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

Just out of curiosity

[jormurgandr]

How were they able to get Steve Jobs to OK this? That guy has made every bad business decision he could, I dont understand why he is suddenly changing his game plan. Whats next, open source aqua (that would rock)? I dunno, just my 2 cents

Why?

[DarkMan]

I must admit that I'm a little blank on why anyone would particularly want a Mac runing Linux, to the point of buying it with Linux preinstalled.

I mean, yes they're nicely built, and they're decent price performance, but why not use a PC compatable? It would give you more choice in terms of OS vendor, and much of the commercial Linux is PC only. PowerPC is a nice chip, but an Athlon will be as quick, for similar money.

I suppose if you've got lots of PowerPC installed already, then you'd gain by matching architectures, but that's (IMO) unlikely.

Even in terms of numerically power, the Athlons with SSE2 are faster than the AltiVec (SSE2 does double precision, AltiVec doesn't), for similar money.

Don't get me wrong - someone selling Linux pre-installed is a Good Thing - I just can't see anything particularly gripping about Mac's pre-installed with Linux.

Why?

[OS24Ever]

Seriously, I'm not flaming or trolling. I have an iMac, and I have intel hardware. I've run Linux on Intel Hardware, and I've run OS X.

Why would I want to replace a unix based OS with an excellent user interface, support for things like Photoshop, Dreamweaver, and heck even Flash/Shockwave plugins. None of this is on Linux (unfortunately)

Now, on the XServe, this could be cool, but on a iBook, PowerBook, iMac or Power Mac I just don't get it.

Why would they do that?

[MarvinMouse]

I love Linux and all, but why ship a quality system with Linux when you can ship it with OS X.

OS X is an absolutely amazing OS, and it has almost all the features Linux has.

If you are going to ship comps with Linux, ship PCs with it pre-installed.

Unix install base

[siskbc]

Really, in terms of un*x market share, the number of OS X machines sold is irrelevant. What is relevant is the user base, ie how many people are using OS X as a unix. Most of your twit mac users don't know what the hell BSD is, let alone how to use it. They don't know what GUI stands for, or even that there is more than one. So, anyone have an estimate on how many drone mac users have attempted to download some source, compile it, and run it on their "unix" machine? I'm guessing about 3.