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Gentoo/PPC64 Beta Live CDs Released
pvdabeel writes "Gentoo/PPC developer, IBM employee and former PPC64 kernel maintainer Tom Gall has announced beta-level live CDs and stages for ppc64. The hardware supported by gentoo-ppc64 is PowerMacintosh G5, IBM pSeries, older IBM 64 bit RS/6000s
(such as the model 260, 270, F80, H80, see linuxppc64.org for a complete list) and soon IBM iSeries hardware.
Gentoo-ppc64 is the other side of the ppc equation, it is a 64-bit kernel as well as a 64 bit user space. We are the first linux distribution to offer a 64-bit top-to-bottom solution which is not a toy environment. This is a significant and exciting step as there is interest in cluster computing circles, users of java, and more generally those who have needs of large address spaces. It's fairly exciting to be on the forefront and continue to push the capabilities of linux on ppc64 forward."
...welcome our new 64 bit overlords.
this is NOT THE FIRST FULL 64BIT ENVIRONMENT.
I am REALLY getting sick of Apple Zealotry about 64bit or fastest computer or best interface or what have you.
The bald faced lying like this is worse than some of the crap from SCO.
Apple; Yesterday's tech, today...but we're the first. no, really.
RST
Kind of defeats the purpose of all computing, which is to run on LEGO.
Let me know when you have a 64-bit top-to-bottom solution which is a toy solution, and I'll know 64-bit computing has finally arrived (think about it).
Now all I need is that G5 :-)
Error 407 - No creative sig found
They've had PPC64 versions for a while, and they seem to work.
I don't quite understand why IBM doesn't want to create something like a G5, only "more serious". I'm sure the pSeries machines are excellent, but if they could just lower the price a bit by dropping some of the enterprise features that drive the price up, they could sell quite a lot of them. For people like myself, it's a chance to use a superior architecture in a not-quite-so-proprietary setting (Apple hardware is very proprietary in some areas). We could benefit from the commodity market for all the standardized components and interconnects (DDR RAM, SATA, PCI-X, PCI Express, AGP, USB, IEEE 1394, whatever) without being forced to buy Apple hardware or pay the MS tax. Commodized G5 system running an open source operating system like Linux or *BSD... that's where it's at.
I know I would like to buy such a machine for myself, and try to convince my employer to buy one for me...
For servers there's the JS20. If you're talking about an IBM Linux PPC workstation, give up already; that market's even smaller than Apple's.
Them's fightin' words, mister.
While I'm proud to hear that Linux has come a long way and now supports more architectures and most other OSes, I'm starting to wonder what's the point. We have Sparc, iAMD64, Power, Itanium, PA and another dozen uncommon architectures out there - and the further you get away from the "standard" i386 the worse support gets. Look at Fedora Core 2 for AMD64 - mysql is 32bit... Try get a JDK1.4 for Sparc Linux... How about Oracle for Linux/Power4?
While we have dozens of distributions there is not a single 64bit Linux out there that is even close to being as full-featured as debian, fedora, redhat, mandrake,... on i386 are...
Since 64bit porting is pretty much the same for all platforms, wouldn't it make sense for the distributions to work together in that aspect?
Cute. I think it's the choice of music that makes it so utterly horrifying.
Getting tired of Slashdot... moving to Usenet comp.misc for a while.
The flashing lights... SO PRETT... Ack! *has seizure*
I think the PPC 970's architechture specs are open. I think this means a company, with enough resources and ambition, could create a PPC 970 mobo, bundle it with the CPU, and put it out on the market. I don't think this has been done (well, outside of apple), but i think it is doable. I've wanted a POWER-esk chip for at least a couple years now, and i'd be in the market to buy something like this. I wonder how much a PPC 970 system would run without all the apple branding and sleek design overhead.
Damnit. One less excuse to get a mac. Freaking "A"!
--- "To iterate is human, to recurse divine." -- Robert Heller
I finally have something other than AIX to run on the 8 H80s I have sitting in the closet!!!
