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A Power Users Look at Linux on the Mac
An anonymous reader writes "Even though most Linux users have treated Linux as an operating system for their x86 white boxes, Linux runs equally well on PowerPC machines. This article looks at Linux on the PowerPC and the appealing range of PPC machines produced by Apple, where the option of using Linux is of great value to many users."
...the best of both worlds under linux on Mac hardware:
http://www.maconlinux.org
-Ghostis
Computer Science is all about trying to find the right wrench to bang in the right screw. -T.Cumbo?
If you want something totally concurrent with the PC world then Gentoo linux is the way to go. Nearly all packages will work with PPC because they are self compiled. As long as you know a little about linux and have used it before, or are willing to learn Gentoo can be installed. They have the best documentation I have yet found, and the most friendly forums.
YellowDog is a port of RedHat, pretty much. The advantage is that they only produce a PPC distro and are very good at it. They have navy contracts with PPC products and actually sell PPC hardware. One of the very few companies who do aside from Apple. YellowDog is good if you want the ease of use that a modern distro should provide.
OpenOffice should run fine. It will also run with OSX using apple's X11, but not natively under Aqua.
KOffice and the Gnome office will also work out-of-the-box.
I guess it depends on your definition of a Mac.
If you call anything in the last 2 years a mac, then sure, you probably have a good case for OS X being a better choice.
But what about my sweet Power Tower Pro with a 250 Mhz 604e chip? Am I supposed to be content with OS 8.1 (the last *officially* supported OS by Apple), or the dead end 9.x? Or try to run XpostFacto to get OS X to run? Nope.
My answer was YellowDog Linux. It discovered all the hardware and runs sweet. I can use apt-get to install/upgrade software (who cares if it's an RPM and not a DEB, aside from the politics?). Heck, mplayer even plays MPEG4 encoded avi's smoothly.
The choice is yours, but for my machine Linux has definitely resuscitated it!
For almost any model there is an installation report about Linux on an Apple PowerBook or iBook.
OK, I'm not trying to be anal here but people who don't know might be misled by the following in the article:
Apple's G5 towers are comparable in speed to the fastest x86-derived CPUs and systems; in other words, the Intel Itanium and AMD Athlon64.
Itanium is not x86 derived. It has its own novel instruction set.
Yellow dog linux
Ah, X11 has been available in one form or another for OS X for quite a long time. It's been availble on Fink for ages and Apple's X11 is included as an option in 10.3
I think you'll also find that most everything you need to run in Linux will compile on OS X or is already available in Fink.
might very well be Mac on Linux, ironically enough. Check out this:
http://www.maconlinux.org/sshots/pic12.jpg
Running multiple versions of MacOS in parallel. Think about the possibilities for software developers. Having multiple environments immediately available for testing.
Then of course there's the ability to run all those Mac apps when needed and still have the Linux desktop to go to when they aren't needed.
Mac on Linux is what the open source world should try and create for the Windows world. Think of the possibilities if you could run Windows at work in a Window - be able to do all the windows specific stuff at need, but have Linux goodness in which to work as well. If a phb strolls in, just flip your desktop over to full screen windows. Then for the rest of the time go stealth with Xpde, good enough to fool a casual glance. Maybe some rootless window hack could even be figured out.
Of course, if your boss says you Must Use Windows, there's not a whole lot you can do. But perhaps this would be an acceptible compromise.
"I object to doing things that computers can do." -- Olin Shivers, lispers.org
X11 ships with OS X 10.3 on the developer CD. An earlier version of the same was available as a download for 10.2.
Whether to use virtual desktops has always been a matter of user preference ... but there appear to be options for OS X.
You cannot boot directly from OF (openfirmware) into Linux. Wrong, OF is a really a boot loader and can load any ELF or xcoff binary from many different file system formats, hfs, hfs+, ISO CD, ext2, and ufs.
Also OF can read both partion maps, Apple format and x86 format.
Of course you can still use yaboot if you want.
While the heading refers to Linux on Macs, there's a number of other PPC machines that'll run Linux
a pegasos I or II is a PPC based machine, there's also Amiga One boards - a new Mini-ITX AmigaOne looks REALLY appealing, as long as it's not slugged with the "Amiga Tax" (double the price for the privilege of being able to run AmigaOS4 if it's released). a Mini ITX board with a GHz or more G4 - not a scaled down VIA type setup, but a full honest-to-goodness G4. That's appealing.
