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Free Software on a Cheap Computer
Shell writes "Is this the solution to free software on a cheap computer? NetBSD and Yellow Dog Linux have both begun to support the Mac Mini. This article from IBM looks at open source operating system options on this new contender in the embedded PowerPC platform space." From the article: "This article looks at the current state of Linux and NetBSD support on the Mini. If you need all the hardware and options fully supported, these open source options won't do it for you ... yet. But, if all you need is a stable kernel, a C compiler, and network support, the code is high-quality and the price is unbeatable." This is part two in the series. Part One was covered a while back.
Is it possible to get a mini without the apple OS?
If you can't, then whats the point? You've already paid for an OS....
Especially when all of these things ... as well as full hardware support comes with the f*cking computer!.
Ever hear of installing the Developer Tools on your Installation CD?
No offense, I'm a big *BSD supporter, but this article's summary is rediculous.
Computers have been getting cheaper and cheaper. I'm mainly citing PCs, since Macs have always one-upped PCs in price and advertising. Sure, cute little machines are nice.
My point: two years ago I put together a 1.8ghz machine with 512 megs of RAM, decent video card, decent hard-drive, for 300 dollars. No OS included. Toss in some FreeBSD and I'm up and runnning for 300 bucks. So, again, someone please tell me how a 500 dollar computer is news these days? Just because it's a Mac? Just because Joe-sixpack can pick one up and doesn't need to know how to assemble parts? If so, why assume he would give a hoot about NetBSD or Linux?
Man was he ever pissed off when he found out he can't display a movie fullscreen on his nearly two thousand dollar monitor.
Huh? Does it not have hardware scaling? I thought G5 came with a radeon. With almost any accelerating videocard, the CPU is not involved when scaling, which means same performance windowed/fullscreen.
Or is your friend trying to play 1080p/i movie or possibly at obscene framerates.
In that case I demand to know where you got the video.
badness 10000
One possible point---you don't want to pay again, every 12 months or so. Another---you don't want to pay for apps, which can be way more expensive than the cost of the OS anyhow. A third---you want some of the things that are better than in OS X, such as modern X font rendering or Mozilla Firefox. A fourth---you want to be able to repair and upgrade your operating system; better yet, to have those fixes and changes integrated so that everyone can use them. A fifth---you're afraid of vendor lock-in, and want to make sure that your OS and apps are supported into the future. Shall I go on?
I think if I was willing to pay 1.5--2x for Mac hardware, I'd just run OS X. But some folks just like Apple hardware. I don't think the folks who choose to run a free OS on this hardware are insane: they have many viable reasons.
..and some people don't like the archaic x86 platform.
PowerPC is a nice platform.
You're absolutely right. The Dell is cheap, quality-wise, whereas the Mac Mini is just inexpensive.
"If you need all the hardware and options fully supported, these open source options won't do it for you ... yet."
Oh really? Then when?
This page was generated by a Barrel of Circus Midgets, and that is the way I like it!!!
This argument was addressed countless times after the mini's release. You're comparing apples and oranges.
I can't tell my musician friend to go out and buy your Dell and expect to get a free music sequencer installed, along with the rest of the software. He won't even get a Firewire port to use his M-Audio Firewire 410 with. And he won't get OS X instead of Windows XP.
RAM, CD-R, sound card, speakers. They're pretty essential these days. But at that point, you're approaching what it would cost to get a cheap-o Dell...
Who doesn't like free music?
$500 is not cheap for a mac mini CPU box.
$200 would be cheap and about the right price point for a mac mini type box.
That page is talking nonsense. I'm not saying you're wrong, but that's not the way to show it. 32mb of 256mb ram is not a huge difference. Having two separate optical drives is BETTER, it means you can copy discs on the fly. Add in the price for the separate cd burner, it's less than the monitor and keyboard/mouse, so the dell still comes out over $100 cheaper. If you're really worried about the ram, stick a 128mb stick in the dell as well, then the dell has three times the advantage, and it's going to be what, $30-50 for that ram stick? Ignoring the fact that you can't buy a 32mb stick for a reasonable price, the extra video ram in the mini is only worth about $10 more. $334+10+53 for the cd burner means it's still $100+ cheaper. The only other advantage is in software, but you can get all of that free off the internet. The article makes a big fuss about no antivirus, but getting a free scanner is easy as that. If the OS's limitations are a big problem, who cares when you can get a full OS better than either of them for the time it takes you to download, or $5. (Mepis from cheeplinux or similar)
I am trolling
If you can't, then whats the point? You've already paid for an OS
When making decisions about your future actions, you should not take into consideration what you have already spent. That's a sunk cost, and it can only serve to bias your decision. Rather, you should be considering, from where you stand right now, what your best options are for the future. This is why companies will spend millions on building a new facility, only to abandon it one month before completion. They do this because they figure that they will wind up losing more by continuing to dump time and effort into the facility, so what's the point?