Why would anyone run yet another lame Linux distribution on their G5 when OS X works exponentially better, is way faster, more stable and has more drivers, applications, and developers involved? What could Linux possibly offer that OS X doesn't already do 10 times better?
Apple is your best bet for a non server workstation.
Yes IBM, SUN, SGI, and HP all have taxes on proprietary hardware. Either way your screwed and are paying a tax. Hell I remember installing HP kayaks and telling the user they would have to wait for 3 weeks for special tracks just to mount the cd-rw drives?? (The cdrom-rw was also made by HP)
Ask anyone who bought ram for an SGI or Sun workstation?
I was under the impression that new world macs are more open. Jobs saw to that to make more peripherals available to the macs when he returned. This is why Linux runs on them and not older world macs.
The trick to save money is this. Don't buy the upgrade options from Apple's website. By the ram at compusa or from micron direct. If you want gigantic storage, buy a mac with teh smallest hard drive and purchase the big ones seperately.
All the macs have affordable 3d opengl cards, SATA, dvd drives -rw, USB and firewire support, flashdrive support, and MacOSX.
Things a Pseries would not have anyway.
Its great to use shockwave or photoshop on occasion or to see what a webpage will like like on IE. The dual boot option is nice.
If you want the IBM because of scsi you can also buy an adeptec scsi adapter or buy one from apple with scsi hardware including raid. They are pricey of course with that installed. Or buy the mac adeptec card yourself and buy the scsi drives seperately like I mentioned above.
There is nothing these machines wont have that the pseries has. The exception is server oriented features like hot swappable hardware and special more professional 3d cards and ECC ram. But even then I am sure the true 3d support will only be available for AIX.
Intel might become proprietary too if palidium comes into existance. MS would love to use the hardware to defeat Linux... all in the name of security of course.
http://saveie6.com/
My roommate and I have had many long discussions about this, and came to the conclusion that it would most likely only be desired by geeks to replace their home home x86 boxes. I agree it would be very cool, but it wouldn't be a very popular product, they'd be like BeBoxes, a good idea, great value, etc. but not popular enough to make it worth it to IBM.
IBM probably wants you to go out and buy a G5 system if you're a home user.
Think of it, with Apple selling G5's by the boatload, IBM makes cash, plus they don't need to support PEBKAC lusers.
If IBM sold cheap(ish) G5 rigs running Linux, they would need to support every single moron who calls them up, probably not something they want to do.
hey!
If you're talking about an IBM Linux PPC workstation, give up already; that market's even smaller than Apple's
Here we have the old chicken and egg debate. Is that market so small because of the limited hardware choices or are hardware choices so limited because the market is so small?
If I could buy commodity PPC hardware, I'd build a development server.
LK
"Hi. This is my friend, Jack Shit, and you don't know him." - Lord Kano
There's an evaluation board by momentum: www.970eval.com. Hopefully the price falls...
-- Bob
1^2=1; (-1)^2=1; 1^2=(-1)^2; 1=-1; 1=0.
There is nothing wrong with learning a new system. It will make you more well rounded as a computer user and for those doing support and other IT jobs, it can be valuable. If I had a G5 and a few GB of disk space to spare, I would probably install this just to check it out, figure out the differences between it and OS X, etc.
Now, I imagine there is little reason to replace OS X with Linux, but there is nothing wrong with using both.
"Empathise with stupidity, and you're halfway to thinking like an idiot." - Iain M. Banks
The poster mentioned Java support. I didn't see anything that indicated if this was in reference to using gcj for Java support, or if IBM had contributed a full Java implementation. I would be curious to know which it might be. Since this effort seems more oriented towards a server system, it is likely not needed to support the Java GUI frameworks (AWT, Swing). This would seem to lean towards gcj (and Classpath) since it does not currently support most of the GUI functionality. But with IBM already having created a number of JVM's in the past, I wouldn't be surprised if they contributed something in this area to the Linux PPC64 effort.
As someone who uses AIX every day at a very large organization, I can say without hesitation that AIX sucks.
./configure, make, make install on competent operating systems are impossible on AIX.
badly.
