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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."
[p]I would like to ask, as a completely serious question, aside from the matter of personal preference, the whole, "Linux is better than anything else in the world," thing, why in the hell would anyone feel a need to install Linux on a Mac?[/p][p]OS X runs on most modern Macs, and is based on a *BSD. It's stable as hell, more secure than any distro of Linux I know of, and it has a very functional GUI (if you like such things).[/p][p]I mean, I run two Linux boxen, one as a server, the other as a generic code monkey-ing machine, and if I had a Mac I would in no way see or feel a need to put Linux on it.[/p]
Edward@Tomato - /home/Edward/ man woman
man: no entry for woman in the manual.
"Qua!?"
One of my friends runs a music studio and is constantly fighting with turning off ACPI on Win 2000. It causes all sorts of issues with our sound cards (Dual Delta 1010s), SCSI card, and IDE controller card. Having to worry about IRQs and ACPI has got to disappear. Are IRQs treated the same under Linux? I would hope that Linux would not give the same kind of issues, the way all Mac OSs don't. I had never heard of an IRQ until we started having these problems at the studio. No wonder most studios are all Mac, we don't have the time to fsck around with this crap. No BIOS, etc.. It's better that way, it seems.
Hm - there are some interesting implications with that.
IBM wants to sell chips. Apple wants to sell hardware. If IBM came out with a "desktop" or even "workstation" PowerPC machine that ran, say, Yellow Dog Linux (or PPC Suse or the like), how would Apple respond?
Especially since most of the programs made for PPC Linux can easily be ported to Apple - whether running under X11 or adding in Cocoa portions - and I'm sure Apple would be more than happy to supply a compiler that could turn PPC-X-Windows code to Aqua code - cludgy, but it could work.
If such a system took off, Apple would be pretty happy - more programs could be converted easily. And odds are, if you're already running PPC desktop, you might be looking at OS X for ease of use issues.
On the other hand - who would use such a system? Most people would probably go for x86 Linux - x86 parts are cheaper, more software is available (even on just the Linux side alone). So a person wanting a PPC desktop would have to have a very good reason, like wanting to do high-end calculations or graphics rendering.
In which case, they'd probably just go for a Mac first anyway.
Personally, I think that Apple's best move is this:
1. Keep the high-end Powermacs/powerbooks.
2. Keep the lower-cost iBooks.
3. Make the iMacs truly cost compatible. Yes, there are the eMacs - what I think would blow away the market is a $600 headless iMac. Small base, maybe like the Cube (only upgradeable - that's what killed the little guy). Most people already have monitors, and if they could by a $600 G4 Mac they'd be estatic. Apple would make money, and could eventually move them over into the more expensive stuff - and even if they didn't, they'd gain market share, which would still mean more money.
Either way, we'll have to see what happens with IBM and Apple. The 970 chips are becoming more popular (Xbox Next, anyone? - this could be a side issue about how many Xbox games could be ported to OS X if the Xbox Next is truly G5 based....), so the future could hold anything.
52 Weeks, 52 Religions with John Hummel
I have two iMacs with Debian installed. Why? Because they're near as damnit silent! One acts as a server and one as a desktop. On the desktop, OOo runs just fine, as does the Gnome desktop and all the usual toys. Thunderbird and Firebird packages are available in Debian's "testing" stream.
Ridiculously well.
OS X (and OS 9, as well, if that's your cup of tea) wakes from sleep in less than a second (to displaying the desktop), and is usable (as in actually responsive and opening a program) in maybe 3 seconds. It's one of the reasons why Apple notebooks are so highly prized. Shut the lid, and it's asleep in less than two seconds. Open the lid, and it's awake in less than three.
On desktop machines, it's equally as functional. Plus, it's always cool to see the pulsating (snoring) "sleep" light, since a lot of Macs are basically dead silent when "asleep"; it saves you from the idiot who wants to press the power button on your machine.
Exactly. It's like putting a VW Bug engine into a mid-60's porsche. Not only is it not going to work right(and LinuxPPC doesn't work nearly as well, just on a features basis, as OS X), but it'll be slow and everyone who sees it will just stare at you- and if they're not polite enough, demand to know why you did it. Even Robin Malda uses OS X!
Who cares? Slashdot is hardly an example of technical prowess; in fact, it's rotting(HTML 3?!?). The FAQ hasn't been touched since '99, and they have yet to rise to the challenge of solving any of the problems they themselves created(slashdotting for example). From what I've heard(several OSDN sales people worked where I used to work), Malda got wined and dined by one company after another hoping he'd either post about them or endorse their products. Absolutely no integrity.
Please help metamoderate.
