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Installing Fedora Core 4 on the Mac mini

Posted by timothy on from the more-cliches-to-the-rescue dept.

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."

10 of 86 comments (clear)

  1. Goodie! by sgant · · Score: 4, Funny

    I can write over OSX, the put on Fedora and then start the endless road into making Gnome behave and look like OSX...which I just wrote over!

    --

    "Leo Fender was in a 'state of grace' when he designed the Stratocaster." -- Paul Reed Smith
  2. Re:Why? by adam1101 · · Score: 5, Interesting

    They're reasonably powerful systems with very low power consumption: the entire system (minus display) usually stays under 20W. Even the Pentium-M consumes much more on the desktop (granted, they're also much faster). The most comparable competition in terms of power consumption are Via Mini-ITX systems, which tend to be much slower.

  3. Re:The article leaves out one detail... by Chucker23N · · Score: 4, Informative

    "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?

  4. Re:Why? by Chucker23N · · Score: 4, Informative

    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.

  5. Re:Why? by kalidasa · · Score: 4, Insightful

    Apple hardware isn't as much of a moving target as PC hardware is, so there are fewer hardware compatibility issues to deal with. Also, not too many pieces of PC hardware at that price point have Firewire 400 and DVI.

  6. But...why? by onebuttonmouse · · Score: 4, Interesting

    This seems like a semi-on-topic question. Why would I want to install Red Hat on my Mac? This isn't meant to be a troll, I like Linux, I use Debian Sarge and Ubuntu Hoary on retired x86 boxes at work. I just would love to know if anyone is running Linux on their Mac - what are you using it for? Why can't I use OS X to do it?

    --
    MacBook Pro. Worst name since the Bicycle
    1. Re:But...why? by JMZorko · · Score: 5, Informative

      ... 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

      --
      Falling You - beautiful
  7. Re:Why? by commodoresloat · · Score: 5, Funny
    What is PPC hardware like? Does it perform better under load or something?

    Everything is much snappier on PPC.

  8. Re:The article leaves out one detail... by Rxke · · Score: 4, Informative

    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.

  9. Re:The article leaves out one detail... by Rxke · · Score: 4, Funny

    Hey, this is SlashDot, one should apologize for *having* read TFA, not the other way round!