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.

[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.

[HuguesT]

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

Re:Just hardware, no apple OS.

[swimmar132]

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

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:Ah, but...

[winkydink]

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

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...