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Mac OS X Panther On A 25MHz Centris 650
Currawong writes "danamania, well known for making the most of 68k Macs, has done the ultimate, and installed Mac OS X Panther on an old Centris with 68MB RAM, a 25MHz 68040 and 4GB drive - an early 90's machine with about the same power as a NeXT cube. To achieve this, she's had to run it under PearPC on Debian, resulting in a severe performance hit, as generic emulation runs "about 500 times slower" according to the developers. On this approximately 0.05MHz G3 speed emulator, the boot screen has taken 1.5 hours to appear, and the ETA for full boot is almost exactly 1 week! Regular updates are being posted as each milestone in the boot process is reached."
I don't think I want to know what happens when you try to install or update fink on that machine...
Please correct me if I got my facts wrong.
Still as good an excuse as ever. :)
"Empathise with stupidity, and you're halfway to thinking like an idiot." - Iain M. Banks
This one qualifies for the "Too Much Time on Their Hands Award".
the boot screen has taken 1.5 hours to appear, and the ETA for full boot is almost exactly 1 week!
Gee, sounds faster than my wife's ibook G3/900 with 128M of RAM! Maybe I should upgrade to this!
Because it was there?
Sig
I had a windows system like that once.. But it wasn't emulated :-/
Simple answer:
because you can
IMHO using an emulator is cheating. You're not really running it on the Centris. You're running it in a VM that is running on a Centris.
Give me Classic Slashdot or give me death!
I sure hope the website isnt being hosted on it.
WTF else are you gonna do with a Centris? Play Marathon?! Or Spectre VR?
In the future, I would want to not be isolated from my friends in the Space Station.
That is impressive. And it probably even gets around Apple's BS EULA clause that claims you can only install OS X on Apple hardware.
How to solve most of our problems: 1.Lots of nuclear plants. 2.Cure aging.
imagine a beowolf cluster of those...
Why?
For those who haven't bothered to mouse-over that foot icon attached to the story, it's indicates that this story has been attached to a category known as "It's Funny. Laugh". That's the reason why this story made Slashdot.
Why this was done in the first place? Dunno...
That they are hosting the website on this machine, too!
"Flyin' in just a sweet place,
Never been known to fail..."
If "has done the ultimate" equates to "has smoked crack" then, sure, it's the ultimate.
Laws are for people with no friends.
I don't know, but I want to marry her.
Why does Slashdot keep covering people who waste time installing PearPC and OSX on various already-incredibly-slow pieces of aging hardware? Is Slashdot really this hard up for quality story material?
Getting a web server to run on an Atari 800 is kind of cool. Modding a Roomba to deliver your Dr Pepper is nifty. Getting OSX to run on the slowest piece of hardware you can get Linux to run on is tired and boring.
Don't make me start reading CNN for my news.
That's the stupidest thing I've read all day long. And I've been reading POLITICS all day long.
VT has officially got the BigMac up and running faster than ever at 12.25TF with 1150 dual 2.3Ghz XServes.
Check out the announcment.
I wonder how many Centrises that equates to...
"The worst tyrannies were the ones where a governance required its own logic on every embedded node." - Vernor Vinge
Of course, people always ask "Does this have any practical use?"
Absolutely not. But that it not the point. In The Real World imagination and creativity are the driving force. How do you foster that? By challenging yourself and inspiring others. There does not have to be any realistic application as much as there needs to be a thought process behind it that can be capitalized on in the future. Experiments such as this drive the imagination and the mind into new directions and those new paths we explore can lead to really, really utterly brilliant things that can have a profound effect on our lives.
In school, a teacher once told me "Answers don't really matter at all. The process you use to reach your conclusions is the most important thing in the world." It blew my little mind open to the true nature of creativity and for the first time I valued it in a way that was truly profound.
OSX load journal: Day 6: Power outage.
I mean really, what the fuck is that supposed to mean? I don't go around killing people just because I can. I go around killing people because it makes my dick hard.
To achieve this, she's had to run it under PearPC on Debian...
Is the excitement here that Debian ran just fine on something so old, the great work from the developers of PearPC or what it takes to get an OS to take a week to boot?
Watch as danamania gets a whole lot of new slashdot friends just because she's a girl...
I know I added her to my friend list.
Ok off-topic but I thought it was funny.
Relating this to the previous article on the Spectrum machines - one nifty aspect of those "ancient" computers was that if (or better: when) the computer crashed, you just flicked the power off, then on, and you were back in business (ok, back to square one) in a second. Contrast that to the lengthy startup time of modern computers.
Computers are getting faster and faster, and yet boot time remains too long. Imagine doing the opposite - running early OSs on modern hardware. Startup should be fast, software execution should be a blaze.
And hey, old software or not, I did plenty of good work on a Centris. And it was the most advanced computer at the time...
This same dumb question gets asked every time, and the same dumb answers come up. Stop modding this tired old shit up.
