Slashdot Mirror
Terrasoft Selling Non-Apple PPC GNU/Linux Systems
cyberassasin writes: "Yellow Dog Linux is selling PowerPC G3 and G4 computers called the 'briQ' with YDL pre-installed. I believe this may be one of the first non-Apple or -IBM machines to make the G-series of processors available.
More
info and specs are available at the Yellow Dog site." Terrasoft Solutions is actually the company, but they now sell both Yellow Dog Linux and these sweet-looking tiny yellow boxes built by Total Impact. Let's hope they're somewhat more succesful than the 1U servers Storm Linux announced before closing up shop.
Does anybody think that this could be a good buyout opportunity for Apple? Apple at the moment do not have solid server type machines available and with OS X poised to also penetrate the enterprise market, I am sure that they are looking at opportunites....
Ah, but is it possible to install Mac OS on these things?
Because they allow you to "access" apple's OS without buying their proprietary hardware.
This really isn't the first offering from non-apple/ibm manufacturers. For what it's worth, the G3 series PPC-750s have long been available as embedded VME or CPCI boards (Look for Force Computers). We've had a rack of G3s at work for two years. Mind you they weren't cheap.
its currently running a version of debian(thats the way it came to us). I work for www.OnCoreSystems.com and a customer wanted this machine for both development and as a target machine, the machine is really quite fast, and quiet (it has one small 20mm? fan in the back of it)....also the version that we have is red...i noticed someone said they were yellow...
And no, the word "Linux" on the side of the case doesn't count.
--
$x='S24;r)>63/* h@<5+oZ)32"5cz';$me='phroggy'x$];
$x=~y+ -xz+\0-Tx+;print$_^chop$me for split'',$x;
No shit?!?! Their product is called Yellow Dog Linux. How in the name of Jesus and hot chocolate did I miss THAT? Call me a troll, but I'm waiting for Blue-Baboon-Ass Linux.
Word!
--
Kir
3cx.org - A truly bad website.
I'm sorry, but... ummm... they're YELLOW!
Not blue, or red, or hell... artic camouflage (you know... the bluish white kind) would've ROCKED.
Word!
--
Kir
3cx.org - A truly bad website.
You always pay for space. All rackmount equipment is expensive. And low-volume equipement is always expensive, too. Mabye the briQ cost will come down if they have massive demand.
-Paul Komarek
That's not true. You can add RAM yourself, especially in the Indigos and newer which switched from SO-DIMMs to standard 168pin DIMMs. Yes, RAM from Apple is more expensive than most of the RAM you find from third party vendors. The same is true for every other major manufacturer out there.
The Cube was indeed fanless.
When the Radeon came out in September of '00 and then when people added Radeons...there was a fan on the video card, so then it had a fan.
If you look over the xlr8yourmac and macnn archives...you will find people bitching about the "noise" from thier Cube if they had a Radeon.
Of course one little video card fan is nothing like the 747-ish sounds that emit from some PC cases and thier 4-11 fans. My Windows 2000 box has 7 fans and my Linux box has 8. My iMac has none, my G3 tower has 1.
That looks exactly the sort of thing I'm after. Thanks. BTW, it doesn't have to have Linux support specifically, but either that or *BSD is essential. Either way, the MZ104+ looks to be completely standard PC components (with the exception of the DiskOnChip), so any of the options will probably work just fine.
"The invisible and the non-existent look very much alike." -- Delos B. McKown
If they were priced low, I'd have bought one, not because they're cool, but because I have a need for a small form factor Linux box. This is the closest I've seen because unlike all the other options, it comes with (or at least, you can get one with) dual ethernet ports. That immediately makes it suitable for a home firewall. It's just that final stumbling block -- price.
"The invisible and the non-existent look very much alike." -- Delos B. McKown
Think small. A G4 tower takes up the space of 5 or so of these, it is only about 3 or so times faster. For a render or server farm, these make a lot more sense- I can wedge 3 or so of these into a single rack slot.
I am not merely a "consumer" or a "taxpayer". I am a Citizen of the State of Texas
Well, except for the video, which I think is done similarly to how other Unixish systems handle X11. Handing off close to raw access to the video device to anything that asks to be the window system :-)
Darwin does not include Apple's windowing system. So your clone will have to include video hardware that OS X's windowing system knows how to talk to, or it ain't going to be all that apple compatible...
