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Running Mac OS X Natively on Pegasos
Peter writes "The Pegasos is an interesting new platform, being one of the very few affordable non-Apple PowerPC systems. But to be a real alternative for me, I want it to run Mac OS X directly (without the need to use Mac-on-Linux or such). Have any of you Slashdot readers done this, and how much hacking did it take?" The Pegasos currently uses a G3/600, and ships with Debian Linux for PowerPC and MorphOS.
Is it possible to run this OS on Apple hardware? There seems to be no Pegasos laptops available (yet?).
Since OpenDarwin is being ported to the platform, I'd be inclined to believe that just plain Darwin (MacOS X) would NOT run on the hardware as-is and therefore you can't run MacOS X on the system.
When the OpenDarwin port is complete, you *may* be able to install MacOS X on a drive then overlay OpenDarwin on top of that and then be able to boot it onto the clone.
Remember that Macs use Open Firmware to boot, so this clone would need either Open Firmware, something compliant to the spec, or hooks to make it work (or some combination of all three).
Considering the cheapest 12" PowerBooks start at around $1200, I'd say the Apple premium isn't too bad. Granted, that's WAY more than these clones, but then you don't have to deal with the fuss of trying to shim MacOS X onto a non-native platform.
All opinions presented here aren't mine.
...Apple's Darwin *is* open source... if you could somehow hack the Darwin kernel to recognize and boot on that hardware, then it should be able to work.
The problem is, that would probably take a serious amount of work, not to mention the possible legal snares with Apple - I don't know what the terming of the APSL is, but it may not allow such modifications. But I don't see it as being an impossible task.
My English teacher once told me that two positives don't make a negative. Two words for her: Yeah, right.
I've known more than one person with a dual 400/500 G4 who's quite stunned with the performance of the iBook. Faster for many common user things. That's an 800MHz G3 compared to the Dual G4 (admittedly a lot older G4)
The G3s can still hold their own with OSX very well, as long as the surrounding architecture is up to snuff.
Hello, if you visit this site you might learn a little bit about Open Firmware... especially the Open part
Time for some tasty Shiner Bock!
how many people here are old amiga freaks?
:)
put your hands up
*puts hand up* and I wouldn't go back if you paid me: I've been using OS X (on some excellent Apple hardware) for two years now (which if you do the math, makes me a pretty die-hard Amigan: I suck with it until 2001! upgrading both the hard and software all that time) And while there are a couple of things about the 'mig that I do miss, on ballance OS X and Apple's hardware knock it firmly into the history books from an end user perspective.
Perhaps if the platform had survived its passage through the corporate alimentary tract of Commodore's disintegration, Escom's collapse and Gateway's asset stripping excercises as anything more than a forgotten brand name and some obsolete patents then it'd be worth considering as an option, but the sad truth is that it didn't.
What remains of the Amiga (with or without the Boing! ball, and leaving aside the interminable in-fighting) is such a fragmented collection of kludges and patches running on out-dated and/or cobbled together hardware that it's just no fun to use any more: it's great fun to play with, but I never got anything actually done on my old machine toward the end because I was forever having to tweak the system.
What I want from a system (and what it turns out I really loved about the Amiga) is a tightly integrated combination of well designed hard and software from a single vendor: there's only one company that offers that these days and it aint based in Snoqualmie.