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Load Linux on the Mac mini

Posted by timothy on from the two-great-tastes dept.

An anonymous reader writes "The Mac mini is an ideal low-cost, high-performance PowerPC development platform for numerous applications. Learn how to install and configure Linux on the mini. Future articles will add the software required to make it into a stand-alone multimedia appliance."

9 of 198 comments (clear)

  1. iBook by the_rev_matt · · Score: 2, Informative

    I haven't done it on my mini yet, but I did install YDL 4 on my iBook last week. It was the easiest linux install I've ever done. If you've used any version of Red Hat > 8.0 then YDL will be very familiar. It's basically a PPC port of Fedora Core 3.

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  2. Re:Some statements need addressing. by Scarblac · · Score: 5, Informative

    You cannot compare a G4 at 1.25GHz to a x86 at 1.25 GHz. It just makes no sense whatsoever.

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  3. Re:Further software ? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 1, Informative

    RTFA:
    Why Linux?
    This series uses the Linux operating system for a couple of reasons. The foremost reason is that it is a design goal for this project to be entirely open source. This goal cannot be fulfilled on top of Mac OS...

    (and there's the modularity of linux et al...)

  4. Re:Further software ? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 1, Informative

    Oh, and unlike OS X, you can upgrade things like Apache separately from the core OS.

    Nothing stopping you from doing this on OS X.

  5. G4 1.25GHz is about Pentium 4 1.5 GHz by AHumbleOpinion · · Score: 2, Informative

    You cannot compare a G4 at 1.25GHz to a x86 at 1.25 GHz. It just makes no sense whatsoever.

    However you can compare a Pentium 4 1.5GHz to a G4 1.25. PowerPC CPUs tend to get a 25-30% performance improvement over their x86 counterparts. The applications that are well tailored to a RISC architecture are few and far between. If you are running one great, but all folks should really expect is the 25-30% boost.

  6. someone ALWAYS asks this by ArbitraryConstant · · Score: 2, Informative
    • Because it has software MacOS X doesn't. Linux and MacOS X are not source code compatible, just close enough that porting isn't that hard most of the time.
    • Note that "most software" being ported doesn't cut it, because we might be talking about in-house stuff.
    • When you're testing software, it has to be in the environment that it will run on in production. If it's expected to run on Linux PPC, you test it on Linux PPC. To make it portable, you need to mess around with the preprocessor and the code that runs isn't the same on the two platforms, so a test on MacOS X is not good enough. Also the libraries aren't quite the same, and some of the system calls are different.
    • The mini is one of the cheapest PowerPC boxes you can get new, so there is actually a reason to use it for testing. PowerMacs are some of the cheapest 64-bit PowerPC boxes you can get.
    • It doesn't matter that you don't get support for the airport and graphics when the thing is sitting on a shelf in the server room.
    • it's cool
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  7. Re:Some statements need addressing. by adam1101 · · Score: 2, Informative

    > You cannot compare a G4 at 1.25GHz to a x86 at 1.25 GHz. It just makes no sense whatsoever.

    Very true, different x86 processors vary wildly in performance. A 1.25Ghz Pentium-M beats the crap out of a 1.25Ghz P4 or a 1.25Ghz Via C3.

  8. Re:Further software ? by ArbitraryConstant · · Score: 2, Informative

    "PF?"

    It's the firewall maintained by the OpenBSD project. The other BSDs now support it because it's more powerful than the IPFW and IPF firewalls that have been used historically on the BSDs. MacOS uses IPFW with a GUI. It's perfectly good for a desktop machine, but it's not hard to imagine someone wanting more on a server.

    That's just an example, but there are other reasons one might pick OpenBSD over the alternatives. Same goes for Linux, MacOS X, just about every OS out there.

    --
    I rarely criticize things I don't care about.
  9. Re:This boggles the mind... by argent · · Score: 2, Informative

    I'd love to know an x86 that comes in the same form factor as the mini with comparable performance.

    "paperback"? Well, maybe, if you count something half the size of a phonebook as a "paperback". But, yeh, it's pretty small thanks to its laptop technology. So let's see what you can get in the PC world if you use similar techniques...

    Googling around it took me about a minute to find a 1.13 GHz Pentium III laptop for $530. That's a bit slower than a mini, but not by much, and that includes a display, keyboard, and mouse ... and wireless.