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

FYI

[flood6]

Here's a related story from the 11th on an IBM article with instructions on installing Yellow Dog on an mini.

Re:The article leaves out one detail...

[Anonymous Coward]

You can enter the login name >console at the login prompt, and it'll dump you to a text-only login

yes, that's

>console

with the > and all

Re:The article leaves out one detail...

[Chucker23N]

"Options for Bluetooth® and Airport® Extreme exist, however the latter will not work on Linux."

"the Mac mini supports three options: wired Ethernet, wireless Airport Extreme, and Bluetooth. Wired Ethernet gets automatically configured, either via DHCP or static IP, via the system-config-network tool. Airport Extreme, however, sports the Broadcom chipset, where open source drivers are non-existent at present (and there's no reason the believe that they will ever exist)."

How does the article leave this detail out?

Re:Why?

[Chucker23N]

The form factor itself is a major selling point. The thing is *tiny*.

Second, it is very low on power usage, similarly to G4 laptops (as it shares much of the architecture).

Thirdly -- obviously this goes away when you (only) put Linux on it -- it's the cheapest available machine that runs OS X.

Generally, you'll have a hard time finding a competitive machine at this price with similar dimensions.

Re:The article leaves out one detail...

[Rxke]

FYI I run Ubuntu on a Clamshell iBook and it recognized and configured the airportcard automatically during install.

So your double use of 'any Mac,''any built-in wireless hardware,' is a bit errr... FUDdy ;) if you are happy running obsolete hardware, that is.

OTOH, Airport Extreme does indeed not work, so be warned.

No OS X, think non-desktop applications

[AHumbleOpinion]

Why forsake Mac OS X on a Mac, well think about non-desktop applications. For example the Navy using Yellow Dog Linux and Mac hardware for a Sonar application: http://www.linuxjournal.com/article/7789.

For a somewhat detailed list of who is using Yellow Dog Linux see the links on http://www.terrasoftsolutions.com/realworld/showca se/

Re:But...why?

[JMZorko]

... because, as cool as OSX is (I actually really like it, and I have a 12" PB 1.5ghz running it, as well as a dual 1.25ghz PM G4 MDD), some things need Linux:

1. AIO (I don't know about Tiger, but Panther only does AIO on file-based FDs, not FDs based on pipes or sockets -- if you don't believe me, check out the XNU kernel source and see for yourself by grepping for ESPIPE) -- some apps need this ability.

2. The Linux toolchain is the same on PPC and x86. ld is ld is ld, gcc is gcc is gcc, elf is elf. Plus, Linux works on embedded devices (which is one nice thing about the Mac mini -- it's a cheap PPC embedded development platform) while OSX does not yet.

Regards,

John

Re:Why?

[TheRaven64]

I have a Mac Mini in a co-lo centre. The hardware is more than adequate for my needs, and the small form factor means that the hosting fees are small. I picked OpenBSD as the OS to run on it for a number of reasons which will be covered in the second article in this series, due for publication next Friday.

Before anyone points out the laptop hard drive, I have 512MB of RAM in the machine, and most of that is used as disk cache - the disk itself spends a lot of its time spun down.