There's also several VMEbus boards based on PPC chips from PPC440 to G4s, and a newer one out soon from Momentum computer, Dual G5s on an ATX board. Pricey, but it's just a reference board at the moment.
If prices dropped on these, especially on the Momentum board, I could see these being real alternatives to x86, especially for people a bit worried about MS's palladium plans. A mac is a wonderful thing, but if you ask 'Why bother" about putting Linux over the top of a machine that'll run OSX, one of the above solutions might be an option.
OK... maybe this note is a little karma whoring by the author of the referred article. But what the heck, I -did- write it, and I'm always pleased when things by or about me make the slashdot headline.
:-)).
/.-ing.
A question a bunch of people have raised in comments is "why bother with Linux if you buy a Mac with OSX on it"... well, read the article. I don't say that switching to or adding Linux is always desirable; but I think I do a good job of describing some scenarios where it is. That said, I certainly -do- like OSX quite a bit (where my favorite installed application is still bash
Also, contrary to some down-modded poster, IBM can INDEED easily handle the load of slashdotting. In fact, a zillion hits to my article is indirectly good for me (I'm not on commission or anything, but it puts an extra sparkle in my editors' eyes). Also, FWIW, all my articles soon make it to [http://gnosis.cx/publish/] (which reminds me that I need some updating, it's been a couple months)... which is also quite strong enough to survive
Yours, David...
Buy Text Processing in Python
Actually, the BSDs execute Linux binaries quite fine. Not all of them, but there are people running Oracle that way. Just don't expect any vendor support.
Programming can be fun again. Film at 11.
Locate just looks at files, not the content in them.
`locate foo` will turn up much different results than `grep -R foo`.
The author isn't aware that Mandrake can do the same thing by running urpmi PACKAGENAME. And the graphical front end, rpmdrake, is a competant method of installing softare. Also, it is possible to install yum or apt-rpm via urpmi if you prefer them.
I have mod points right now, but I'll respond to this instead.
KDE and Gnome have been ported to run on MacOS X. Apple provides a version of XFree86, which is bundled with Panther, or a free download for Jaguar. X11 runs rootless, which means all of your X11 windows are mixed in with your normal OS X windows. KDE and Gnome have both been ported. KDE is a little farther along than Gnome, but both are available through Fink. Check to see which packages are available.
Also, with KDE, the Qt library has been made available under the GPL for MacOS X, just like on Linux. So KDE software can be ported to MacOS X native with much less hassle than before.
Apple also supports Linux on their computers. TerraSoft makes the Yellow Dog Linux distro. They are also an Apple Value Added Reseller, and they sell Macs with YDL preloaded without voiding the Apple warranty.
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The internet is the greatest source of biased information in the history of mankind.
The Common Hardware Reference Platform (CHRP, aka PPCP) was released many many years ago, but it hasn't really taken off. IBM did sell some of these systems, and the modern pegasos platform offers G3 & G4 processors.
Here's some more technical info.
p.s. mac sleeping is perfect - sleep and wake are quick, and network connectivity (even when roaming) is very fast.
HIV Crosses Species Barrier... into Muppets
I still run linux exclusively on my laptop and in the office, and on just about any server I have a say over. Some people ask why install Linux on a ppc but a lot of oss apps don't run smoothly on osx even with fink. I've had a lot of problems, where running a full fledged distro seems to run pretty smoothly on the ppc.
OSX is nice but if I was not running photoshop, garageband, or final cut, I would not have purchased a mac. I have a dual 2.8 xeon at work running gentoo that I prefer hands down over the G5 for coding, mainly for software reasons.
I like the gentoo packaging system, everything is available through portage. With OSX, I feel like I'm running windows again because most of the software is shareware. Like I just paid $130 for isight, but I can pretty much only video chat with it by default. If I want to use it for a webcam, I need to pay $30. If I want to record video with imovie, I need to pay $50 for ilife.
Another thing that bugged me about isight was the apple has hard coded the min requirements for the software. So if you plug the isight in to a 500mhz g3 ibook, it will not even attempt to work even though it could. I've never ran in to windows or linux software that will not even attempt to run if you don't meet the min requirements.
so it turns out I can use the isight with the g3 500 ibook, but I have to spend another $30 for some shareware that removes the limit and lets usb cameras work for isight. So in total, it cost me $110 in software in order to get basic functionality out of my $130 fire wire camera.
My debacle with the isight is classic case of why free software and keeping a separation between the software developers ands the company that makes the hardware, has a lot of value.