Total Impact also seems to have these daughter cards that drop into an intel PCI system. With up to 4 powerpc CPUs on a card, and multiple cards per system!!
... Might be an interesting environment to adapt something like MOSIX to. (Load balance between multiple cards in the same system, etc.)
You could keep your intel workstation, and still run powerpc applications
In any case, this could allow for a LOT of CPU power in one box. Neat product.
"There's no secret. You just press the accelerator to the floor and keep turning left." -- Bill Vukovich
If you want small and low power, the G3 and G4 offerings from Apple are cheaper and get you more (more peripheral ports, CD-or-something-drive, and a built in monitor!).
iBook (500MHz) $1299-1799
PB G4 (400MHz-500Mhz) $2599-3499
the iBook wins in all ways, the TiBook nearly so. See Apple Store, and TerraSoft Store
Start Running Better Polls
This sounds familiar.
--
And you may ask yourself, well, how did I get here?
This is a super thing for all of us who have been waiting for a G* produced by someone other than Apple, but it has some up ups and downs. Terrasoft is selling servers which are for a niche market, not really boxes that most of us or most of anybody is probably going to put on their desk. Beyond this niche market they are at least as expensive as something you would get from Apple, without the bonus of coming with MacOS for those who would be interested in a dual boot or even a video card... I am sure they have created a high quality product but it mostly looks applicable only to servers. This is perhaps comparable to (from what I have seen) most "built-for-Linux" machines on the PC side... [insert custom Linux machine manufacturer] makes great servers, but they cost a lot more than the alternatives and may be limited in certain ways...
Nonetheless, a step forward for the G* platform, go Terrasoft.
prosebeforehos.com
Think: the darwin being distributed is the same darwin running underneath the user parts of os x, and darwin does *all* the talking to the hardware. And from what i've heard, darwin/os x (because of mach, and because of some other design decisions) is designed to be as easy as possible to port. So while there's no way you could get out-of-the-box mac os working with these machines, you could just rewrite darwin to support them, slap that under os x, and as far as my understanding of the APSL is there is nothing apple can do to stop you.
Some people seem to have done something like this to get os x to run on unsupported, old apple machines.
OK, so maybe darwin *doesn't* have much use as its own operating system compared to BSD. That doesn't mean it's not damn useful.
Irritable, left-wing and possibly humorous bumper stickers and t-shirts
No. For that use I don't think the price would kill them. They're small, you see, so they don't take up much space. And building space is expensive. They don't put out much heat. They don't use much power.
But they are a bit pricey for personal use.
Caution: Now approaching the (technological) singularity.
I think we've pushed this "anyone can grow up to be president" thing too far.
I would be courious to see whether anyone can get Darwin working on those things, or any other PPC based OS for that matter.
Jumpstart the tartan drive.
With all new Macs the fabled ROM has gone. All new Mac use what Apple calls the 'new-world' ROM, whereby the only thing it contains is the open firmware. The old style ROM is now in the form of an image supplied with MacOS 9.x. This was done for both cost (256Mb ROMs are costly) and with the advent of MacOS X most of the stuff on the ROM was no longer of any use.
Jumpstart the tartan drive.
yellowDog Linux, it should rock. I think it is a bit pricey, that's my only problem with the machine. They need to show justifucation for the price.
My YDL2 box is solid as a rock.
photosMy Photostream
Check out this PPC rack mount hack. http://imac.pointinspace.com/. By taking a used/older iMac MB and fitting it into a 1U rackmount, you can end up in the sub $1000 range. And since the iMac MBs are pretty small you might be able to double them up. Maybe update the processor http://www.xlr8yourmac.com/ if needed.
What to do with the monitor and case is up to you...
"I have a cunning plan..."
The title says "GNU/Linux". The text of the announcement says "Yellow Dog Linux". Which is it? Debian or YDL?
A Government Is a Body of People, Usually Notably Ungoverned
Yellow Dog Linux (it's official name) is most certainly not The GNU System. It can't be, as a completed GNU System has not yet been shipped.
Most certainly it is not The GNU System with merely a different kernel. Go buy the Deluxe GNU distribution, pop in the linux kernel, and it won't work. (To be fair, it won't work with Hurd either). Take any given Linux distro and merely replace the kernel with Hurd and it won't work.