Compiling software for AIX is hell. Things that are a simple
Now, Gentoo on PPC64 is great news just as soon as you can get major vendor support contracts for it and you can run Oracle on it.
If the G5s had support for ECC memory, then we could use them for modelling without taking a gamble that a flipped bit screws the results.
When days of computation go into making a calculation, the last thing you want to do is to run it again because there's a non-negligable chance that there was an uncaught bit error.
Luckily Apple have since seen the light and the new Xserve G5 at least supports ECC RAM. Before that, for affordable scientific computing, dual Opteron machines had no real competition.
Agreed.
Apple should support ecc ram powermacs too.
Really, whats the cost difference these days? Its almost negliable.
Apple wants the unix workstation market and professional 3d cards aside ECC ram IS ESSENTIAL and cost little to implement.
http://saveie6.com/
Oh come now - you're on Slashdot! When something involves Linux, it doesn't have to be reasonable.
Implicit Evaluation with PHP
...and run at a blistering 5 KIPS! (Thousand Instructions Per Second)
Honey, I shrunk the Cygwin
Read the fucking, uh, summary: "a 64-bit kernel as well as a 64 bit user space." OS X, while lovely, is not a 64-bit operating system.
(Also, PowerMac G5s aren't the only computers that use the PowerPC 970; IBM also sells some.)
You know, not that long ago people would've said the same thing about running Linux on x86...
http://www.talknerdy.org
I think it's sort of awesome. Such a catchy song. Such pretty colors. I'm mesmerized... What game is that from anyway?
umm
Second, this needs not be limited (and indeed is not) to G5. I guess for an Apple fan Power970==G5, but there are such things like Power970 workstations/blades that have nothing to do with Apple. After all, the chip is IBM's, not Apple's. Can you run OSX on an IBM PPC64 blade? I didn't think so.
Mods, how can this post be informative when the article clearly counted G5 as just one example in the list of supproted archs?
This is just another Apple fan confusing G5 with PPC64, nothing more.
I'm rather curious to see how long it would take to render a full divx movie in a pure 64 bit environment. Drool..
Listen to my experimental-industrial-techno!
i've tried the whole linux-on-a-mac thing many times, and on the older machines, its hardcore. mac os 9, IMO, sucks really hard, so running Debian on a PowerMac 7500 (i think that was the model) was really cool, and brought extended functionality to that aged old-world machine. but gentoo/debian/yellowdog instead of mac os x on a desktop? i don't think its worth it. maybe for cluster computing, or servers, or whatnot to avoid licensing issues. but i think those that honestly think linux is better and/or more functional than mac os x on the same machine are smoking something that, if not already, should be made illegal (or government sanctioned). user interface? osx wins hardware compatibility? osx wins, it was made for the hardware after all multimedia? osx wins software availability and ease of use? osx wins again the only area where i could think that you would want to use linux over os x is if you are a linux developer and NEED full compatibility with hardware-related procedures, or if you are a 13 year old kid who got a mac, dont feel like learning OS X (which takes the better part of a measely hour), and think you're gonna be l33t by running a "free" os rather than mac os. if thats the case, go for it. but IMHO you're wasting your time. especially with a fully-functional GCC, xcode, X11, terminal, and BSD base.
I don't quite understand why IBM doesn't want to create something like a G5, only "more serious". I'm sure the pSeries machines are excellent, but if they could just lower the price a bit by dropping some of the enterprise features that drive the price up, they could sell quite a lot of them.
Well, what you're talking about is essentially a consumer version of the PPC. Unfortunately, the consumer market is a business IBM has made it clear they don't want to be in, the enterprise is where they've chosen to compete.
On the bright side, they have been encouraging 3rd party vendors, most notably Genesi, to build consumer products based on PPC. I think there are probably some other 3rd party boards available, but I haven't really kept up with them.
I expect commoditized PPC systems will eventually become an option, but unless the 3rd partys establish it as a lucrative market first, I doubt IBM will jump into the frey.
IBM tends to avoid competing in the consumer market directly, but they're more than happy to sell parts and license technology to companies who want to play there.
