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New G3-Based Platform Runs Mac OS X
Worried writes "Pegasos is a new platform based on G3/G4 CPUs and it runs MorphOS and various Linux distros so far. This very interesting review of the platform over at OSNews points out that Darwin can play a significant role attracting new buyers. Another --possibly significant-- point in the article is that Pegasos can run Mac OS X via the Mac-On-Linux runtime kit. This is the *first* non-Mac platform that can run OSX without even the need for an Apple BIOS!"
Correct me if I'm wrong, but since the second-rev G3 machines (blue and white towers), hasn't the Apple BIOS been unnecessary? Or am I confusing the Software-ROM (that the New World mac architecture introduced, ROM-in-RAM) with something else?
"Jesus saves, but everyone else in a 10 foot radius takes full damage from the fireball."
The SSL certificate is not from one of the "trusted" providers, nor does the name on it match the site name, since they're using an IP.
I decided to go through the rigamarole of creating an account to find out the price when they DO get them in, only to find out that while they are sold out, you cannot even list a price.
In other words, this is a non-product. They made a small run of them apparently, but you might as well just call it a beta test, because that's what it seems to be. They have announced that they're bringing out a G4-based replacement, and a G4 upgrade for the current G3 board. All of this will be neatly swept under the rug by dramatically more powerful systems based on next-generation 64 bit PowerPC.
If you need a cheap system to run MacOSX, buy a used Mac or one of those ATX systems based on Mac motherboards. Both are available now and not very expensive, all things considered, plus faster than this unavailable hardware.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
fp!
Why would you want to run Mac OS X under MOL?
It completely defeats the purpose of MOL... and Mac OS X. MOL is designed to allow you to access your mac os x programs when running linux on a dual boot mac, but as far as I know you loose most of the flashy speed that you would get from a standard OS X install.
I say just run linux and be happy.
This is just sig!
Nope. They're not macs, they're CHRP, which is totally legal and not Apple infinging at all.
I ue briqs - www.totalimpact.com for a renderfarm ad they are G4 PPC CHRP boxes, running yellow dog linux and custom render management software that Total Ipmact have written. They're great little general purpose computers.
-- oldthinkers unbellyfeel ingsoc
I would think that the manufacturers will be in the clear as they don't supply or load OS X on the system, but the actual owner of the installed copy OS X is in breach of the EULA...
Can't see Apple identifying infringments, and tracking them all down though!
(At least I hope they don't... they should be busy building the 970 Powermacs...)
It's illegal for Apple to try to impose that restriction. It's an illegal tying arrangement. See 15 USC 1.
Whoa! My ears are burning!
:-).
There actually was a Mac "emulator" for the Atari ST (which everyone called the "Jackintosh" when it came out) first. I didn't agree with the term "emulator" everyone used, since it really wasn't an emulator, but a port of MacOS to the Atari hardware, without Apple's permission. I dubbed this a "Hostile Port".
The early versions for the Amiga worked as well, but eventuall you got versions that ran as a more-or-less well behaved task under AmigaOS. That was pretty cool, if you needed Mac software... you could have Mac and Amiga at the same time. In those days, the Amiga had one of the fastest Mac hard drives, thanks to DMA, available -- dramatically faster than any "real" Mac.
I was a founder of Metabox, along with Andy Finkel (ex-Director of Software at Amiga) and two German businessmen, Stefan Domeyer and Geerd Ebeling. We were originally called PIOS Computer, back in the Mac Clone days. PIOS/Metabox had the first 300MHz Mac Clone shipping -- that should set the coordinated for your way-back machine. We bought the motherboards from UMAX, which also carried the license, and made our own CPU cards (actually designed by Thomas Rudloff).
I was working on a CHRP system, which wasn't terribly easy in the day. It had a separate CPU module, along the lines of what they had planned for the second generation BeBox (not precisely the same, but had they gone forward, it probably would have become so), and we had single and quad processor modules in development, G2 stuff in Apple terms. Future modules could have done G3, G4, or PPC970 for that matter. But Apple did pull the plug before this was finished, and Metabox [rightly] didn't see a viable market in a PPC machine that couldn't run MacOS. Of course, the Mac had over twice the market it has today.
The CPU modules kept selling, and Metabox acquired a US branch, based in Austin Texas, to bring some of this to the US market, but it wasn't expecially good timing, since Apple finally got aggressive with G3 machines.
We had three STBs -- the Metabox 500, based on the PC architecture and OS/2, the Metabox 100, which was an OEM from Teknema/Ravisent, and the never-completed Metabox 1000. That was my design, Thomas joined in later, and we had more people building add-ins for it, like a DVD/DVB decoder. This was roughly DVD-player-shaped. It ran a proprietary, AmigaOS-like OS developed under Andy and one of the Germans, Carsten Scholte(sp), called CaOS. The Amiga coonection was pretty key -- we tapped into numerous, well developed technologies like MUI (OO-graphics), Voyager (a browser), etc. This all ran on a ColdFire 5307/5407, not my top choice for a CPU, but a decent enough CPU if you had hardware for MPEG.
Metabox failed when the management got totally nuts, due to the stock prices rising (my shares, which I couldn't sell then, peaked at about US$5.8 million, but I got out of Metabox in terrible financial shape, with them owing me about $75,000 in salary alone). Basically, they spent money on nutty sponsorships: they tried to create a German basketball league, they sponored Forumla 1 racing, Soccer teams, etc. They bought a small film studio.
Meanwhile, the engineering team wasn't getting paid regularly, as the shares started falling in the fall of 2000. They pulled some maneuvers, probably illegal, that effectively stole all of my and Andy's shares in the company, replacing them with then-worthless, unregistered shares, all without our permission. A year of in-and-out of bankruptcy killed off the positive happenings at the US branch (I was CTO there in late 2000/early 2001, we were getting serious interest in the STB from Blockbuster, Enron, and others... ok, so maybe it was fated, anyway, to fail
They went into another bankruptcy late last year, more of the Chapter 7 than Chapter 11 sort from what I heard, but I don't know the German rules that well. Basically, the management proved, in less successful times, to be a bunch of criminals, stabbing their own partners in the back this way. I'd love to report they're all in jail now, but German law doesn't seem to have much to say unless you're German (they actually have excellent protections for employees - thankfully, most of our crew didn't get hosed).
-Dave Haynie
Darwin is Open Source. It would seem to me that if someone wanted to get OSX running without MOL (or Xpostfacto) on a non-approved PPC machine, they could compile a darwin kernel that does not exclude non-standard hardware.
For example this board has what appears to be a non-standard north bridge and south bridge (non-standard as far as apples go)but they work under linux. Someone could port the modules over to darwin, I'm sure. From what I can tell, there is not very much of a "community" behind darwin. Most seem content to let the apple guys do the darwin work. If I had any level of programming skill beyond 1 semester of C programming I'd seriously look into this myself.
Where do the major differences exist between darwin and Freebsd? Certainly FreeBSD is written to be portable since it runs on i386, alpha, and 64bit Sparc platforms. I'd think that some of the code could be inserted into darwin to add kernel level support for unsupported hw.