Terra Soft Offers Linux-booting iPods, FW Drives

Kai Staats of Terra Soft writes "We are pleased to now offer support for bootable iPods and FireWire drives, enabling a highly portable Linux on PowerPC environment." Note that this is about booting a Macintosh into Linux, not running Linux on the iPod.

Comments

Just hardware, no apple OS.

[ClickWir]

Torvald's response came quickly and succinctly. "My main machine these days is a dual 2GHz G5 (aka PowerPC 970) - it's physically a regular Apple Mac, although it obviously only runs Linux, so I don't think you can call it a Mac any more ;)" he said.

Re:Just hardware, no apple OS.

[JabberWokky]

Wine does not work on a non-intel system. It doesn't handle different opcodes, only a different API. There are solutions for running Windows on PPC, both closed and open source, but Wine is not one of them.

--
Evan

Re:Just hardware, no apple OS.

[nickos]

Linux has always been designed for the x86 platform first and then ported to other platforms later. That said, PowerPC has a much nicer architecture than x86 (heck, almost anything is better than x86 - the only thing in the x86's favour is that commodity PCs use it). Also, if you're looking at running Linux on a laptop, PPC based machines tend to have a better battery life for their level of performance...

Re:Just hardware, no apple OS.

[CritterNYC]

Wow, that's pretty good.

And eleven hours is amazing. How do you get that?

That laptop you mentioned is double the cost of an iBook though.

That Sony VGN-T150 is quite a different animal than anything Apple offers. It uses an Ultra Low Voltage Penitum M running at 1.1GHz. That's how it gets 6 to 11 hours of battery life with the extended-life battery.

The closest you could get with an Apple would be the 12-inch Powerbook with a Super Drive at $1700. The Sony runs between $1900 and $2000. But it's only 3.1 lbs compared to the Powerbook's 4.6 lbs and the battery life it gets is quite amazing. (even compared to the Powerbook's "up to 5 hours")

Of course, we're really comparing apples to oranges here (no pun intended) as these are very different machines for different needs.

last to get ports

[SethJohnson]

It's cool that you brought up the port issue. I'll expound on my frustration with linux on PPC...

I ran a webserver on PPC linux (SuSE) for a few years. The SuSE folks did a good job porting all the standard linux apps and packages over from x86. But as I sought to customize my server with special CGI packages that did stuff like photo galleries and log analysis, I would run into roadblocks because necessary libs weren't available in PPC rpms. Sure, I could try to compile them myself, but in most attempts at this, I'd run into all kinds of compile errors for which I have no knowledge of how to troubleshoot.

Eventually I scrapped my PPC server and switched to an old dual Celeron x86 box running Mandrake. It was very nice to have everything readily available for my distro.

At the point that this server dies, I intend to replace it with my antiquated B/W G3 450mhz box. I see more development focusing on Mac OS X PPC than linux PPC as I think there is a significantly larger userbase on Mac OS X than linux PPC. So, unlike mr Torvaldis, I'll probably run my system (server) off Mac OS X at that point. My desktop will remain Mac OS X.

Re:last to get ports

[iamacat]

I hate to say it, but try Gentoo. The initial setup is crazy, but this is the end of dependency problems. You get up-to-date versions of every library, not something distro maintainers neglected for a while. Then in your system configuration file you can disable support for unwanted components, like java or kde, which reduces number of dependencies or potential problems to begin with. Finally, configure can adopt a package to a far wider range of systems, versions and presence/absence of specific software than a binary package can handle.

If you don't specifically need Linux kernel, fink might be an easier option. You get access to the same packages as gentoo without, but setup on top of OSX is trivial. You can still run your server without UI if you want. Edit /etc/ttys and replace loginwindow with getty.

You're speaking of Apple hardware.

[TheLittleJetson]

Saying that a Mac without OS X isn't a Mac just isn't true. There's more to a Mac than software.

Linus' claim is correct. A Mac without OS X is not truly a Mac, as it doesn't offer the full Mac experience. However, that doesn't mean that Apple's hardware is run-of-the-mill. It's quite superb, as you've pointed out, and there are other non-mac examples of this (iPods, Airport Base Stations [I think the express is a really cool product], we've even got a few LaserWriters still in use at my work).

I think this is one of the legitimate reasons why you SHOULD run Linux on a Mac. He's fricken Linus, man! It's hard to do what he does (work on Linux) without using Linux. He's made the choice for real, practical reasons. It frustrates me that several in the slashdot crowd want to run Linux on Apple hardware because they think there's some lame/n00b stigma attached to OS X. I've said it plenty of times before, and I'll say it again: OS X run's the majority of unixoid apps just fine. It's the best-fit for Apple hardware; the level of integration between hardware/software is going to be very difficult to reproduce with Linux, especially on a notebook. Don't make the switch unless you have stuff that needs to be done under Linux that simply CAN NOT be done under OS X...

Honest journalism

[GrouchoMarx]

At least for a change they're not trying to pretend this is a real article instead of a commercial. They're being very obvious that it's an unpaid advertisement. That's an improvement for Slashdot of late.

Sad.

Re:Availability?

[pete-classic]

3. You may copy and distribute the Program (or a work based on it, under Section 2) in object code or executable form under the terms of Sections 1 and 2 above provided that you also do one of the following:

a) Accompany it with the complete corresponding machine-readable source code, which must be distributed under the terms of Sections 1 and 2 above on a medium customarily used for software interchange; or,

So, they only have to give it to "members" or whomever they provide binaries to.

-Peter

Old world macs don't support OS X (officially)

[johnny cashed]

Of course, Old world macs aren't firewire bootable either. But YDL is very fast on old world macs compared to OS X via Xpostfacto on old world hardware. (which is still good if not aged hardware) I'm currently running OS X on a G3 upgraded Powercomputing clone (thanks to Xpostfacto). at 420Mhz, it is slow compared to YDL on a Beige G3 266. So it is either OS 9 or YDL on old hardware. It is getting harder to get modern web browser features on OS 9.

not the only firewire trick with the firmware

[moosesocks]

the firmware loaded onto macs nowindays is quite impressive in that it can do all sorts of things with firewire. booting off of a firewire device is one of the more tame 'tricks' it can do.

OpenFirmware can also make your mac pretend that it's a firewire hard drive. Connect the mac to another machine (another mac or a PC that can read HFS+ partitions), and boot up the machine while holding down the T key. Before the OS loads, the computer enters target disk mode, and every hard drive attached to that computer appears as a normal firewire device to the other computer.

I don't see why this wouldn't work with an ext3 or ReiserFS partition... it's a VERY useful trick for restoring a trashed system (which in all honsety rarely happens in Mac OS, but is rather common on Windows and Linux if you're compiling your own kernels and such)

this will kill iPods

[a1291762]

Their hard drives aren't designed for booting OSes from. Too much seeking will fry them.

External Firewire Drives Too!

[ryan_fung]

From TFA:
"Terra Soft has created a hybrid Yellow Dog Linux v4.0.1 #1 Install CD that incorporates the changes required to install to an iPod or FireWire drive from the graphical installer. This hybrid is immediately available through YDL.net Enhanced accounts at www.ydl.net."

Now I can play around with Linux on PPC without touching my current setup! Great!

Now the problem becomes: how long before the new ISOs become available to the public?