But here's a short, unofficial, quick point by point comparison of OS X vs. linux that may be insightful [yeah mods, i'm talking to you!]
1) Flexibility
OS X will run on ppc architectures, and that's it, while linux can run on just about any architecture.
2) Usabilitiy
OS X is much easier to install than most linux distros (especially gentoo), and provides a consistent, pretty user interface. Linux can be setup to be just as usable, but it takes quite a bit of work (again, i'm only talking about gentoo).
3) Drivers
OS X has all the drivers it needs because hardware manufacturers create the drivers themselves, whereas only a few hardware manufacturers create drivers for linux, although many wonderful hackers have created fully functional drivers. Linux drivers still are almost always at least a few months later than windows and mac drivers.
4) Security
Because OS X is a *BSD, it is presumably just as secure as linux.
5) Cost
Upgrading from 10.2 to 10.3: $129 [1]
Upgrading from anything to linux: free (if you use a cdrw) or the cost of a cdr.
6) Speed
I don't know where you got this information that OS X works exponentially better and is way faster. The only info I can find is in [2] where linux performed better on a mysql benchmark suite.
7) Stability
the gentoo linux version is still in beta, so presumably OS X is much more stable. exponentially better? debatable.
8) Philosophy
there are mac zealots and gentoo zealots alike - do you think cocoa is the best gui environment ever created? do you think portage is the best package management ever created? Do you think software should be free, or do you think you should support quality software/hardware with a reasonable [or reasonably expensive] cost?
9) Software
Without a doubt, OS X has better, more professional software. In terms of f/oss, i believe linux has better software, although they're pretty close. the more people that use linux, and submit feature requests/bug reports, however, will undoubtedly increase the quality of linux software.
Cut+paste the following short C program into a text file, and compile it with "gcc whatever_you_called_it.c"
#include "stdio.h"
int main(void) {
if(sizeof(void *)==8)
printf("Hooray, this is a 64-bit system!\n");
if(sizeof(void *)==4)
printf("Damn it
exit(0);
}
On: Alpha, HPPA64, PPC64, IA64, x86-64 (in 64bit mode), MIPS (in 64bit mode), you get the "Hooray".
On Mac OSX, you get the "Damn". Yes, even on a G5. A G5 might have 64-bit CPUs, but it doesn't have a 64-bit OS. Linux/PPC64 is such an OS.
A good filesystem is another nice thing Linux has that OS X doesn't. XFS and Reiser4 to name just two
But the difference is that part of why the G5 is so expensive is because it can run OS X. So, why buy a more expensive computer than you need to. OS X can basically do all that linux can and now more and more linux apps are being ported to OS X, so the resons for even dual booting are now less compelling than ever. When 7,8, and 9 were all you could get, yeah YDLinux, LinuxPPC and MKLinux made more sense, but now that there are so few compelling reasons to use Linux over OS X, why go through the annoyance of installing linux rather than migrating fully to OS X?
Also, is this story saying that there is still really no 64-bit linux distro for Athlon64/Opteron? I'm thinking of buying one and took at look at Gentoo's X86-64 forum. But it's hard to get the big picture of how it really is to own one (and run it on a 64 bit OS).
As far as the kernel is concerned, _linux_ is way faster than OS X on ppc, especially ppc64. Also OS X can't use large pages afaik nor run 64 bits executables. It's rather a toy compared to linux in a lots of areas ;)
So, yes, even though OS X has much better functionality on Mac computers than Linux because they are on their home turf, with the hardware specially tailored for the OS and vice versa, this distro of Linux can take advantage of the 64 bit processing, something that the stock OS lacks.
Or I could have gotten it all wrong... Go ahead and flame.
I'll just say this..
"Why not?"
Why would anyone run yet another lame Linux distribution on their G5
Because Apple makes really great hardware, but I don't use software that doesn't come with source code and the freedom to improve it.
I used Apple systems while growing up, and I've always thought (most of) their hardware was fantastic.
