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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.
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.
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$x='S24;r)>63/* h@<5+oZ)32"5cz';$me='phroggy'x$];
$x=~y+ -xz+\0-Tx+;print$_^chop$me for split'',$x;
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!
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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
I guess I'm picking at nits, but "With just a little EE knowledge..." doesn't seem true. "Just a little EE knowledge" *might* be enough to design a small computer. But building products is much, much harder. Despite their "high" price for these units, a little EE knowledge won't build these things for anywhere close to their price. Nor will it be as reliable. Or tested. There's a lot of engineering involved in any product, especially a small-form-factor computer. Much of it isn't even electrical.
I just want to give credit where credit is due.
-Paul Komarek
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.
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
This sounds familiar.
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.
Just curious, but what isn't solid about their current batch of G4s? Maybe you're suggesting that they need some rack-mountable machines?
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
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
My company creates very large and very expensive embedded devices. We recently shipped two new products.
The first product (call it Alpha) was designed and created by us, but manufactured by Fujistu. Should this product be called "Alpha" or "Fujistu/Alpha"?
The second product (call it Beta) was designed, created and assembled by us. But every board was built by Solectron. Should this product be called "Beta", or "Solectron/Beta"? Or should it be called "Xylinx/Solectron/Beta"?
If I build a new house from parts purchased as Lowe's, I do not call my new home "Lowe's Manor". Likewise, if Patrick Volkerding created an operating system where the parts came from GNU, he does not have to call the finished product "GNU/Linux". Indeed, only a fraction of the parts he used came from GNU anyway.
To quote Linus, "Your midwife doesn't select the name of your babies."
A Government Is a Body of People, Usually Notably Ungoverned
However, RMS created gcc.
So? Gcc is used to build OpenBSD. Should we now call that GNU/OpenBSD? It is also used to build the OS that we use at work for embedded systems. Should we call it GNU/LynxOS? Or what about GNU/Macintosh OS X?
You do not name a system after the tool chain. That is so silly that even RMS dismisses it. Next thing you know you'll want me to name my doghouse "Stanley" after the brand of hammer I used.
Talks like a duck, quacks like a duck, it is a duck.
The GNU System has not yet been shipped. It is incomplete. So far, I have not heard it talk or quack, so I have no reference with which to compare it to Slackware's talk and quack. Which, by the way is extremely similar to the talk and quack of Solaris, IRIX, BSD and every other Unix and Unix-like system.
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.
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
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.
Get server, put video card in, install os, remove card, put back together, rack mount.. SSH to it from then on.
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Free Mac Mini
Looks like there are at least a couple of fans in the uncovered box here
But the problem is finding ATX PPC mobos. This thingy is a step in the right direction, but it's not versatile enough for the price...
/Brian
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?
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...
I don't think so.
You can buy lots of different ppc sbcs from lots of different suppliers. It looks like all they've added here is a tin box, yellow paint and almost-all-in-one packaging. With just a little EE knowledge, you could build the same thing yourself.
Apple might want to duplicate the effort to get a server machine, but I think the words "Apple" and "server" are so far apart in the average IT buyer's mind that selling it would be a pretty steep hill to climb.
Kill, Tux, kill!
Exactly. A nice 2U like a Dell 2550 would be awesome. Something that meets Data Center Standards. Right now any server room with Macs in it need to dedicate more space per capita than the NT side. It's generally a nicer fit to install an NT server and Use Services for Macintosh as a File/Print server. If I could stick something that looked like a Dell or CQ in my manager's face, I'd have a signed PO by the end of the day.
- Dan I.
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 ?
I would be shocked if Darwin doesn't run on this machine. Folks have been working hard to decouple Darwin and the Apple hardware. The form factor for the enclosure is the real story. The only other real player there is RLX, with their transmeta-based 24-blade 3U systems. While the RLX systems are denser, the Crusoe processors aren't as well-suited to high-power computations as the G4.
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