is right too, but then...
Mess with the Best / use Windows like the Rest .
It takes 40+ muscles to frown, but only four to extend your arm and bitchslap the motherfucker
There was a discussion of this on MWJ some time ago, and the editor indicated the reason is MPAA paranoia about DVDs being played on any machine where a debugger (e.g., gdb) can be used to examine the decoding code when it's executing. Hence no DVD playback on UNIX, Linux, or Mac OS X, and MacsBug is disabled when you run the Apple DVD Player under MacOS 9. So it's not a rumor.
The power management problems appear to have been fixed with Os X 10.0.4. (BTW is version X 10.0.4 a bit redundant?)
www.lucernesys.comHorizon: Calendar-based personal finance
Okay, one reason: iMovie. iMovie and Firewire was one of the major selling points of the iBook, for me, and digital video takes up a lot of disk. I'll put Linux on a cheaper machine where disk space isn't at a premium. (And I have already cleaned out a lot of the cruft that Apple put on the disk for me. Like Outlook Express.)
www.lucernesys.comHorizon: Calendar-based personal finance
Its good that a few people are realizing that Mac are not always an expensive solution. People tend to think Macs are the most expensive computer solution. This is not always the case. As for the one button mouse issue you can easily go out and buy a three button mouse for any mac.
The Gateway you quote has the same issues, and is almost a full inch thicker than the iBook.
I have both, use both regularly...
Laptops make crappy game machines. There is no nice way to say it; especially on an old laptop like mine (PowerBook 5300) you're subject to a keyboard layout that just isn't all that conducive to keyboard control of a game, but the ability to take my Inform programming with me to have an iced tea and a cookie while hacking is indispensable.
On the other hand, desktop machines usually have the speed, and make great jukeboxes, but forget LAN parties unless you've got a big trunk and a lot of spare cables.
/Brian
Build XFree86 from CVS. It's not in the release but if you pull from cvs and make World && make install, then
startx -- -rootless
it works for the most part. I have had some problems with the cursor disappearing, but no worse than with Classic.
.sig: file not found
In past discussions on Slashdot, I have had the opportunity to quietly raise my finger from the corner of the room and whisper "Why not run Mac/OS X?" only to get completely bombarded by Linux zealots who tell me that, in addition to OS X being a terrible operating system (which it isn't, of course) they say "Hey I've already got a K6 box that I built myself for $23.48. Why go out and buy a Mac for a grand or more?"
Well that argument doesn't seem to hold any water when somebody goes out and buys a brand new iBook and installs Linux on it, and then everybody TAKES HIM SERIOUSLY!? Come on, folks! OS X shipped with the machine he bought! And it is so clearly superior to Linux (in addition to being much easier to install) that installing Linux instead is just plain ridiculous.
So it boils down to one of two modivations: Doing it because it's possible, or doing it because it's Linux. Doing anything simply because it's possible is not only foolish but can be downright irresponsible. Doing it because it's Linux reveals that the decision to use Linux is not based on feature/function or any other sound, objective rationale but rather on some other unquantifiable, subjective notion like "Linix is COOL man!" or some such nonsense.
Which is fine in it's own right. Linux as hobby. I once saw a Ford Pinto mounted on top of four enormous tractor tires. Logical? No. Practical? No. Waste of time? Most definetely. But it entertained the builder and even entertains passerbys. A freak show, if you will.
But the owner of that Ford Pinto made no attempt at convincing passerbys that his vehicle was the BEST vehicle ever and anybody who doesn't have a Ford Pinto mounted on four enormous tractor tires is JUST PLAIN IGNORANT. Similarily, I just wish you Linux zealots wouldn't take yourselves so seriously. It's a hobby and you enjoy it: Fine. But keep in mind that there are frequently more practical and useful computing solutions out there than just Linux. And that there are people who use computers to get work done. Please quit trying to pass of Linux as the best solution for EVERYTHING. It's not.
Well when the MPAA has this much say on what happens on our machines this begs the question: Whose computer is this, anyway?
Never has there been more reason for GNU.
I don't know where you got that price, maxed out like that it's pretty expensive.
:)
Although, you can save a lot by getting the 512MB ram from www.crucial.com rather than from dell.
In the UK, crucial will sell 512MB of compatable ram for £150, while dell charges £600 !
I'm expecting mine on Friday
http://rareformnewmedia.com/
The PowerPC chips are vastly supperior to Intel when it comes to portable applications. They give lots of power while consuming under 5watts. There are also lots of other really cool chips out there (like ARM) that just don't make it into laptops because Windows only runs on Intel.
Now if you look at the iBook and you see that Apple made a pretty damn good laptop. They could do this because they don't have to worry as much about cooling or battery drain. Intel notebooks - dispite being well designed - have that CPU handicap which results in larger, heavier notebooks that don't last as long on a charge. Crusoe chips sound promising but they're still a hack and you'll get more performance/power-drain from a smarter design - like ARM. But this requires that your software be re-compiled for the new CPU architecture. Linux allows this... Linux rocks!!!!
Willy
Anyone have any good links on where to get an iBook? I went on pricewatch.com and all I found were iBook's that only come with macOS9. After reading everyone's opinions.. I'd like to take a closer look and put better consideration into turning to the mac side....
