New Amiga Hardware Runs Mac OS

Ethan writes: "A developer on the Yahoo Amiga One mailing list has successfully installed MacOS 9.2 using Mac On Linux. And it seems that adding OS X support is on the to-do horizon for the MOL developers. I think that it will be interesting to see the people at Apple lose some sleep now that a low cost, fast, off the shelf solution exists to run Mac OS, without any Apple hardware. If it doesn't do anything else, at least it will give the people buying the new Amiga One G3 PPC board an existing software base." Mind you, I've never even seen an Amiga One, but it would be a pretty silly thing to make up ;) Update: 07/05 07:03 GMT by T : Mike Bouma piped up with a link to a page featuring the same hardware, in this case running Debian, OpenOffice.org and Mozilla.

Comments

That isn't true.

[autopr0n]

Ever heard of a company called Compaq?

All you have to do is write a work-alike rom that does the same things as the apple one. And since this is mostly being done for the hell of it, and you arn't limited by hardware you can make it as big and slow as you'd like.

You can also patch diffrent versions of the OS to run without the ROM if you want to. Or you can use a combination of the two methods (for example, taking out any verification code in the OS to make sure it's running with a genuine apple ROM)

Businessweek on Gassee and BeOS

[joneshenry]

According to this article from long ago in Businessweek, BeOS would have been the foundation of the modern Apple OS had Gassee simply not wildly overplayed his hand. According to the article, Gassee's minimum asking price was rumored to be around a 200 million dollar stock deal. Considering that BeOS's assets were eventually sold for about 11 million, Gassee overvalued his property by about a factor of 20. Furthermore Gassee missed out on the opportunity to be Apple's savior instead of having the honor go to Jobs.

Something I've wondered about

[Mr_Silver]

If running OSX on a wintel box suddenly became very easy (and ignoring licence issues), would Linux on the desktop suddenly look rather doomed?

I've wondered about this and come to the conclusion that ignoring the sort of people that read slashdot and again I state for those people that didn't notice the first time ignoring the sort of people that read slashdot that you'd find that people would be more willing (and likely) to move to OSX because

• Nice interface brought to you by the people that know how to do interface design properly
• An excellent selection of software (iTunes, iPhoto etc. etc.)
• Easy to use for the point-and-click users, no need to go hitting the command line, but power users can if they want
• Office X. Enough said.
• Stability

(I'm definately not saying the Linux doesn't have some of the above, but the steeper learning curve and not as good interface wouldn't go in Linux's favour)

Of course, we know it wont happen, there are far to many issues that would prevent it from happening. But, if OSX could run on Wintel boxes , would Linux ever see a look in if joe public and general corporations decide to leave Windows?

Re:Something I've wondered about

[David Kennedy]

I wish I was moderating this - I wonder the same.

The reason that I wonder the same is that I, as a seasoned software developer and looong time Unix user, recently bought a Mac as my home platform. Everyone assumed I'd build a PC and slap Linux on there. I assumed the same until the 11th hour and then bought a Mac. It's pretty, easy to use, required me to learn nothing about the hardware (I'm a software person through and through) and yet I can run all my favourite apps and there's plenty of already ported Unix/Linux apps, and converting the rest is no more challenging than getting them to build on, say, an older HP or similar.

I'd very much like to have been able to get my folks a Mac rather than their troublesome Windows box.

Mac OS X on commodity priced hardware would be VERY attractive in the marketplace.