If you get more usability, security, performance, or what have you, out of Linux than you do out of MacOS X, then it does not matter whether or not you have already paid for MacOS X. That has nothing to do with what operating system you should be using from this point forward.
An unjust law is no law at all. - St. Augustine
What kind of drivelling crap is this? Fair enough, free software on PPC is damn good stuff, but it not as if Apple have magnanimously made OSS affordable for the common man (no gender bias intended, figure of speech). Happily for us, 'free as in speech' tends to coincide with 'free as in beer', and well-tested, ubiquitous x86 hardware is absurdly cheap.. cost is not a convincing argument for buying a mac mini, since greater functionality can be provided with F/L/OSS at lower cost on an x86 platform.
This post doesn't really represent the article itself all that well.. if you read it (oh wait.. slashdot, remember?), the article dwells more on the stuff that can go wrong when installing Linux/BSD on your mac mini. With a platform like the mac mini, where every one is identical (clock speed excepted), 'can go wrong' should be interpreted as 'will go wrong', unless it involves the user screwing up..
However, the absolute uniformity of the mini may allow the development of a distro specifically for it.. x86 operating systems have to be prepared to deal with all kinds of frequently questionable hardware, whereas a mac-mini-specific distro would have much smaller field to observe, and so could possibly develop a true 'just works' free OS for the platform. Hell, since they're all the same it could be possible to get a binary driver from nvidia and really go to town on the eye-candy (i know, that's the Free aspect wrecked, but would still be pretty cool..)
Of course, given that OSS developers cannot really start work until the machine is in retail, the chances are that such a distro would only really be ready by the time that the machine itself is viewed as 'obsolete', and certainly no longer available in stores.
The point is now Apple has bypassed 2 major choke points with the mac: price and size. A lot of people have wanted to try out a Mac of their own, but they were either too expensive to bother or they didn't want the iMac with it's built-in monitor taking up even more room on their desk. Now with the Mini they can get a Mac for $500 USD (base configuration) and it's small enough to put anywhere on (or under) your desk.
Now, for the non-geeks: not everyone is tech savvy enough to know
a) about mini-itx or Via low-voltage CPUs
b) how to build a machine
c) install and use Linux
Mac's "just work." Someone with no PC experience can just plug the thing in and get it working. The same can't be said about Linux.
Now, as for buying a Mini just to turn it into a Linux box... that's another debate all together.
That "featherbrain" you are making fun of is actually quite smart. Have you actually watched the show? Geeks would actually enjoy the show if they gave it a chance. Carrie is a hacker, but not of machines, but people. The whole show is about her attempt to get in there and figure out how the system we call "relationships" between men and women worked and how to nudge it, move it, and get it to do what we want. There are many parallels between Carrie's methods and conclusions as applied to relationships and those of the early phone hackers (as applied to the phone system) and today's computer hackers.
I was skeptical when I first tried out an episode in my wife's collection. I got hooked once I realized that Carrie, far from a featherbrain, has the dedicated hacker ethos and smarts.
I guess you could say the same about machines that come preinstalled with Windows. Everyone should use the preinstalled OS, it obviously has to be the best one for the machine, it's the one god intended.
Except that computers have different uses, and for some of them Linux is better. I'm not saying it's always better. I think the preinstalled OS usually has better hardware integration (drivers), but not necessarily, and other aspects of the OS may outweigh the driver issues.
Escher was the first MC and Giger invented the HR department.
Debian runs fine on the Mac Mini. Then you can move across all software and scripts from whatever other Debian platforms you've got ... and they just work.
People need to remember that the first article in the series was talking about using the Mini as an embedded development platform. Mac OS X is hardly an embedded OS, so being able to replace it with a more customizable system (i.e., Linux, NetBSD) is a plus, especially if you can make use of the hardware provided in the sexy little package.
Putting a crippled Linux/BSD on a Mini when you have OS X installed is silly: except for the sheer studliness of it go out and buy a cheap x86 box to get your Linux fix.
MacOS X which has 64-bit support. Besides what does it matter since the Mac Mini uses a 32bit processor...
Click here or a puppy gets stomped!