In the time since I installed MkLinux DR2.1 on my family's PowerMac 7500 back in 1997, I've decided that the long term advantages that come from free software are worth much more than the few slight and temporary advantages a proprietary program might offer, so as far as I can, I use only free software.
The OS X kernel ("Darwin") is free software, but the interesting stuff- Cocoa and the GUI stuff is proprietary.
You might might not think that software freedom is important, but some people do, and the combination of that concern with Apple's fine hardware is the reason someone would run GNU/Linux on a G5.
~Phillip
Why would anyone run yet another lame Linux distribution on their G5 when OS X works exponentially better, is way faster, more stable and has more drivers, applications, and developers involved? What could Linux possibly offer that OS X doesn't already do 10 times better?
Freedom.
This may be off-topic, but I'll never use linux on an apple laptop until i can remap caps and ctrl. I guess apple has a proprietary keyboard, and there's only a program to do it in OS X (ucontrol).
Being an emacs user, a system with ctrl in the wrong place is impossible to use.
Really? does it really matter when you consider this; Alpha, had two great operating systems for it, OpenVMS and UNIX, same goes for SPARC64, it has Solaris.
Of what possible benefit is there bringing Linux accross? Linux's main attraction was the fact that it finally offered a viable solution on the x86. The home of Linux IS the x86.
Now, gentoo will build a full 64-bit system (kernel, libraries, apps). (It can also create a 32-bit mode (sub)system.) People can argue about 32-bit vs 64-bit runtimes, but if apps use large amounts of memory, then after a certain point they will suffer (libraries, kernel calls use up some of that address space, so the app may end up with 3GB or so usable RAM in 32-bit mode (fortunately few apps need that much ram... yet).
As for x86-64, that's the same type of system. Gentoo, RHEL, SuSE & a few others (TurboLinux, Debian?) all have 64-bit systems on the Opteron, and aside from Gentoo (generally), all include 32-bit libraries as well, so they can run older applications that are in 32-bit mode. From my looking at benchmarks Opterons (Athlon 64) & 970s (G5) both have about the same performance (IN GENERAL) per clock, of course right now Opterons go up to 2.4 GHz (vs 2.0 GHz for the G5), so the Opterons are faster right now. I have used an Athlon 64 Gentoo Linux system, and it's very very fast & responsive (most Gentoo Linux systems are in my experence). I have only played with a G5 a little, but it didn't seem that responsive (& I don't really like OS X) vs systems I am used to (KDE/Linux on CPUs with less than 1GHz) But that's environment, so I can't honestly compare the CPUs alone there (just the CPUs in a normal environment).
As for 64-bit systems, Alpha is pure 64-bit (didn't emerge from an older binary-compatible proc), as is the Itanic, SPARC64 it seems is generally split 64-bit/32-bit (because it seems to be that 32-bit is faster on sparcs) and appears to default to 64-bit mode, PPC64 is probably going to be like AMD64 (or officially x86-64) in that 64-bit mode will be default with 32-bit libs for compatiblity. PARISC, I don't know about.
Before anyone get's their mod points in a twist, let me add that I'm a Gentoo fanboy who has installed Gentoo on a dozen boxen between home and work. I love it. But the latest LiveCDs have been very poor, namely 2004.1. Hardware detection is minimal if it works at all, and there are several other showstoppers along the way too that you won't discover until you hunt them down in the forums.
Let's hope we get these worked out by the end of the year, because this will sour people's impression of a great distro if we don't fix it.
Alpha would blow the doors off PPC64 if had been developed. It would easily be past 2 GHz today and would also have SMT and/or multiple cores on a single die. Fuck you Compaq. Fuck you Hewlett Packard. Fuck you Tipper Gore. Oh wait...
Um, this statement is false. The mysql server and client are fully 64-bit... here's proof.
While we have dozens of distributions there is not a single 64bit Linux out there that is even close to being as full-featured as debian, fedora, redhat, mandrake,... on i386 are...
If you want something as full-featured as i386, then (aside from simply running i386) x86-64 is the best game in town, because it actually runs i386 binaries. For example, my copy of Mathematica for i386 Linux runs perfectly in Fedora 2 x86-64.