Merriam Webster's dictionary defines "operating system" as "software that controls the operation of a computer and directs the processing of programs". That sounds like a kernel to me. But I'll be generous and allow a certain amount of infrastructure as well. But it still doesn't cover bash (you can use a dozen other shells instead), glibc, emacs or gcc. It would cover ld, init and the file system, none of which on my system come from GNU.
A Government Is a Body of People, Usually Notably Ungoverned
They keep talking about processing power, so I think they mean render farms and cluter computing are the intended uses.
but have you considered some of the firewall boxes made by linksys and netgear? the linksys boxes cost between 140 and 200 (USD). the 200$ one has wireless capability.
i've setup ipmasq and messed around with the trinityos firewall script. i've also played with the premade linksys firewall. if you need some service that the prebuilt boxes cannot provide i can understand. if you are wanting to use linux just to "use" linux i really think you should look into something prepackaged. they are inexpensive with respect to money and time.
use LaTeX? want an online reference manager that
-- john
Rackmount? It looks like you could use a few Briqs to build a cluster in an ordinary mid-tower or full-tower case...use an ordinary x86 system as a front end to half-a-dozen or so of these. Try doing that with the same number of iMacs (or even the guts of those iMacs).
Then again, a bunch of rackmount cases would let you combine several of these. Imagine a Beowulf cluster...of Beowulf clusters.
20 January 2017: the End of an Error.
With a starting price of $1649.00, why not get an imac which comes with a monitor, faster processor, and viseo card? I guess if you really need to rack mount these babies...
Want rack mount? We got a Cobalt Qube I and it was both lower power and lower price - three or four years ago. There's a rack-mountable version available. Ran linux, too.
It used a MIPS then. Just looked at their web site here. They've been acquired by Sun and are up to their fourth generation.
It's an Intel- compatable processor (at 300 or 450 MHz), still running Lunix. Power is up to a bit more than the briQ but that includes the power supply, which the briQ's ratings do not. Upgrades to SCSI, PCI jacks, and built-in RAID 1 available.
Low-end prices are $1,149 for the slower model (300 MHz) of Qube (450 available), $1,499 for the (450 MHz) rack mount. Note that this includes cabinet and power supply.
So it looks to me like the briQ's in the ballpark, but you're paying $150 extra AND losing the rack mount box and power supply to get a G-series machine and a serial port, and a "standard" rather than "custom" (and server-tuned) linux distribution (since Yellow Dog also sells the distribution bare).
I presume they're playing into approximately the same space, since they've named it briQ, which I take as a reference to the Qube. But the Cobalt machines are being pushed as (preconfigured) enterprise servers (email, web, web cache), while the briQ looks like a building block for both this and for clusters.
Maybe with two players in the same market segment we'll see some price competition in a bit.
Bantam Dominique roosters crow a four-note song. Once you've heard it as "Happy BIRTHday" you can't NOT hear it that way
To my knowledge, the G-series of chips has never needed a fan mounted directly on the processor. In dual (or more) processor configs there is often a fan that leads to the CPUs' heat sink (one mamouth one), so that gets close, but it is not like what is needed for the Intel/AMD processors.
I talked with the YDL people at MacWorld this week. They do have one fan that sucks air in a U shape around the case. They're working on a new design that they hope to have done soon that runs on convection cooling and doesn't need a fan. It's interesting to note that Total Impact had some sort of psedo-deal with LinuxPPC announced in January, but they've switched to YDL I hope it works for them.
Oh, I guess that's the idea
Get server, put video card in, install os, remove card, put back together, rack mount.. SSH to it from then on.
--
Free Mac Mini
Looks like there are at least a couple of fans in the uncovered box here
I like the noise, it keeps me sane.
Ryan Earl
Student of Computer Science
University of Texas
The only good points about it are low power consumption/heat production, it looks cool, and its compactness. As for price/performance, you would smack that all around with a Athlon cluster that cost the same price.
It better have some badass compilers that will vectorize code for AltiVec included.
Still, having a little 16-node cluster sitting beside your desk would be neat.
Ryan Earl
Student of Computer Science
University of Texas
That would be a great product, though -- rack-mounted Darwin server, anyone?