Dell Dimension 4700 Series: Intel® Pentium® 4 Processor 530 w/HT Technology (3GHz, 800FSB)Operating System: Microsoft® Windows® XP Professional Limited Warranty, Services and Support Options: No Extended Service, Support or Ltd Warranty Memory: 256MB DDR2 SDRAM at 400MHz (1x256M) Hard Drive: 80GB Serial ATA Hard Drive (7200RPM) CD or DVD Drive: Single Drive: 48x CD-RW / DVD-ROM Combo Drive Enhanced Software for CD or DVD Burner: RecordNow! Deluxe - Burn, Copy and Label CDs Floppy Drive and Additional Storage Devices: No Floppy Drive Included Monitor: No Monitor Video Cards: Integrated Intel® Graphics Media Accelerator 900 Sound Card: Integrated 5.1 Channel Audio Video Editing: IEEE 1394 Adapter Speakers: No Speaker Option Keyboard: Dell Quietkey® Keyboard Mouse: Dell 2-button scroll mouse Network Interface: Integrated Intel® PRO 10/100 Ethernet Office Productivity Software (Pre-Installed): No Productivity Suite - Corel WordPerfect® word processor only Security Software: No Security Subscription Miscellaneous: Award Winning Service and Support Digital Music: Dell Jukebox PLUS - Rip and burn your CDs faster, print CD labels, and more Digital Photography: Paint Shop Pro® Studio Enhance and restore photos and more Operating System Enhancements: Combo: Microsoft® Plus! for Windows XP and Digital Media Edition Financial Software: No QuickBooks package selected- Includes limited use trial Adobe Software: Adobe® Acrobat® Reader 6.0 Internet Access Services: 6 Months of America Online Membership Included Modem: 56K PCI Data Fax Modem
$926 directly from the Dell site, not some made up reference to a forum price listing.
256MB DDR333 SDRAM - 1 DIMM 80GB Ultra ATA drive Combo Drive Wired Keyboard & Mouse Set - U.S. English 56K v.92 Modem Mac OS X - U.S. English 1.42GHz PowerPC G4
$657.00
This is a much closer comparison. As for the processor being better, that's strictly your uneducated opinion and I doubt that you've ever touched a mini to see just how responsive it is even with a "slower" proc, slower RAM and a slower FSB.
The key always comes down to the software and the Dell deal still doesn't include everything that the Mac gives you.
Who wants to run Linux or BSD Unix on a Mac Mini? People buy a Mac Mini to be a cheap low-end Mac. They actually want to run OSX.
If they wanted to run Linux or BSD Unix, they could buy one of those el cheapo $300USD or lower PC Clone systems. In fact, this is something that Linspire counts on, selling their el cheapo Linspire based systems at Wal-Mart, etc.
The day you find people running Linux or BSD Unix on a Mac Mini, will be the day that Apple sells the Mac Mini sans the OS. The Chicago Cubs have a better chance of winning the World's Series, than people have of Apple selling Mac Minis without an OS.
Remember, Slashdot does not have a -1 disagree moderation, and no, troll, flamebait, and overrated are not substitutes.
Anyone remember The OpenPPC Project? This was something Ralph Giles and I started a few years ago, to follow up on a PPC-based reference board designed by IBM. Unfortunately a parts problem prevented it from ever being produced commercially, despite creation of a commercial company (Pop Computers) to manage the process.
Anyway... while the Apple Mini/OSX solution isn't the same thing philosophically, I'm fairly content that it solves most of the problems for which that project was created: It's Unix, it's cheap, it's PPC.
What it *isn't* is open-source in any real way. As someone who's now more influenced by practical than ideological concerns these days, I'm content.
Tom Geller
That's a sunk cost, and it can only serve to bias your decision. Rather, you should be considering, from where you stand right now, what your best options are for the future.
If you get more usability, security, performance, or what have you, out of Linux than you do out of MacOS X, then it does not matter whether or not you have already paid for MacOS X.
This is true, but the article title implied that the reason for installing Linux was that it was free. If that means free as in beer, then it's a specious argument, precisely because the cost of OS X has already been paid: you cannot save money by installing Linux.
Indeed, if your time has monetary value, as everyone does, then taking the time to install Linux in fact adds cost.
I stole this sig from someone cleverer than me.
So what, MacOS is a decent OS. Who cares? It only runs on Macs anyways. The great thing about Linux and other open systems is that they aren't platform dependant.
You know, some people actually LIKE Linux systems, and they prefer to use them on whatever the hardware of the day is, be it a G5 or an Opteron or an Itanium. At the end of the day, you're still using your trusted and open OS, which you'll more then likely be able to run on the next system out the door by whatever company.
Don't you get it? Vendor lock-in sucks, I don't care if it IS the proverbial underdog that's doing it.
- It's not the Macs I hate. It's Digg users. -