As an aside, x86-64 clearly contradicts the story summary's claim of being the "first linux distribution to offer a 64-bit top-to-bottom solution which is not a toy environment." Red Hat Enterprise 3 for AMD64 was released six months ago with a full 64-bit userspace environment, and I don't think anybody can seriously argue that RHEL3 is a "toy environment" compared to a beta gentoo-ppc64 release.
It's easy!
Step 1. Insert Live Gentoo CD.
Step 2. Wait 15 hours for CD to automatically compile the software in RAM (including the kernel).
Step 3. Reboot (to boot the new kernel).
Step 4. Go to step 2.
And on SPARC V9 (in 64-bit mode) and zArchitecture (in 64-bit mode).
The "in 64-bit mode" also applies to PA-RISC 2.0 ("HPPA64") and PPC64, as those evolved from 32-bit architectures and support 32-bit as well as 64-bit binaries, just as x86-64, SPARC V9, and MIPS - or, rather, the 64-bit version of MIPS - evolved from 32-bit architectures and support 32-bit binaries. Most OSes for them that support 64-bit mode probably also support 32-bit mode.
On OSes such as OS X and older versions of some other OSes, only 32-bit mode is supported.
Wow, how interesting!
You know, the "in 64-bit mode" also applies to IA64, as while IA64 can hardly be described has having evolved from a 32-bit architecture (resemblence to PA-RISC notwithstanding), it supports a 32-bit userland (for example, running HP-UX with HP tools).
Amazing world we live in, isn't it?
We are the first linux distribution to offer a 64-bit top-to-bottom solution which is not a toy environment.
Well, either he is saying that 64bit Linux on the Opteron is not a top-to-bottom solution, or that it is a toy environment. I frankly don't care whether it is "top-to-bottom" or "side-to-side", but 64bit Linux on the Opteron seems to work well. I mean, IBM is using 64bit Linux as the basis of their eServer 325, a machine with 2116 Opterons in it.
Also, what PPC hardware am I supposed to run this on? If I buy Apple hardware, Apple is just going to use those sales to claim more OS X installations and to try to use that as a marketing weapon against Linux. And IBM PPC hardware is pretty expensive.
I don't run forks of FreeBSD on my hardware. I run the real thing.
...said resemblance not being a huge surprise, given that I think it started out as an HP project.
...although the 32-bit userlands that IA-64 supports are 32-bit PA-RISC (via, I think, binary-to-binary translation) and x86 (via hardware and, I think, either a current or planned binary-to-binary translation mechanism), not any 32-bit flavor of IA-64. It might also support 64-bit PA-RISC (again, via translation), and it might be amusing to see binary-to-binary translation for x86-64. :-)
HP are porting OpenVMS to IA-64, with Alpha->IA-64 translation (they might be doing VAX->IA-64 by VAX->Alpha->IA-64, using the existing VAX->Alpha translator).
You're more likely to be able to run DB2 on it given that IBM makes both DB2 and PPC.
Comment removed based on user account deletion
Because there is no aanoyance in installing Linux. Why bother with the annoyance of installing OS X if Linux runs all the programs you need?
Gee, that must make it hard to use computers at all. The firmware in your disk drives, network controller, are graphics card are almost certainly closed source. (Even your BIOS is likely to be, although there are alternatives.) Not to mention all the switches, bridges, and routers your packets go through on the way to slashdot...
However, if you had enough money, I'm sure you could convince all those vendors to sell you a copy of their source. But I have a feeling that what you want isn't just the source code -- you want the code to be free.
Am I part of the core demographic for Swedish Fish?
there will be a PPC workstation for the new amiga os i think
they demonstrated it on tv running linux and osx on it (illegally)
stop supporting microsoft with pirating their software!!!!!
"Hey boss, mind if I reboot the RS/6000? I am *dying* to try out this new KDE 3.2!!!
OS X has all the drivers it needs because hardware manufacturers create the drivers themselves, whereas only a few hardware manufacturers create drivers for linux, although many wonderful hackers have created fully functional drivers. Linux drivers still are almost always at least a few months later than windows and mac drivers.