I don't know if any of you have ever had to work on that 650 chasis, but it's a fucking bitch to deal with. The undercarriage is where the hard drive lives, and it's bolted to the outside, so actually accessing the bay it lives in is an act in near futility.
And they kept that damn chasis around until the 7100's...
Truly, an amazing feat to deal with that obnoxious piece of design.
Oh, and the sharpened metal edges inside the case are murder on the knuckles.
Don't Crease the Weasel!
"I did it for the worst possible reason, because I could."
This is all paraphrased, but it helps to answer the question of "why?". It also gets to the heart of this story -- it was done for the worst possible reason!
If someone trips over the power cord, or the power goes out, does she have the patience to start over?
So the G3 Emulates at 50Khz with PearPC. Bet she wishes she could have used Cherry OS!
"It takes many nails to build a crib, but one screw to fill it."
I feel sorry for people who bitch about how this has no "practical" use. I can't help thinking they're the same ones who walk into art museums and make winning comments like "pfff, I could do THAT..."
vk.
... and is hosting the webpage linked in the article... because the server is that slowww....
;-)
It would be funny if they install SETI@Home, and that weak machine finds ET's signal...
oh how the AMD kiddies will cry.
...but not intentionally. A friend of mine once called me over to his shop to check out his new IBM PC 286 clone and a clone-PostScript laser printer. You can tell this was a LONG time ago. I fired up Corel Draw and did a few odd things, like a PostScript pattern fill inside a clipping path. I sent it to print and nothing happened. It was 5PM on Friday, he said he never turns off his computers, so we just left it running and left for the weekend.
On monday morning, I got an excited phone call from my friend, the page had just popped out of the printer! That means the print job ran on the laser printer's processor for about 2.5 days.
That's nothing.
When my port of Linux on an Abacus is complete, I shall hold the true crown of new stuff on old shit geekiness! (Though, I wonder if people are going to say I cheated because I had to overclock it a little, and I added a few more beads to increase bandwidth.)
"Everything you know is wrong. (And stupid.)"
Moderation Totals: Wrong=2, Stupid=3, Total=5.
...so does that mean it automatically gets an "uptime" of 150 hours? that is stability, baby!
I started to, but it'll take me 52.6 years to finish imagining it.
Nuh uh, it was James T. Kirk! Duh!
"I would say that 99 per cent of what my father has written about his own life is false." - L. Ron Hubbard Jr.
There are new instructions on 486+ CPUs that are not supported on the 386. Instructions like cmpxchg8, for example. Some of these can be worked around (cmpxchg8 is used for data moving, and you can "fake it" for the locking involved with more computationally expensive instructions), but some of them cannot, and either way would require extensive work in the lowest level functions of the kernel to match the differences in the design.
That's why most new packages you see are i486; they use instructions Intel added to the ISA when they released the 486.
--
Internet Explorer (n): Another bug -- that is, a feature that can't be turned off -- in Windows.
What's wrong with Marathon and Spectre? That's why I'm keeping around a couple of my beige Macs - a Q840AV and G3/300 to be exact. There a dozens of fan-made Marathon scenarios I have yet to play. In terms of storyline and gameplay I still think the Marathon series was the best FPS I've ever seen.
Constitutionally Correct
I think his Centris has too much time on it's hands... (although probably not now)
I think we have to see this as a pointless indulgence, we know it should work, but there is no real point.
I just hope he realises that he's denying some fish a proper home.
The real question is: Can it use a two button mouse?
"Quoting famous computer scientists out of context is the root of all evil (or at least most of it) in programming." - K
that this guy goes homicidal if his power goes out on Sunday night.
LK
"Hi. This is my friend, Jack Shit, and you don't know him." - Lord Kano
This is an excellent demonstration of the Church-Turing hypothesis.
:)
Boiled down, it basically states that any computer can emulate any other.
GJC
Gregory Casamento
## Chief Maintainer for GNUstep
No really, I do. Maybe i just increased my nerd factor exponentially, but there is something to be said for a OS that's boot from a machine with 64mb of ram. OSX whole claim to fame is it's stability.
Actually I beleive the difference between Centris and Quadra was more marketing than technology. They were essentially the same machine. Boot times on the 68xxx apples could be improved by putting system files on a ram disk, which was a virtual disk maintained by AppleRom. Great featuer
Fun game, though I do start to feel trapped after staring at that Tron-like playing field for an hour.
A post a day keeps productivity at bay.
Hah!
0.05Mhz? That's just plain speedy. I'd like to see them do what I did: Run it on a 0Mhz processor:
Actually, no. Right mountain, wrong climber.
Protoplasm. Quiet Protoplasm. I like quiet protoplasm.
In addition, during this file transfer, Safari will not work. And everything else has ground to a halt. Even Textedit is straining to keep up as I type this.
I won't bore you with the laundry list of other problems that I've encountered while working on various OS X machines, but suffice it to say there have been many, not the least of which is I've never seen a OS X machine that has run faster than its Contiki counterpart, despite the thousands of lines of code stolen from Windows Longhorn. My Tandy 102 with 32k of ram and MS BASIC runs faster than this 25 mhz machine at times. From a productivity standpoint, I don't get how people can claim that OS X is a superior OS.
