Terra Soft Reveals Linux/PPC Hardware Solution

Gentu writes "OSNews features an article revealing a new product from Terra Soft, makers of the popular PPC Linux distribution Yellow Dog Linux, which effectively enables YDL to run on its own platform. Terra Soft is offering a motherboard and a complete PC based on the 600MHz G3 (G4 is also planned). This is of course still PPC, but it ain't a Mac. However, the article hints that it might be technically possible to run Mac OS and Mac OS X via Mac-On-Linux." Prices start at about $500, with 1U rackmounts starting at $870.

Comments

Re:OS X

[anothermortal]

Macs are only expensive if you buy the Dual Processor models, or the UberCool G4 Titanium Powerbook (portable space heater). Recall the recent price drop on the iBooks? The low-end model is only $999. Add a bit for some extra RAM, and you have a nice, decent Mac OSX box for home. iBooks are inexpensive, and I believe, a good deal when compared to similar priced PC laptops.

From the MOL FAQ

[pwagland]

Q: Does MOL run on non-Apple hardware?

A: It does. MOL runs for instance on the Pegasos board, the Teron board and on AmigaOne hardware. In short, MOL should run on any PowerPC hardware (with the except of 601-based systems). However, the EULA of MacOS prohibits its usage on non-Apple hardware (it is of course perfectly legal to use MOL to boot a second Linux though).

This means it might be technically possible to run MACOS on this thing, but it is also technically illegal!

FreeBSD?

[nsayer]

FreeBSD 5.0 will have a PPC port. I wonder if it will run on this hardware? I imagine the only requirement is an OpenFirmware BIOS for booting.

FYI

[wilburdg]

As an employee of Terra Soft I thought I'd let you know a little tidbit of information. Our server, which is handling the /.ing just fine (and has an uptime of 248 days) is actually running 200MHz slower than these Boxer systems. It is an old Beige G3 tower running at 400MHz with 640megs of ram, of course running Yellow Dog, and it has handled a good deal of /. submissions, without so much as blinking.

processor : 0
cpu : 740/750
temperature : 28-31 C (uncalibrated)
clock : 400MHz
revision : 2.2 (pvr 0008 0202)
bogomips : 801.17

machine : Power Macintosh
motherboard : AAPL,PowerMac G3 MacRISC
L2 cache : 1024K unified pipelined-syncro-burst
memory : 640MB
pmac-generation : OldWorld

not really

[g4dget]

I didn't say that the EPIA-M was as fast as the G3. It beats the PPC board on other dimensions that you might care about (price, power consumption, size, compatibility, I/O ports). I mention it because, clearly, if you pay $500 for a 400MHz G3, speed can't be your primary criterion anyway. If you are going for speed, get a low-cost P3 or AMD, still for less than the PPC system.

In any case, I actually doubt that "G3 kicks the bejeezus out of the EPIA". I have both an iMac and an 800MHz EPIA, and I actually run compute-intensive stuff on them.. A 400MHz G3 is probably no faster than a 400MHz P3, and a 933MHz C3 probably is somewhere around a 300MHz P3 since the 800MHz C3 comes in at around the same speed or faster as a 250MHz P3 in the benchmarks I tried.

As for gcc maturity, the C3 is Pentium compatible. Linux just runs on it. If it's not as well optimized, that only means that there is more room for improvement over the above comparison; PPC optimization for gcc looks like a done deal--it won't get much better. What I do know from personal experience is that "porting" to the EPIA or any desktop PC is much easier than to the iMac/PPC: again, code just runs, while on PPC, you face byte order issues and x86 assembly doesn't work (e.g., for MPEG codecs).

Re:What's the point?

[ReelOddeeo]

One acronym: DRM. It's coming, and in hardware form.

I don't worry so much about DRM / TCPA / Palladium as I used to.

Why? Governments all over the world (outside the US) are jumping on the open source bandwagon. Other countries outside the US will make hardware and have local software development efforts. The only way that hardware DRM can really be truly effective is to get all hardware to use it. Since this appears like it will never happen, then DRM hardware efforts will be defeated or ignored. In either case, you won't have to be tormented with DRM hardware.

If China / India / Japan, etc. make their own PC's, and support Linux, then there is no way all (any?) of these PC's will have hardware drm. In fact crap like this could perhaps accellerate Microsoft's downfall.