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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.
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.
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...
This sounds familiar.
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
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.
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.
That wait is over anyway.
There's the EyeTech A1, which will more than Likely get around to running Linux even if the new AmigaDos 4.0 fails to arive, but from what it looks like, FINALLY Amiga Inc. isn't just talking shit.
First, as you can see there is a picture of a new Amiga motherboard which is PowerPC based, and it fits in an ATX case.
Then, for everyone who thinks it's vaporware (it might be, you know...), there is the rather convincing FAQ from Eyetech which discusses in depth the ZICO STANDARD from Amiga INC. for use with AmigaDOS 4.0.
A lot of people may not have any faith in a belated Amiga Ressurection...
...but I've got you all beat. I have no faith left in the computer industry! So beat that! HA!
"Everything you know is wrong. (And stupid.)"
"Everything you know is wrong. (And stupid.)"
Moderation Totals: Wrong=2, Stupid=3, Total=5.
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...
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.
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.
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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