But why use NT as a Mac server? Linux will run on the same hardware for much cheaper, and Netatalk is not that hard to get (though I've noticed that RedHat no longer supports it for reasons unknown). (And trust me on this -- support issues for netatalk are nonexistent -- it's pretty much plug'n'go. Not like, say, Samba or Apache.)
/Brian
This looks quite similar to the Ross SPARCplug from yesteryear:
http://www.dm-int.com/sparcplug.htm
Neat little gizmo that many of our engineers had several years back. Though, I'll probably buy a BriQ as soon as someone ports Darwin to it.
Sig? What Sig?
Imagine the hundreds of thousands of tons of CO2 that would be saved if people destroyed their pentiums and replaced then with G4's.
:)
Think of the Environment
Think Different
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2004_U.S._Election_c
Ok, I should have been more specific in my post. What I meant was, can these processors operate without a CPU fan. Most of the noise in my current computer comes from the CPU fan, so eliminating that noise is what I'm most interested in.
After having to put up with a noise polluting AMD Duron PC for a few years, I've been looking for a decent computer that would not have any cooling fans and would come in a sturdy enough case to silence the power source and hard drive noise. Noise levels should preferably be at around 30 dB and below when operating (the PC I'm using screams at 62 dB).
With a starting price of $1649.00, why not get an imac which comes with a monitor, faster processor, and viseo card? I guess if you really need to rack mount these babies.... If they were $750 or less, I would have bought one just because they look cool. I toulg be cool to have another G4 computer in my current dual processor G4. Oh well...
Well I suppose given that its based on the smae stuff in a MAC, its not surprising that its insanely over priced.
Power Corrupts,Absolute Power Corrupts Absolutely, leaving one person(group)in charge is absolutely corrupt.
Reminds me of the Pathfinder that someone installed a powerbook and a touch screen in. The form-factor seems perfect for an automotive installation...just add a display in the dash and presto...an overpriced car stereo.
I do think Terrasoft makes a nice linux distro though.
E.K.
We apologise for the fault in this post. Those responsible have been sacked. -- Signed RICHARD M. NIXON
This is hardly the first small PPC server to come out. Terrasoft used to make a rackmounted box called iDitarod that came in a little wheeled rack with G3 or G4 (can't remember) chips in it. It came with Yellow Dog installed and it was yellow, too. But, each box was about 3x the size of this one.
Also, before they were bought by Sun, the Cobalt Qube ran on a PowerPC chip and came with Gnu/Linux installed. Now it contains (I think) a Duron and a Sunified version of Linux, it's still small (7." cubed), blue and cute, though.
OpenBSD is x86-specific. :)
You should be able to run netBSD on 'em though.
my old sig used to be funny, but then slashcode ate it and now it's not funny anymore
What's more, iMacs are designed to run hot.
If it's been on for an hour or two, you can cook eggs on the top of mine.
Well, not quite. But hot enough that, if more stupid people bought from Apple, there'd be a warning label there somewhere. (You know, like the "Warning: Coffee is Hot" stickers. :)
my old sig used to be funny, but then slashcode ate it and now it's not funny anymore
I don't think these are really marketed as servers either. It looks more like they are targeted for use as computation farms.
Come test your mettle in the world of Alter Aeon!
I've noticed folks taking about benchmarks and purchase costs and so forth, asking "are these things are expensive?" or "how fast is it?" Trying to justify these systems (or any other system) without considering ALL costs, including operational costs, is pointless. For instance, if I were an ISP, I'd definitely want to consider how much electricity my servers consume. That includes calculating what it would cost to cool a server room full of them. After all, I run a business and have to pay for air conditioning, too. My point: If the power saving is large enough, speed may not be the most important consideration. It fact, an ISP might get better performance AND operate more profitably by installing 1,200 of these rather than buying 1,000 "less expensive" x86-based units. It is possible to go broke saving money. --Richard
I mean: am i wrong or those boxes are intended to be servers ? No video card pre-installed, small size, relatively high price, kinda "rackable": they're servers, aimed at competing with IBM servers (well... small servers...).
They're not competitors to Apple's desktop Macs. They're not aimed at desktop use... or am i completely missing the point ?
This computer is obviously aimed at industrial computing because it has an overall capability of expansion and is not limited like the iBook.
