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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.
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 :-/
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!
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...
If "has done the ultimate" equates to "has smoked crack" then, sure, it's the ultimate.
Laws are for people with no friends.
"I sure hope the website isnt being hosted on it"
Considering it won't boot for another week, this truly must be a story from the Mysterious Future!
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.
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.
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.
...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.
I started to, but it'll take me 52.6 years to finish imagining it.
A more accurate comparison would be to run XP on a 486/25 with 64 MB of ram. Of course, XP will probably refuse to run on a 486 at all, so you'll need a 686 emulator running on the 486, and you'll need at least 128 MB of ram (so the emulator will have to use virtual memory to emulate the extra 64 MB + that used in overhead.) I have no reason to expect that if the emulator is good that this won't work.
It'll probably run faster than MacOS X on the Centris too. After all, OS X needs a PPC, which is totally different than a 680x0, so it needs to be emulated at the lowest level. But a 686 isn't very different from a 486, so an emulator could take advantage of this.
That this works at all is not really a testament to the robustness of OS X, but instead a testament to the robustness of the PearPC emulator. As far as OS X is concerned, it's running on a PPC box. Just a very slow one ...
Really, the reason it was posted to /. is because they think it'll take a week to boot. If it booted in an hour, we wouldn't be nearly as amused :)
Hell, my Apollo 3000 with 8 MB of ram took about 30 minutes from power on until it was booted up enough for me to start an xterm. All thanks to the memory-grubbing power of HP VUE on top of DomainOS -- no emulation there!
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
Hah!
0.05Mhz? That's just plain speedy. I'd like to see them do what I did: Run it on a 0Mhz processor:
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.