Well, one recent example from personal experience:
;-).
I was having problems with our two powerbooks (OSX) talking to a printer that was plugged into the airport. Fine, I thought, I'll call up Apple's CS people and they'll figure it out.
Hah! The fellow I talked to had me go through the machine's internet connections. Why he did this isn't obvious. The printer should work even if the machines aren't connected to the internet. But never mind; by the end of the session, my previously-working internet connection was bollixed up so badly that nothing could communicate. The call ended with me starting an hour-long validation of the system, and then I was supposed to call back.
When it finished (not finding much, and the internet still f**ked up even after a reboot, I called back. The fellow I talked to that time went through all thee tthings from the first call. Then, when he discovered that the connection to the internet was through a linuux box, he demanded that I reboot it. I balked at that, and let him know in no uncertain terms that this was utterly unacceptable.
I did agree to disconnecting the linux box from the chain, and hooking the airport up to the cable modem. He still couldn't get it to work. And still, nothing at all had been done with the printer. He left me with yet another system validation task running, and by the time it finished, it was well past their closing time. And he'd made it clear that they wouldn't be able to help us as long as there was a linux box on the LAN.
I went into personal search-and-recover mode, and got the internet hookup working (through my linuux gateway, of course). I couldn't have done it through the OSX net tools that I found; I mostly used the diagnostic tools on the linux box to tell me what was happening.
One thing I learned from the linux tools was that the airport was running a DHCP server. I hadn't yet seen anything in the Apple tools that told me this. Its address range overlapped with the range used by the linux box's DHCP server. Those who understand this paragraph will understand the problem.
I found the DHCP controls in the Apple software and moved the airport's DHCP server to a different subnet. A bit more judicious configging, and I got my internet connection back again. I even got the printer to work, sorta, though we do still have a problem that when I close my powerbook, my wife's loses contact with the printer. (I've asked about this on some newsgroups, with no answer. I'm afraid to call Apple about it.)
The major effect of all this was that I wrote it up for the people I'm consulting for. They had been looking into trying some OSX boxes as part of their corporate network infrastructure. After my report, they dropped that idea. A couple of other people did a bit of judicious inquiring, and gave independent reports that I hadn't exaggerated a bit.
Nonetheless, I have a powerbook in addition to two linux boxes. I think that OSX has a lot of good things going for it. But I wouldn't recommend it for some things that are routine on linux. One is handling networks with a mixture of different machines.
Much of the problem is the "Don't worry your little head about it" attitude of the Mac community and Apple. That's fine if you're a non-nerd. But if you know what you're doing, and you want tools that give you access to all the innards, you'll find OSX slow, opaque and frustrating. With linux, you'll find a community that is willing and able to help you (if not always in a friendly manner
The hardware is nice. If I could get a 17" powerbook with linux (with drivers for all the hardware), I'd find it really useful. I think I'll start bookmarking reports like this one, and maybe invest in one of these machines in the not-too-distant future.
Those who do study history are doomed to stand helplessly by while everyone else repeats it.
"No need to mention that the quality of open source support in OS X is worse than on MS-Windows: Xfree, OpenOffice, Mozilla - they are almost unusable, comparing to them on MS-Windows boxen."
Unfortunately, it seems as though you have never even tried Xcode and/or Fink ( http://fink.sourceforge.net/ ). the current open source apps I run on my Mac are: Mplayer (direct port), Xchat (direct port), Gaim (direct port), Camino (Mozilla derivative direct port), Gimp (via XFree86), XMMS (Via XFree86), and GNUPG that I personally compiled with GCC. I also have absolutely no problems at all with an ssh -X session to run my X apps off my Linux server.
If you are going to bash something you could at least provide some examples; everything I have tried to run that is open source has compiled and run just perfectly.
"The strong will do what they want, the weak will do what they must."
-Thucydides
1) Turning it off in BIOS, 2) During the start of the Win2k installer, where it says press F6 (or F8? I forget) to install third party drivers, you hit that button and then install "Standard PC."