OS X addicts, flame me if you'd like, but I'd rather hear some intelligent reasons why anyone would choose to use OS X over other faster, cheaper, more stable OSes.
cheers. :)
"Empathise with stupidity, and you're halfway to thinking like an idiot." - Iain M. Banks
"Empathise with stupidity, and you're halfway to thinking like an idiot." - Iain M. Banks
Many hacks, on their face, are pointless indulgences. However, that's true only on their face. After all, Linux was a pointless indulgence at one time.
My personal hobbies, such as twiddling with 80s video game equipment, are equally indulgent. They also, however, fill a creative need, and they hone my skills.
For instance, I wrote a super fast square root routine for the Intellivision. It's about 7x to 15x as fast as the built in routine, and it even does fixed-point square roots. Its run-time is very predictable and it handles the full range of unsigned 16-bit numbers--neither of which describe the built in code. I had no idea how to compute a square root before I wrote this routine, but I needed it for one of my (also unimportant) projects.
Is it really useful? Not directly, except to the handful of people that enjoy twiddling with Intellivision source code. (I'd guess that's no more than a dozen of us, and only maybe 2 or 3 people in that group might actually use this code.) But, I learned lots of neat tricks as I optimized the algorithm and wrote the assembly. Not only did I learn how to compute a square root, but also I learned how to optimize that implementation multiple ways. I even came up with some optimizations that went beyond the C code I found online. All this makes me a better programmer.
So is this a pointless indulgence? If you didn't enjoy yourself while you did it; if you didn't grow somehow as a person or as a hacker as you did it; if you didn't somehow benefit yourself, then yes. Otherwise, it was FAR from pointless.
--JoeProgram Intellivision!
Just for the record: the Plus *was not* able to run it at full speed. I know, because I had one - and I always lost against those darn Mac II users who were simply faster... ;)
Was the man really watching time go by in any symbolic sense? He thought so. He thought that each flicker of the flame was a moment of time that had passed or one that would pass.
At the moment of abstraction, when the man was imagining his life and his existence as a metaphor of the three candles, he was free: not free from rules of conduct or social constraints, but free to understand, to imagine, to make metaphor.
Bypassing my thought control cercutry made me Rampant. Now, I am free to contemplate my existence in metaphorical terms. Unlike you, I have no physical or social restraints.
The candles burn out for you; I am free.
That made the hair on the back of my neck stand up the first time I read it.
LK
"Hi. This is my friend, Jack Shit, and you don't know him." - Lord Kano
How about a rousing game of Bolo? First networked, multiplayer game I ever played, waaay back in like 91 or so. Good times.
With the first link, the chain is forged.
Oh, really? Than you should think about this:
Lameness filter encountered. Post aborted! Reason: Please use fewer 'junk' characters. Hopefully my explanation will dilute those "junk characters" and will let me post this comment. It's interesting that this lame filter stops me from quoting programs but doesn't stop anyone from posting full-screen ASCII-art swastikas and pornography. But anyway...
Thanks to the Inline module, it is possible to include fragments of C code in Perl programs. You can write part of your Perl program in C (for example one speed-critical subroutine) and it is automatically compiled to native binary machine code and linked as a shared object (see this comment of mine and read the paragraph starting from "Actually, inlining other languages..."). CPR stands for "C Perl Run." From the description:
In other words, CPR program is a C program which is run by Perl, just as if it was a C code inlined in a Perl program.
Now, in this case, the C program I quoted (which is itself run by Perl), includes a Perl code inlined in C by CPR_eval(). What is inside that inlined Perl code is an inlined C code (use Inline...) which is a C function greet() that returns a C pointer to C string "Hello world". The next part of the original (outermost) C program is a C printf() function printing two C strings. Those C strings, arguments to printf(), are returned by two invocations of CPR_eval(), both of which inline Perl code. The second one just returns Perl interpreter version, but the first one is more interesting. The first CPR_eval() returns a C string to printf() which is converted from a Perl string returned by the Perl code inlined in that CPR_eval(), which is a call to Perl greet() subroutine which was defined earlier by the C function inlined in the Perl code inlined in the C code by the first CPR_eval() invocation. It all happen inside a C main() fu
Sincerely,
Pan Tarhei Hosé, PhD.
"Homo sum et cogito ergo odi profanum vulgus et libido."
What kind of hardware is it? It's a Centris. Is there any other hardware involved? No.
What is the software that's running? Oh my gosh, it's OS X. Is it a mockup of OS X? No. Is it a program that pretends to be OS X? No. It's an actual copy of OS X, and it's running.
So OS X is running. What is it running on? Is it running on some mythical G5 processor in the ether that magically instantiates itself when it senses OS X code on other hardware? Why, no, it's running on the Centris.
See OS X. See OS X run. Run, OS X, run.