Installing Fedora Core 4 on the Mac mini

Tammy Fox writes "The Mac mini is all the rave. Discover how to install the soon-to-be-released Fedora Core 4 on this tiny desktop appliance, including new features in Fedora Core 4 to support the new hardware."

Comments

Re:The article leaves out one detail...

[fyngyrz]

I can see the actual state of affairs, instead of just what Apple's marketing wants me to see. Rest assured, I'd let you point the current state of affairs out if you knew what it was. Since you clearly don't, however:

1. If the GPU doesn't have enough oomph to do something, then by all means, load the CPU with the task. Don't just make it unavailable to Mini users. I'm speaking here of some of the effects like "ripple" that, if I understand correctly, are not available on the Mini. I am most certainly not "confusing hardware support with what the hardware can support." If the mini requires the hardware of the CPU to be used for some things where the hardware of the GPU is used in other machines, fine -- then I'm looking for that specific support. Especially from a company you want to characterize as a hardware company (a characterization that I most profoundly disagree with, more on that in a bit.)
2. If you have to go to a "linux like" level and configure Apache, for instance, then the support for Mac users is considerably different, now isn't it? On the other hand, under Linux, you're going to have GUI configuration tools and no one is going to be saying you can't use them because you didn't buy this or that. Which is where the advantage comes in. With linux, you get the goodies, all of them, whatever they are. And that's no small thing. With the Mac, you get a crippled system or a system with everything, depending on what you pay. Which is certainly not consumer friendly, re your #5. As far as my comfort level goes, I'm awesomely comfortable, thanks for your concern. I'm not talking about me here, I'm speaking of Apple's general market, which isn't me -- it's people who need GUI based tools, and for them, linux is going to do a better job because those tools are becoming more sophisticated every day (I'm alpha testing a GUI/wizard based Apache configurator right now that is just awesome, in fact -- it even handles SSL certs and configuration, a sore spot for Apache.) Linux isn't just about the command line anymore, and it hasn't been since about... red hat 9 or so. Perhaps earlier. RH9 is the earliest server system I've got around here that can be managed entirely via GUI, anyway.
3. OS X is not Linux. OS X is derived from something else. It's important to keep that in mind, as there are consequences. You will run into many, many things that OS X will not do out of the box, or easily even if you grab a project, such as compile something like Midnight Commander because, as it isn't linux and (apparently, correct me if I'm wrong, of course) as it has GPL-related licensing conflicts, the requisite environment isn't there though it is there on just about any linux distribution you can imagine.
4. Apple is not a hardware company. If they were, they'd be dead. That's because they have, since time immemorial, sold inferior hardware. Right on back to the Apple II, when they used a crappy 6502 instead of (for instance) a 6800 or a z80, or later a 6809, which was an awesome 8-bit MPU, probably the best ever made. Apple's PPC designs have been (a lot) slower than x86 based hardware since they saw the light of day and still are to this day, even with the dual G5 at the latest and greatest MHz. And don't even start with "MHz != MHz", because that's a load of FUD itself. For instance, my 3 GHz x86 linux machine runs ray traces -- regardless of the scene being modeled -- in just the appropriate bit less than half the time that my 1.42 GHz Mini does. Compiled from source, using GCC. I wrote the ray tracer from scratch; I know it's a pretty decent computing task mix. That clock-speed/time-taken relationship stays the same no matter if I do an integer ray trace or a float or a double, too. When software==software, MHz==MHz, pretty much.

   Then we can look at other Apple hardware for examples of what a bad hardware company they make. Consider one of the newest Apple mouse efforts. One button, as per usual and still clueless as ever.

Re:The article leaves out one detail...

[ErikZ]

2) There is no distinction between what machines can be servers and what cannot...

Then why do only the Xserves have ECC RAM?

3) You provide the most piss poor reasons to run linux I have ever heard. OS X can do everything in a server capacity that linux does, as such there is no reason to run linux on the mac

I've done VNC to a Fedora Desktop and a OS/X desktop. Just because OS/X *can* do it, doesn't mean it's any good at it. To sum "You don't have to install linux on a Mac, but there are some things that Linux can do better."

4) Apple is hardly going to care that people want to run linux on their hardware, because you already paid them for their hardware. Repeat after me: "Apple is a HARDWARE company." The fact they make good software doesn't change that.

Oooook. Then why charge 125$ for a *software* upgrade? Seems that they're making a good chunk of change from that. I bought a Mac Mini to try out OS/X. It certainly wasn't for the hardware.

For a hardware company, they sure farm out a lot of their hardware to be created/produced by othe people. It's almost as if they just collect all the parts and build them into a computer, which they sell. Repeat after me, "Apple is a COMPUTER company."

5) Apple isn't consumer friendly? They replace non functional components on the spot in their stores,

The stores going out of business because Apple is no longer cutting them deals?

they perform the os upgrades for you preserving yoru data, and take your expensive toys and provide you new ones when they break or your battery dies, how are they not consumer friendly?

And there we sum it up in one word from your mouth. Toys. Apple computers are shiny expensive toys.