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."

Comments

Linux

[turtled]

Linux keeps on running. I just installed it on my microwave!

Meant to be funny... not trolling.

Re:Linux

[MarkGriz]

"If you have to spell it out like that your comment might not be as funny as you think ;-)"

If you have to spell it out like that it's because some moderators might not be as bright as you'd expect;-)"

Re:Linux

[Elranzer]

He's right. It's NetBSD that you install on your microwave. Duh.

Further software ?

[rokzy]

what is linux going to offer over OS X since you get OS X with a Mini anyway?

plus does linux have support for AirTunes? and will it have support for the possible video streaming over AirPort Express that was hinted at in the discussion of iTunes 4.8? I don't know but I don't think so.

Re:Further software ?

[dasunt]

what is linux going to offer over OS X since you get OS X with a Mini anyway?

Some of us prefer linus to Mac OS X. In my case, I'm a bizarre, twisted individual that prefers FVWM to any other window manager, likes mutt, slrn and vim, and I don't want to spend hours on end playing with fink and trying to mimic a linux install when a true linux install is just a few minutes away with the right distro and boot CD.

Plus, it annoys the mac zealots. ;)

Sorry guys, while MacOS X is a fine OS, its not all things to everyone.

Re:Further software ?

[TheRaven64]

I have a Mac Mini in a co-lo centre, running OpenBSD. For me, it was a very cheap way of getting a co-located host (the mini is a lot smaller than a 1U server, and so hosting was cheap). In a headless box, most of the benefits of OS X are lost (assuming I am too cheap to pay for OS X server - which costs more than the Mini itself).

I can't really see a reason for installing Linux. The article mentioned that YellowDog was `lightweight', at only 4CDs. OpenBSD is a 4MB boot CD and then you just download the parts you need (around 100MB for the base system). This gives you a secure server, which can easily be administrated remotely. Oh, and unlike OS X, you can upgrade things like Apache separately from the core OS.

Re:Further software ?

[Elranzer]

what is linux going to offer over OS X since you get OS X with a Mini anyway?

The inability to run Macromedia Flash content, for one.

Re:Further software ?

[grotgrot]

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.

Re:Further software ?

[Jeff DeMaagd]

It isn't as if OS X 10.3 will spontaneously delete itself from the hard drive because you didn't buy 10.4.

10.3 is still a fine OS, most of 10.4's features are relatively minor updates anyway, save for Dashboard and Spotlight. There are some issues that need to be worked out with 10.4 anyway.

Re:Further software ?

[exp(pi*sqrt(163))]

This attempt to seem l33t 'n' all might impress the neighbors, but if you can't figure out how to install fvwm, mutt, slrn and vim under MacOSX then I suggest you take up a hobby like flower arranging instead.

Re:Further software ?

[jellomizer]

Well I found that Linux is well geared to developing applience like applications. Take a Distribution strip it down. And make it do what you want and make it do it quite well. A firewall, A spam filter, A way to do remote backups. Or just a multimedia presitation unit. OS X as a desktop operating system is Great, and it is Good for a General Server too. But if you want to a more detailed workhorse then Linux does the job a lot better. Say you want to make a Multimedea system. Install Linux have it open up X-Windows and use your application say Firefox without the menus being displayed full screen. No window managers just firefox. So you have an easy to make multimedea station. Or better yet if you make your multimedea station software as a live CD. You just pop in the CD and boot the Mac. and bingo it is up and running make as many copies as you want and have it spread across your company stores.

Re:Further software ?

[nuggetman]

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

Yeah. It really pissed me off to no end that all those installs of Panther just totally stopped working at 6pm on April 29th

Re:Further software ?

[dasunt]

I have no problems with installing fvwm, mutt, slrn, and vim under MacOS X, nor would I have any problems with installing the same programs under windows.

Heck, I could even emulate OS X under windows and install those applications under the emulated OS X interface.

But trying to turn MacOS into linux is as silly as trying to turn a Volkswagon Jetta into a 1 ton truck. With enough time and energy, it is possible, but why not buy a truck in the first place?

As for l33tness, I run mutt and slrn because both are fine apps, with scoring capabilities, and both will let me edit using vim (and both will run under GNU screen). I use vim because its one of the best editors in existance. I use fvwm because it allows me to do stuff such as map ctrl-j ctrl-k to switch to the page with the nearest rxvt terminal (or open an rxvt terminal if it can't find any).

I'm sorry if you think that the only reason to run certain applications/linux is to be l33t.

Re:Further software ?

[ArbitraryConstant]

"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.

Re:Further software ?

[geoffspear]

Why "should" an application quit when you select "Close Window"?

An application that does so is broken. Your statement is like saying "an application should save my file when I print."

WTF?

[baldass_newbie]

Why would anyone waste hardware and time doing this?

Not to be a troll, but you've got BSD running under the hood with a clean UI, so uh, what do you gain besides bragging rights?