Sorry, clearly you've never used OSX.. it IS the most intuitive user experience, and the most widely distributed UNIX. Grandma, any child, most Slashdot admins, and Virginia Tech all agree. Take a look at how elegant Aqua/Quartz is what with it's PDF base and GPU offloading. I know the 'community' likes Linux, I like and use Linux, but NeXT and now Apple has taken the OS to where nearly every Computer Science PHD speculated in the late 80s when they imagined: "What do we *really* want from an OS." Here it is, OSX, enjoy it!
That's why I bought an iBook.. I figured it would be a perfect linux laptop.
Then I tried OSX for the heck of it, you know, it was already installed.
And now you can pry OSX off my mac from my cold, dead hands.
Now, Linux on newer Macs? I dunno. I've never used OS X, so I can't comment.
"Mission Accomplished" -- George W. Bush May 1, 2003
I have a second hand 400mhz G4 powerbook. When OSX came out I tried it, but it seemed to run a bit too slow on the powerbook for me and watching a divx movie in osx was nearly impossible with quicktime.
After a week I was fed up with it. I've been running gentoo linux on a lot of x86 servers, so I decided to make it a gentooppc computer - with a GUI for the first time.
It took some effort at that time, since gentooppc was just starting, but eventually I managed it.
I felt proud that it worked and it made many mac addicts give me strange but cool looks.
Nowadays I run the 2.6 kernel and kde 3.2 and I must say it's perfect (only vga out is a bit of a b!tch with my graphical chipset): reliable and fast and all of the hardware is supported. I use it mainly for webbrowsing (konqueror), movies (mplayer), email (sylpheed-claws) and SSH'ing to other machines.
Only one but, if you run linux on a non x86 computer, you don't have the nice Wine things, but on the other hand you can run DOS apps with Bochs (though terribly slow on my system).
I won't swap if someone offered me a faster powerbook with OSX and I weren't allowed to reinstall my beloved linuxppc.
Knoppix-MiB has ppc isos, see the discussion and posts by 'fleny68' here.
Timeo idiotikOS et dona ferentes
Because MacOS X needs a shitload of RAM to run decently. If all you need is vim and a browser, fluxbox on linux is a far better solution. Especially when the last generation stuff only came with 128MB of ram by default and is increedibly cheap right now. Less swapping off the harddrive also improves battery life.
RAM is cheap now though. I'd say you need about 384MB to keep OS X running smoothly and the terminal application is fairly nice.
One of the things that people have been saying with each iteration of OS X is that it is getting faster and faster. While this may be true, they still have a long way to go. I recently tried out a gentoo live cd on a friends 600MHz G3 iBook, and I was blown away. In OS X 10.3 the iBook feels responsive, but it is clear that a fast G4 or G5 would fair a great deal better. Under Gentoo running gnome 2.4 this computer was sickeningly fast. It felt almost as fast as my Athlon XP 2500. I was amazed at how much this little 600MHz G3 was capable of. If you are looking for a reason to use Linux over Mac OS X, look no further than getting to utilize the performance your system is capable of.
I know I know OS X is a more modern os blah blah blah. People used to say (maybe they still do and I just ignore them) the same thing about java, it is a more modern language and all of it's advanced capabilities are too much for todays computers. The end result? Very few modern GUI apps are written in java. I say the same thing for OS X, just because it uses a somewhat new concept for GUI (pdf-based) doesn't justify it's cripplingly slow speeds. I for one would rather have a fully functional GUI that doesn't make a decent processor suck wind every time I try to resize a browser window, than have the prettiest antialised interface. For the record I personally find gnome 2.4 with the ximian industrial theme quite pleasing to the eye. Just my $0.02.
Fear trumps hope and ignorance trumps both
Try Jaguar on a 7300. Or Panther on a 9600. Or even Panther on a beige G3. For those of us who love Apple hardware, can't afford gear more recent than four years old, and want to get some UNIX out of it, Linux just blows OS X right out of the water.
Linux doesn't care about my video chipset. X11 DEs don't require 32 megs of VRAM. Linux runs inside of 128 megs of physical memory without difficulty. Fluxbox is just as responsive as OS 9 on the same hardware- something OS X still can't claim.
All that and here's the bag of chips: The Debian "Software Update" (apt) updates EVERY APPLICATION ON THE SYSTEM. Compare to OS X, where I get my Apple updates through SWU and have to download and install Adobe updates, new builds of BZFlag, new versions of Quicksilver, etceteras myself.
Not to say I don't have issues with various packages, but dear GODS Linux is far more useable on older hardware than OS X. On a general level- quality of applications and userland are a slightly different matter.
