Terra Soft Ships Macs with Linux Preinstalled

dhovis writes "Do you think the Xserve is cool, but you wish it ran Linux? Well, MacCentral is reporting that Terra Soft Solutions, an Apple 'Value Added Reseller,' is now shipping Macs. They are offering several new Macs with Yellow Dog Linux preinstalled now, and are promising the Xserve will be available soon." They are currently shipping Power Mac G4s, iBooks, and iMacs, as well as AirPort cards. See the Terra Soft Store for more information.

Comments

Kudos

[rberton]

I run YDL 2.2 and before that I ran 2.1 on a QuickSilver (867 Mhz) PowerMac. I have been running glitch free for over a year now and my uptime is currently 85 days (power outage caused a reboot).

The one drawback is that setup was a PITA. I think it's great that Terra Soft is selling these pre-installed to take some of the ass sores out of the setup. Also Kudos to Apple for allowing them to resell with another OS on the machine.

Re:My two cents

[timothy_m_smith]

Is anyone really going to care if the XServe has the ability to run Linux? I really don't see the XServe as having that much value unless you really, really want to run Linux on a PowerPC rack-mounted server. The fact is that the XServe runs a bunch of IDE hard drives which would seem worthless for any real-world applications without any sort of RAID. What kind of business needs 480 Gb of non-fault tolerant disk space? In the end, why not just run on Intel or AMD hardware that will have much better software support.

Re:I have to wonder why

[Artifex]

Your reasons are pretty much exactly why I want my next computer to be a mac - and I've been running PCs for 17 years or so.

A Mac with OSX would give me a stable OS with real apps (Photoshop, some office product) and still let me fart around with BSD pretending to know what I'm doing. I don't have to worry about "serious" apps breaking from dependencies on some package that just got updated, but I can still play around with the free stuff if I want to. Plus, I'm not a software developer, and I feel it's pointless for me to have to spend hours tweaking desktops and hardware drivers to get things useful.

I think their engineering is solid, but I am still waiting for them to get up to speed. Macs look pretty, but a 533MHz FSB on a Pentium 4 still makes me drool. And before you complain that I'm comparing things improperly, imagine your G4 with a 533 FSB. Then there would be no doubt that it rules, right?