I think you can do the same by changing the "ACPI-compliant computer" driver in Device Manager under "computer" to "Standard PC." Of course, this isn't recommended, as I believe it requires the reinstallation of a lot of drivers (maybe all?), and I don't even know if that works correctly, but one should always be open to experimentation I guess. :P
i have a G3/700mhz ibook and a G4/800mhz ibook. thge G3 runs yellowdog, the G4 runs panther. guess which one is faster? the G3/yellowdog combo. seriously. both have 256mb ram, and i don't notice the lags nearly as bad. the only thing that lacks is a current JDK. now don't get me wrong, i love os x, and love the ibooks. but, there is nothing that can't be done on linuxppc that can't be done on os x except high end movie/sound and some niche applications. photoshop is always cited as the sine que non. you know what, not for 95% of the people who do graphics. openoffice runs great on the G3. dreamweaver ain't all it's cracked up to be. it is dog slow, crashes like it was written in redmond, and has a crappy editor. (i know, i have DW MX) but do you really think apple cares if you buy a mac and install linux? not at all. they are a hardwrae company. in fact, they even allow terrasoft to install linux on new macs and offer dual boot options. could you imagine microsoft allowing an OEMto offer dual boot winboxen?
bottom line, linux and powerppc are a great match.
My problem? I was perfectly gruntled, until some numbnuts came by and dissed me.
I've installed Debian on numerous Macs upgraded with accelerater cards(powerlogix, newertech, etc.,) and the one thing you must remember is to enable your backside cache by setting the correct l2cr on the boot prompt. Most g3 cards can be handeled correctly with the BootX utility to enable the backside cache then checking on the backside cache in BootX. However G4's are another matter. The only way I've managed to enable the l2cr is manually putting it on the boot prompt line since BootX only handles G3s backside cache corectly. Another thing about setting the backside cache on G4s is finding the correct init mask for the l2cr, they are not all the same. You have to do some heavy googling to find the specific value for a specific card. But once these values are found, my upgraded old powercomputing machines, espicially the 60mhz boards perform extremely well with linux. Also many of the problems with XFree86 server can be overcome by using the fbdev. You can even use dri with it.
Perhaps because it uses a video card which nVidia can't be bothered to support on PPC?
Cf.
- (lack of) linux support
- requests to nVidia
- (lack of) response from nVidia
Now if only we had MOL running under Darwin/OS X, that would make for a great Linux-on-Mac solution.This is...
O
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Apple has focused on their AFS protocol (which is insanely fast).
:w
I assume you mean AFP, not AFS. That's Apple Filing Protocol v Andrew File System. I'm pretty sure Apple's not very focused on AFS, today. Nor does anyone describe AFS as "insanely fast."
That's a vague assumption. That's like saying there were and are no big differences and cross-platform barriers in the many UNIX-based systems. Even systems which are all based on a common 'real' AT&T UNIX all have their differences, features, and warts, that keep source code, particularly complex graphical apps, from 'just recompiling' on them.
There are some pretty cool buildtime scripts that make some software very portable, but definitely not all of it, nor even the majority of packages.
I can't run a lot of the the stuff I want on my AIX and HP-UX machines, sad to say. Puts my beautiful legacy Unix hardware to shame in some ways, put up against a crappy Pentium 133 system.
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I have Puma on my 8600 and Jaguar on my Beige G3, atm. Have a look at X Post Facto.
If you want to run X11, then yes it does. Have a look at /etc/X11/XFree86Config-4 on your Linux box. Now go and install X11 on Darwin, and look at the same file. Oops! It isn't there. That's right; it doesn't need you to tell it what blinking graphics card you have, it can just ask the kernel.
Only if you only install Debian packages. As soon as you install something from another source, you have to maintain it yourself. Just as you would on OS X.
OS X also has the benefits of being a BSD: no ugly klunky SysV init, a classy signal handling mechanism, and Ceren. But it's a ++BSD; have a look at the System Starter. Marvel at the way you can compile a single binary that will run on multiple architectures. Drool over the dynamic loader. Whimper in awe at the Mach threading system.
Oh look, you're just regurgitating a pre-written troll from a troll site. Go away, troll.
The Mac has been 32-bit since day one, the 68000 8MHz CPU. I don't know if that's why, but the Macs have a LOT of IRQs, one for every device, and MANY more to spare.
My IDE is on IRQ 26 on my Mac, and USB is 28, I don't know what else is in there, but I'm pretty sure the Mac has 255 IRQs and there's no sharing.
This is why hardware for the Mac is so much easier to plug-and-play.
Do you realize that even on modern PCs there's only 8 IRQs? There's another 'cascade' interrupt device that provides IRQ 9-15.
"Sometimes, I think Trent just needs a cup of hot chocolate and a blankie." -Tori Amos on Nine Inch Nails
It's an iBook G4. I'm now a happy and proud owner of such a machine, and user of both MacOS X Panther an Linux on it.