Linux on Sparc is the real untold story. The installation of Debian unstable on an unused Sun Ultra 5 has been a recent revelation, and given the prevalence of such hardware sitting unused in many locations, represents a low (or no, if one carries out an ftp install) way of recycling such hardware to make it truly useful. The Sun Ultra 5 recently rejuvenated in this way is running much faster than it ever did using Solaris 7 or 8, and also has none of the compilation/compatibility problems which beset Sun desktop users who don't have Sun's own (expensive) compiler. apt-get install - could life get any easier?
The company I work for writes software for wireless adapters, and Windows was our first platform. The appeal for us of porting our software to another platform would have been much greater if there was some similarity between OSX and Linux, but there is very little. The driver model, the device management, the hardware platform, the GUI, and even the main user mode languages (OC vs. C/C++) are different. I recognize that there is a fair bit of compatibility in the user, non GUI, API's and in the CLI, but I think that was the minimum possible (ie. it couldn't be avoided).
This was Apple's choice when they did the big jump to PPC and OSX: they could have gone with the PC platform, they could have built OSX on the Linux kernel, etc. I think the OSS community would have embraced the slick, polished GUI and software that Apple has if Apple had given them a reason to - it's exactly what Linux needs. But what the OSS community did not need (and still doesn't need) was to reopen the BSD vs. Linux divide (like GTK vs. Qt).
I'm sure they had solid financial and strategic reasons for staying away from any Linux compatibility, but for both Apple and Linux users (and for us developers) it was a bad choice. Perhaps they were concerned that if they did something that really benefited the OSS community then MS would get mad (ie. no more Office).
It's a shame - since Linux is focussed on the low cost, business market, and Apple is focussed on premium, brand conscious, consumers, they could have co-existed and cooperated very nicely.
In the end my company delayed, but has recently decided to port to Linux.
I've yet to see Debian or YDL support a new apple computer straight out of the gate. When they do support a new model, its most often in a crippled state. Like some posters here have mentioned, the nvidia Go line of graphics cards are barely supported and lack 2d and 3d acceleration. Other items still NOT supported are Bluetooth, Airport Extreme, and external video (on powerbooks). These features were all in the 12" powerbook that came out over 12 months ago!!! The powermac g5 support page just simply lists "No."
YDL hardware support page
Linux on ppc is just not worth it on a new machine. But on a positive note, by the time support is available, the computer will be too old to upgrade to the newest MacOS and will need the linux build.
That would be because that is incorrect. Rhapsody and the earliest release of OS X, OS X Server 1, did indeed use the Display PostScript system from NeXTSTEP, modified to present a slightly more Mac-esque user interface. But when Adobe bumped up the licensing costs for DPS, Apple were forced to go back and effectively write a new graphics system from scratch. They based it on Portable Document Format, it's called Quartz and the user interface is known as Aqua.
I find your assertion that OS X does not use X laughable. The latest version of OS X comes bundled with an X server that will run rootless right on top of the Aqua screen. The XFree86 distribution will build from unmodified source and work on earlier OS Xs too: have a look at X11 running in Aqua on a Beige G3 with Jaguar. I develop software for a network of Linux PCs, OPENSTEP PCs, NeXTs, Macs, Suns and assorted other systems. If it wasn't for OS X's support for X11 there would be much less portability between the systems (although GNUstep helps a great deal in that regard). So OS X does use X11, even if you and some other users choose not to.
Actually I'm talking from the perspective of a Debian user here. Debian's package hierarchy is good, but it's still far from exhaustive. There will come times when the program you would like has not been Debianised. And when it does, you have to install that program yourself and maintain it yourself, just as you would on any other operating system.
Darwin is not the kernel. Is that so freaking hard to understand? XNU is the kernel, which is a part of the Darwin Operating System. Darwin is a BSD operating system which includes the Mach microkernel running in monolith mode, with features from the BSD kernel added in. The BSD subsystem does not as some people think run as a personality on top of Mach; the two have been combined by Apple.
Yes indeed I am. This post comes to you from a turbo colour slab running OmniWeb 2.0 on top of NeXTSTEP 3.3. Acquisitioned is not a real word, acquired is. Yes, I know that fat binaries came from NeXT. They're still in use today, in OS X. OS X is the only modern operating system to use this technology, in which it is far superior to other offerings. It's jsut a pity that Apple don't make more of it.
No you don't, and frankly I don't give a monkey's because ELF is getting old. The Mach_O binary format provides portability as well as small executables when compiled thin. It provides superior threading by realising processes, LWPs and threads as kernel-scheduled Mach threads. It's better than ELF.
It appears that more homework is required on your part regarding the various parts that go to make up OS X. Find out about Xnu, Mach, Darwin and FreeBSD, then report back on your progress. The second assignment will focus on Cocoa, Quartz, Aqua, CoreFoundation, IOKit and possibly WebObjects if we have time.