Or am I missing something? I did read the fine article and I see they want their project to be OpenSource, but THEY ALREADY PAID FOR THE LICENSE!!!!

Re:WTF?

[Mad_Rain]

'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. :) )

Nothing New

[Horrortaxi]

People have been installing Yellow Dog on Macs for a long time. This is nothing new.

Since it doesn't support the built in wifi or bluetooth I'm not sure why this would be such a good idea though.

Re:Some statements need addressing.

[rokzy]

what you said may be factually true, but you still miss the point completely.

you even quote the relevant sentence yourself but go on to ignore the most important word: PowerPC.

plus if you RTFA it's about the Mini being good because of its small size etc. so all your points about cost are worth fuck-all unless you can find an x86 machine with the same size and aesthetics. any retard can order a tower peecee from Dell. we didn't need you to point that out.

iBook

[the_rev_matt]

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.

Re:Some statements need addressing.

[Scarblac]

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

Linux on Mac

[Thijs van As]

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.

Re:This boggles the mind...

[metamatic]

Paying the absurd premium for Apple hardware just to rip the already-beautiful OS off of it and install *nix?

Absurd premium? No doubt you'll post links to equivalent non-Apple machines that are significantly cheaper. Something like a complete fanless mini-ITX system in a Mac Mini size box, for $300, right? Or are you just bullshitting?

Also: Mac OS X is Unix.

(But not necessarily UNIX(TM))

Re:This boggles the mind...

[Palshife]

Ya know, some of us dual boot ;) We can use that VTEC when we want and then switch back to 8 cylinders with a keystroke. Ditching OS X is a travesty, but nothing should prevent me from using Linux on the desktop when I really want to.

Re:Some statements need addressing.

[Anonymous Coward]

(G4 at 1.25Ghz) != (x86 at 1.25Ghz)

Hey I just did

Re:Some statements need addressing.

[Anonymous Coward]

I'd like to take this opportunity to warn that the first one of you knuckleheads who uses the word "boxen" is gonna get a smack in the head.

Thank you. Please carry on.

Load Linux on the Mac Mini

[wolf31o2]

1. Download Gentoo 2005.0 for PPC
2. Boot Gentoo 2005.0 for PPC
3. Follow Gentoo Handbook for PPC

How exactly is this news? Is it really that hard to use other distributions on the Mini?

Re:Load Linux on the Mac Mini

[wolf31o2]

Not having a Mini myself, I was asking a serious question.

Is it really so hard to install Linux on a Mini compared to any other Mac that it deserves its own article?

I could care less what you think about Gentoo. However, you made your position quite clear when you immediately assumed that I was spouting some pro-Gentoo stance and trying to detract from other distributions. Whether I am a Gentoo developer or not doesn't change the simple fact that I asked a simple question, to which I would really like to hear an answer rather than some baseless nonesense being spouted off by an obvious Gentoo detractor that self-admittedly has never even tried the distribution.

Re:This boggles the mind...

[ItMustBeEsoteric]

Just to remind you, the Mini is pretty far from absurdly priced. They start at around $500 (US).

Re:Some statements need addressing.

[Quattro Vezina]

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).

G4 1.25GHz is about Pentium 4 1.5 GHz

[AHumbleOpinion]

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.

You've got it completely backwards

[Dan Ost]

Sorry, but I don't get you people. Who the fuck cares what "window manager" is running? Do you spend all your time playing with your window manager or do you run software to actually accomplish something productive?

You've got it backwards. Those of use who care about window managers do so
because we want to minimize the pain of working with a window manager
so that we can be more productive.

I use FVWM because I can configure it to stay out of my way as much as possible
so that I can work in the fashion most natural to me.

Re:You've got it completely backwards

[aristotle-dude]

Uh, the amount of time you are going to spend interacting with the window manager should be minimal compared to using the applications. If you are spending an inordinate amount of time interacting directly with the window manager, then there is something wrong with your environment.

I don't see how Aqua get's in your way.

Re:Think...

[Chucker23N]

"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."

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/libr ar y/pa-macmini1/?ca=dgr-mw01macminip1

"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.

someone ALWAYS asks this

[ArbitraryConstant]

• 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

Re:Some statements need addressing.

[adam1101]

> 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.

Re:Next up

[Winterblink]

I don't know. Why did you read it?

Re:This boggles the mind...

[argent]

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.

Why would you want to do that :P

[core]

There's already two functional Unix platforms that supports all of the Mac mini hardware.. That's MacOS X and Darwin (F/OSS). Most useful linux apps will compile without trouble on MacOS X, if they aren't already available via the excellent Fink project.

Cartoon miniature golf for Mac: http://www.funpause.com/gardengolf/

Apple Tax on a mini?

[aristotle-dude]

Apple Tax? Are you sure they are not giving OSX "free" with the machine?

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.