Well, you can either build the latest bleeding-edge CVS checkouts, as petard suggests, or you can look here:
c le s&secid=1
http://www.macgimp.org/sections.php?op=listarti
They point you to XDarwin as based on the latest release, and then to some binaries compiled with rootless X to replace a few binaries from your X install. I've yet to really have it crash hard or anything. Only major drawback I've had so far, other than a few little wonky things, is that you need to start it from a shell rather than from an icon on the desktop.
Oh yeah, and you *will* need a window manager, and a panel of some sort would be nice so that you don't lose those minimized windows (since there's no root window to throw them on).
For something quick, I've been using this panel:
http://www.chatjunkies.org/fspanel/
And trying to decide between the PWM and Sawfish as window managers.
this is because the decoder is hardware-based, and it writes directly to the video card's buffer, bypassing quickdraw altogether. when you take a screen shot on a mac (presumably with command-shift-3) it copies the contents of the quickdraw graphics ports, which do not reflect what's actually in the video card's memory
Yeah this is exactly what I figured but I wasn't 100% sure. of course now I'm sorry I mentioned it as it has turned into a bit of a troll. What i really wanted to know is if anybody had heard anything more concrete about Apple being delayed in releasin the OS X DVD player because of copyright concerns.
And it is WAY to easy to get karma around by simply implying that the MPAA is evil.
- j
has been coming out of iBook speakers for a long time. N2MP3 Pro makes Ogg Vorbis tracks, and Audion plays them. Others too.
It's cool to hear about people using the graphical loader in Open Firmware to dual and triple boot Linux, and/or BSD with a Mac. The first time I used that graphical loader to dual boot OS 9 and a developer release of OS X, I immediately thought of how Linux-friendly Macs have become. Apple's disk utilities also have a long list of partition schemes and formats for Linux. Unless your Mac is very new and drivers aren't prepared yet, it's so easy to work with Linux on a Mac. You can boot from a CD or boot from a FireWire drive.
Apple's current products are a whole level above anything that the PC cartel is making these days. It is hard to find a flaw in them except for the fact that Mac OS is in a transition right now, with Mac OS 9 being better than X for about half the things people are doing, and vice versa. In six months or so, any off the shelf Mac will be a tremendous system with a huge library of software, and easy to dual-boot Linux, too.
With MOSX, you can boot back and forth between 9.1 and X cleanly and easily- with the added advantage of both systems existing on one hard drive partition. With older version of MacOS, you can run as many versions of MOS as you have hard drive partitions- you can throw on linux if you'd like, and older versions of MOS, MOS X server, etceteras.
For example, it is entirely possible to run OS 9.1, MOSX, MOS X server (AKA Rhapsody), MOS 8.5 and, say, MKLinux on one machine.
From personal experience, you'd probably want at least three hard drives for this, though- Server gets moody without a drive to itself, and MKLinux requires a pre-existing MOS to boot-strap itself from.
In any case, it's an Apple computer- as a graphics nerd, Mac OS X lets me run Dreamweaver, Fireworks, Photoshop, Perl, and Apache on the same system without dual booting. I dig that. (and sorry, Gimp doesn't cut it. You're deluding yourself.)
I find it funny your handle is "nofud" (which I presume to mean "No FUD") while you spread blatant lies about the MPAA. As you can read elsewhere in this thread, hardware overlay is a speed feature, not a copyright-protection feature. My WinTV card does similar things. Pretty much anything that has to draw to the screen very quickly will take similar measures - to INCREASE PERFORMANCE.
± 29 dB
price. it's snappy, it's got features and it's very cheap. disregard the "macs are expensive" dogma and do some comparison shopping.
size. damn they're small. if size counts (ahem) for you that is.
dual boot option: when everyone says "dual boot" they mean "windows plus something else". but you may want to have mac os as your second boot instead (for instance, if you are sick of the broken implementation of colour correction in photoshop under windows. ugh).
os x option: similar to dual boot. you can keep osx if you wish and have access to all the goodies there. (project builder/interface builder for instance)
coolness. don't totally discount esthetics. if you hang posters on your wall, like certain styles of music over others or have a favourite colour then you do put some priority on esthetics.
2 1337 4 u!
True, all true... but who's got room for a USB Thrustmaster in their laptop bag?
/Brian
Almost. It also has to be accessable to me in the US (the Psion Series 7, according to their site), I'd like a little more memory (16M?). The Series 7 only gets, according to Psion's site, 8.5 hours of battery life. That's pretty nice, but when you're sacrificing *that* much compared to a desktop, it doesn't seem like that much of a gain. My Newton 2000 gets a lot more battery time than that, and excluding the built-in keyboard, doesn't seem to do much more. Not to mention the Series 7 is slower than my Newt. :)
As for the netBook, it just doesn't seem accessable to me. Not only do they not sell them to individuals (as far as I can tell),
Also, it costs almost much as an iBook, and probably as much as an iBook with a HD. The HD would be limited by the fact it'd have to be an IBM MicroDrive.
I'd also need to such a computer run an OS that ran the apps I do- I've not been able to find any indication that a mature version of Linux or any other non-EPOC OS runs on it.
Cool, but not mature enough, I suppose.
Working toward a usable PDA environment in the spirit of Newton OS: Dynapad
How much experience do you have with making that MultiZone, to work with the 6x DVD Encore drive? I cant seem to get them to play nicely... I installed the H+ drivers and all that stuff, it was a while ago though... I moved from Sydney, Australia to OK, USA and thus have two different zoned DVDs in my collection. Its rather annoying, actually. Any help would be great. (just interpret my email address)
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Video meliora proboque deteriora sequor - Ovidius