/home directory, so now I have a single home for both Linux and OS X. Same desktop, same config for common programs.
The first thing I did when I got my hands on it was to re-partition it's hard drive and install Panther. Then I followed the instructions on setting up the mother of all Linux distributions on it from here.
I did the initial install of the Debian GNU/Linux base system (not without having to use a different kernel image for the ATA support, among other things to fiddle with), but then I started to take a serious look at OS X. It's an impressive operating system, with such a lovely and responsive GUI but the real power of UNIX I'm all used to underneath. I installed lots of open source software that I've get used to and couldn't live without. It all works so smoothly and nicely along other native applications, such as iTunes, Mail.app, Safari, Keynote, etc. - you get the best of both worlds. You have fink, you have darwinports, there's even OpenOffice.org. And if you're a developer, you also got Xcode from Apple. As I said, the both of worlds. And for some extra bucks you can get back some of your most beloved features from the Linux world: WindowShade X is a fine example of it.
Panther is also packed with some neat features not present anywhere else. Finder, for example, if one of the best file manager I've ever used. And Expose - I really miss it when working on Linux. One of the most useful enhancements a desktop environment could have get, it's not only eyecandy.
But then the necessity came and striked me hard. I have a small Linux consulting company. I was in a meeting with a customer the other day, and he wasn't so convinced that Linux could be a _viable_ alternative on the desktop. He thought it was just a black screen with UNIX-y commands and such. And there I was, with my iBook with Debian loaded on it but with no desktop environment to show off. Just a black screen with UNIX-y commands and such.
So I spent the whole night that day googling around and finally got my iBook to work nicely with Linux 2.6.2, supporting almost every single feature that's present on it except for Airport Extreme and the sleep functionality, which are not supported: sound, networking, USB 2.0, firewire, the combo drive, the ATI Radeon 9200 with DRI, the special function keys, the CPU frequency scaling. I even configured it to use an hfsplus partition for the
There are still some things that Linux can do better than OS X. Like OpenOffice.org or GIMP. Certainly both programs do exist for OS X but their performance and overall integration with the rest of the system is not so good.
The conclusion of it is that, even if MacOS X is one hell of an operating system, Linux is fun. I love to use the same plataform on my x86 desktop I've grown used to for more than 6 years than on my PPC based laptop. And I still have the chance to reboot and use Panther for the amusement of it.
Regards,
Articulos para gente geek: Poleras, linux, libros y mas
His problem the tech support guy didn't let him know that Airport runs its own DHCP server, that the Apple documentation doesn't mention it, or that it was one of those things that Just Runs (TM) even if you already have a DHCP server on the network (the Linux machine).
It's totally his fault that a piece of equipment was designed to be "smarter" by autoproviding certain services without checking to see if they already exist!
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Internet Explorer (n): Another bug -- that is, a feature that can't be turned off -- in Windows.
One would normally not see this as the canonical form is:
This is faster as it does not need to send information between two processes using an IPC mechanism (the pipe) and it avoids unecessary computation ("grep filename" may be slower (depending on the grep implementation) than simple filename comparison a la fgrep).If you're actually going to use a regular expression to search for a file, the more common method is:
This avoids printing directories. Add '[^/]*$' to the end of the regex to avoid matches in directory names. Many versions of "find" (including Mac OS X "find") support a "-regex" option, but this is nonstandard.If your search allows it, even better is:
I'm not suggesting that you didn't know these things, but you can be certain that (due to the nature of the article) some *nix newbies will read your post and they may start doing those commands on a regular basis, not knowing of better alternatives, so one should be careful when posting these things to such a forum.As a Mac (primarily) and Linux user, I would say Linux on the Mac or Mac clone is not ready for prime time. Just look at Yellow Dog Linux. Terrasoft sells Macs with YDL preinstalled, but, if you browse their site, there are major areas in their own Mac machines which are not supported.
I run Gentoo on a Mac clone (Power Computing PowerCenter Pro accelerated with a G3 add-on card). Getting this up was quite a chore and the video (an on-board version of an ATI Rage card) still only works in fb mode despite literally months screwing around with it. On a G4 dual processor Mac, Gentoo works better, but the DRI acceleration is still not up to snuff.
I mostly find Linux useful in bringing slow older x86 boxes to a useful speed. My main laptop is an old 400 MHz P2 Dell which runs wonderfully with Knoppix/Debian (although the Dell Rage Mobility is still a problem).