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.

[KZigurs]

Wise remark. Like it or not - apple hw, without max os x isn't a mac.

It's just another linux machine with that horrible X thing on it. :P

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.

[RevAaron]

Wise remark. Like it or not - apple hw, without max os x isn't a mac.

It's just another linux machine with that horrible X thing on it. :P

Like it or not, but that isn't the case.

Recently, I've been considering buying a new laptop. I last had an iBook G3/500, recently bequethed to my girlfriend, with me using a PDA/handheld as my main computer for the last year or so. So, thinking about getting another full laptop, I've been shopping around. But since I've had my fill of OS X, I was looking at PCs too, since I'd probably be fine on a PC running Windows or Linux. But I keep coming back to the Macs. With the quality of hardware, the size/weight factor it's hard to find a notebook of comparable price, one that isn't a big piece of junk.

Saying that a Mac without OS X isn't a Mac just isn't true. There's more to a Mac than software. Most folks who think so have never used a Mac, not for any long period of time. Similarily, a PC running OS X isn't a Mac. Maybe an x86 machine produced by Apple could make it as one, though.

Re:Just hardware, no apple OS.

[lowrydr310]

Is there anything better about running Linux on a PowerPC based system as opposed to an x86 system? Do people really go out and spend big bucks on Apple hardware just to run Linux?

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.

[HuguesT]

Wintel hardware is like US TV. More than a hundred channels, and nothing on.

Re:Just hardware, no apple OS.

[wealthychef]

It's just another linux machine with that horrible X thing on it. :P

Troll-bait aside, as a Mac user running OS X at work and at home, I use X11 all the time. The only problem with OS X's windowing system, Aqua, is that it does not support remote windows. With "that horrible X thing," I can and routinely do open graphical windows spawned by applications on other machines running totally different operating systems. It is the only technology out there that does that that I have ever heard of. Even between macs, try opening iTunes on your home machine from your work machine. X11 is a useful application, not horrible at all.

Re:Just hardware, no apple OS.

[swimmar132]

Can you get 5+ hours on the Pentium M laptops?

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.

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...

Ah, but...

[PornMaster]

Is this how Linus boots his Mac?

Re:Ah, but...

[winkydink]

No, that would be a separate article. Anything Linus does is a separate article.

Woah!

[Anonymous Coward]

"Terra Soft Solutions(R), Inc., the leading developer of integrated PowerPC Linux solutions"

Woah! Leading developer of integrated PowerPC Linux solutions. That's impressive! I wonder if there is a second place?

Re:My kid's lemonade stand needs more traffic

[DrLZRDMN]

If it runs Linux.

Maybe a highly portable Mac

[MBraynard]

My flatmates powerbook blew out the harddrive. In order to do it on the cheap and still make the machine useful, he is running OSX from his Ipod.

Re:Honest Question

[javaxman]

Setting aside the "because I can" and "because it's Linux" arguments, what is the benefit of running YDL instead of OS X on one's Mac?

Setting aside those two arguments ( which are fairly compeling, but we'll set them aside since you say so ) there is only one scenario I can think of where I'd run Linux on *my* Mac, but it's entirely likely. I currently use a Mac at home. What if, next month, I get a gig programming in a Linux environment? Am I going to go out and buy a whole new machine, or am I going to install Linux on my existing hardware?

If I can install Linux on my existing hardware, I'm going to. But I'm not going to want to boot my machine that way all the time, because OS X has a good number of apps that I use ( for non-work purposes ) which don't exist ( really ) under Linux, and I'm not sure the wife and 3-year-old are ready to make the switch ot Linux.

So doing the external-hard-drive thing would be neat. And using something as tiny as an iPod to carry my entire Linux world around between home and work? Even cooler.

Instead of buying a new mobo for my outdated PC that's been sitting idle for years now, I can buy an iPod, and maybe even write it off! Super-cool.

As for the market? It's probably not huge, but does it need to be? I thought OSS was about having options, not about having the biggest install base...

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)

When Will the "Make it Boot Linux" Madness Stop?

[windowpain]

I left a ham sandwich on my desk today and forgot about it. When I got back three geeks were working to make it boot Linux.

Re:Honest journalism

[Atzanteol]

Company 'foo' offers new product isn't news? Okay, no more "Apple farts, smells like roses" articles, "Intel releases newest chip" articles, or any new products what-so-ever...

Do you really want to be stuck with stories only about "I got my X to run Linux!" articles and "How do I search the internet" ask slashdot posts?