I still haven't found Mac OS X drivers for my SMC 2835W (802.11g wireless card), whereas it works just fine with GNU/Linux. This might be an exception, but this is a quite popular card.
theefer
amd64 works quite well
you will have no flashplugin in 64 bit browsers (you can use the 32 bit ones anyway), some trouble with games and other 32 bit binary applications
stop supporting microsoft with pirating their software!!!!!
This seems like a good point in the thread to ask what Torvalds develops on. I'm certain I read a post here on /. claiming he used a dual 970. IIRC, he used to work on a quad Xeon. I'm presuming that if he isn't using x86 anymore then he's got something from IBM. Anyone have a link handy about this? Google isn't doing for me tonight.
Well, I have an AMD64 3200+ and it runs a complete 64-bit kernel and userland and yes it is Gentoo. But that is probably like saying "I love MS" here on /.
The speed is excellent. There are however a few things that don't work perfect in 64-bit yet.
I have an ATI 9200 card and there is no 64-bit ATi driver yet, not that it is a problem for me since I'm not a gamer and the driver supplied with xorg-x11 is moe than good enough for my use.
If you mod me down, I *will* introduce you to my sister!
There are not 64 bit kswapd's support inside of linux-2.4.26 or linux-2.6.6.
Kswapd is limited to 2 GiB of swap per process, so, this limit exists, processes are limited to 4 GiB, no more.
There is no full swapping of 64 bits.
open4free ©
So what you're saying is that if I buy a Mac, I pay for hardware that I might not need, while if I buy a PC, I can add it as I go? Oh, ok.
I want to delete my account but Slashdot doesn't allow it.
Just raise the taxes on crack.
No, hfs+ is at the bottom of the heap, ever so slightly above ext2 and FAT32. Even ext3 has several major advantages over hfs+. Indeed, hfs+ is closer to NTFS than most filesystems you could think of; it's old, it sucks, and it shows. (This is not to say that all old filesystems are bad, mind. Most of them are, however.)
You are right, my previous post was rather on the rantish side.
/usr/lib. If you want to add shared libraries to the system you have to symlink them to this directory. This makes building software also rather a pain. If you know how to do this, you are ahead of myself and our consultants from IBM.
There are, however, reasons beside being able to build software that I view AIX as sub-optimal.
There are minor annoyances. For example, tar does not support things like a -z flag. It's a triffle, but damn it can be annoying. Most of the standard Unix utilities have quirks that are mildly annoying. Granted, this does not technically make the operating system inferior. It does, however, make the user experience much less enjoyable. I understand that most people are familiar with the GNU or BSD utilities, and that AIX uses the more traditional utilities. But with all the innovation that has happened with these utilities, why not include them by default?
Your comment about the 5L stuff represents a misunderstanding of the situation. The 5L utility suites are grotesquely outdated. Go take a look at the Linux Toobox page. It is like they built once and forgot that they had it. They never update anything.
One of my other pet quirks with AIX is that it seems to be impossible to add other paths to shared libraries. As far as I can tell, everything is hardcoded to
You are dead on about HPUX. It is worse than AIX, but this is still not exactly a ringing endorsement of AIX.
My background is not primarily in Linux, though I have had some time with Solaris and others. I'm not sure what this comment was supposed to mean.
You missed my intent with the Oracle comment. I'm not actually hoping for Oracle on PPC64. And no, I don't think Oracle will ever come to such a squirley oddball platform. You are indeed stuck with AIX if you want Oracle. My comment was more to reflect that in using LinuxPPC 64, you are jumping from the frying pan into the fire.
Linux runs on OldWorld Macs just fine. More difficult than running on NewWorld, but it works nonetheless. Boot into it with BootX or quik. Personally I run it on a Power Mac 9500 and have run it on a Power Mac 7200.
Tangenting, I believe you can run them on pre-PCI/pre-OF/pre-7200 PPC machines. And you can (often) even run them on 68k Macs. My Centris 610 is running Debian and XFree86 for excellent "couch computing".