Slashdot Mirror

← Back to Stories (view on slashdot.org)

Jobs Offers Free Mac OS X For $100 Laptops

Posted by ryuzaki0 on from the it's-the-thought-that-counts dept.

bonch writes "Steve Jobs offered Mac OS X free of charge to the $100 laptop effort by the One Laptop Per Child project. However, his offer was declined because the project was looking for a 100% open source solution. The laptops will now be running on Red Hat Linux on AMD chips."

4 of 1,053 comments (clear)

  1. Re:What? by mboverload · · Score: 4, Interesting

    Actually, OSX runs VERY well on an old 333MHz iMac with 64 megs of ram. I won't take the latest version, mind you, but it works well. No lag in the dock or anything.

  2. Red Hat wasn't always bad. by CyricZ · · Score: 4, Interesting

    Red Hat used to be a quality distribution. But we have to go back to the Red Hat 5.x and 6.x days to notice that.

    As time has gone on, there have been many improvements that they have failed to adopt. Dropping support for RPM in favour of APT is one such improvement that they didn't make. The whole GCC 2.96 debacle sure didn't help their reputation amongst developers.

    Either way, you are correct, Red Hat is not the way to go. Mac OS X, especially free, would have been the best possible choice. Not considering that, Kubuntu would have been the second best option. It'd offer a solid, coherent KDE system, built upon the power of Debian.

    --
    Cyric Zndovzny at your service.
  3. Apple-Intel Implications by ndansmith · · Score: 5, Interesting

    Did Steve Jobs offer to have OS X running on AMD chips? I presume that Apple already knew what processor the $100 laptop would have. I do not know the ins and outs of Apple's agreement with Intel, but I wonder how they feel about this. Still, since Apple is not actually manufacturing the laptop, I guess they can run their OS on whatever they want. Still, it is interesting to note that Apple would considering running OS X on AMD products.

  4. Re:OS X easy to use -- what are people smoking? by IntlHarvester · · Score: 4, Interesting

    The universal menubar provides a context menu that never moves.

    Which was great when we had 9" monitors. Whether it is such a good idea when you have a 30" display, or multiple 20"+ displays is an arguable point. Saying you can just "fling your mouse" when the target is actually several feet away is really dubious.

    Being the cynic that I am, I tend not to think that Apple had done research proving a fixed menu bar is the best for large displays. Instead they keep it around because it's a Mac visual trademark that distinguishes them from the competition.

    --
    Business. Numbers. Money. People. Computer World.