I notice that it has a dual PCI bus. Something only found on a few machine types and always associated with high reliable speed.
I also see that the missing keyboard and monitor can be fitted on the secondary board inside the casing. This is clearly a feature that hints that this unit will do well in massive parallel setups - no excess luggage. The possibilty of having more network adapters and the fact that you can fit a secondary network adapter on that second board means that you here have a product being totally free to engage in any custom provided network interface. I would like to see firewire on that board as inter processor connect.
Maybe I am to simple, but I don't see how I can shell an iBook to get at that. And even if I did so, then I still would have to come up with a well designed enclosure that makes sense.
I think it is a pretty nifty little buggar.
Bad form to reply to yourself, but, I meant to say: "Give it a nice, graphical installer..." ;)
Back to your regularly scheduled program...
BRx.
Life after capitalism? The participatory economics project
One of the biggest barriers to entry to becoming a "Mac user" tends to be the high cost of a decent system. You can get an iMac for pretty cheap, as far as things go, but, for the same price you can get a significantly more customized (& probably faster) Intel-based system.
The closed hardware platform has always let Mac users sleep easy in that all Mac hardware always has 100% plug-n-play support... but, still, there are those of us who'd like to *build* a Mac... or get a Mac with the specs of a G4 tower for significantly less...
Anyways, the site linked-to above and noticed they mentioned these briQ's are capable of Mac-on-Linux...(obviously...) but then it hit me: why not develop some superbly lightweight Linux distro that was basically just a bootloader for MacOS 8.6 (hopefully OS X eventually) -- you could avoid the annoying proprietary ROM issue, by using a software ROM legitimately from the 8.6 CD (which you buy legitimately.)
Give it a nice, graphical interface... Enter the consumer priced Mac clone...
BRx.
Life after capitalism? The participatory economics project
Granted, the TerraSoft boxes are the size of a CD-ROM drive, but that is still a ridiculous price for outdated, overrated hardware.
Is your company running tools written by ma
Are the specs of the clusters (ram, hd) per node or for the whole system? If they are per node with the 4-node cluster, you should have:
- 2000 MHz cpu power
- 120 GB hd space
- 2048 MB RAM
for 15000 $.
What does a comparable ix86-box cost? Can a dual-1.3 GHz / 2GB / 4x30 GB RAID compare with this for cluster-based apps? If so, It could be made for less than 7000$.
The idea is really cool, but it's just too expensive. I hope that enough creeps are crazy enough to buy them, so another company will make ix86-based briqs for much less money. Maybe this will open a market for extensible pc's. If the load is too high, you just (hot)plug another node in it, maybe even a G4-node for graphics-apps, a P4-node for number-crunching and so on. As far as I can remember, a british company (Acorn?) tried to make such a system in the early 90's.
---
nice idea, but most of the newer powerbooks won't run with the clamshell closed, because they need to convect cool through the keyboard. they can sleep ok with the top down though.
These systems undoubtably have fans due to their arcitecture. The iMacs have heat sinks that are designed to convect heat throught the machine. These are designed to be packed together and therefore cannot use the same principals. Please refrain from comparing PPC processors to AMDs or x86s as far as heat. You could cook an egg on a P3. You can light a cigarette with a P4.
----
It kinda feels like you're being kicked in the head.
What?
I got nothin'.
I'm curious to know if anyone has tried to operate Mac-on-Linux on one of these boxes, and if they have, what kind of speeds they're getting.
--
I saw themm at Mac world expo they are definatly cool but when I asked about the price $1600 I thought they were just a bit to pricey. BUt they are awsome they even sell them in a cool rack i think there were about 6 or 8 of them in the rack it was the size of a standard pc case with a switch built in but the rack price $28,000 was a bit out of my range :-( My idea was a web hosying company with a wall full of these you rent them as colocated servers but again the price would kill that plan. Can't someone come up with a cheap G4 motherboard?
I also picked up yellow dog linux 2.0 3 cd set for $25 at their booth
http://Lenny.com
4 great justice!
Did anyone else notice this? The site says that it does not ship with a video card, but has a pci slot, so you may use your own video card in it. Nice, but the problem is, if you look at the picture of it with the cover off (found on this page), the pci slot is on the bottom of the mb. There's no way you could get a card in there and get the cover on! :)
NZ