Slashdot Mirror
Load Linux on the Mac mini
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."
'Cause I think that the Mac Mini would be an excellent MythTV frontend. Of course, there are some binaries for OSX already, but they aren't optimized for HDTV yet. I have absolutely no idea, but perhaps linux development for this project would be ahead of the curve? (Would probably take someone with more knowledge than me to answer this one. :) )
"What do you think?" "I think 'What, do you think?!'"
I initially bought my 12" iBook G3 to install Linux on it. I chose for the iBook because of the size/battery life/price. It was going to be my first mac, I didn't even work with one before.
After all, I did install Linux on it (YDL), but I didn't use it for longer than an hour! Before that time I used Linux as the OS on my PC. It's just because the sharm of OS X I didn't use it.
Now, 1,5 years later, I bought a Mac mini and I'm not planning to install Linux on it... I'm totally OS X'ed.
Plus add the fact that important stuff like Airport Extreme won't work.
Actually, if the G4's IPC is similar to the Pentium III, then the G4 is far, far better than an equivalently clocked Pentium 4. The Pentium 4 has one of the worst IPCs of all time.
The Pentium III (especially Tualatin) has a much, much higher IPC than the Pentium 4. In fact, the Pentium 4 was ridiculed early on because the Pentium 4 was easily outperformed by Pentium IIIs that ran at hundreds of MHz lower. Pentium 4s only started outperforming Pentium IIIs when Intel started ramping up the P4's clock speed like mad, pushing it past 2 GHz in a few months, and past 3 GHz not much later than that.
Also, the Pentium M is very similar to the Pentium III when it comes to architecture--the PM is basically just a jacked-up PIII with lots of cache and lower power consumption. Right now, we have 1.8 GHz Pentium Ms beating the crap out of 3 GHz Pentium 4s. Why? The P4's NetBurst architecture just plain blows.
Although I do agree that the grandparent is wrong--it's just that the only time a G4-to-x86 comparison is valid is when you're comparing a G4 to a Pentium M or Athlon 64 (especially the Pentium M, as the G4 is a 32-bit CPU).
I support the Center for Consumer Freedom
There are those of us who bought a mini 3 months ago and don't think that forking out 25% of the original system price for 10.4 is reasonable. So I am going to put Linux on that partition I reserved for 10.4 instead.
"Since IBM is hosting this article, I'm not that surprised that this was done. IBM has always seen Apple as a threat, not an ally."
r ar y/pa-macmini1/?ca=dgr-mw01macminip1
I'm sure you can explain the series of "Using Mac OS X with your Mac mini" articles at IBM then. They don't even mention IBM's commercial compiler and use Apple's provided GCC version.
http://www-128.ibm.com/developerworks/power/lib
"How come no one has figured out how to install Linux on an iPod yet?"
http://www.ipodlinux.org/Main_Page -- they have. A long time ago.
499.00 USD (price of mac mini)
-129.00 USD (price of OS X)
-79.00 USD (price of iLife 05)
=291 USD
Does anyone really believe that Apple is making a lot of money on the minis? Show me an X86 machine with similar features/form factor for anywhere near that cheap.
Jesus was a compassionate social conservative who called individuals to sin no more.