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Red Hat, Linux and Intel iMacs
segphault writes "Ars Technica examines the implications of Red Hat's recently announced plan to get Linux running on Intel Macs. 'Red Hat representative Gillian Farquhar announced last week that the company plans to add support for Apple's new Intel Macs to its popular distribution. Fedora and several other commonly used Linux distributions support the PowerPC architecture used by Apple in the past, and Red Hat wants to ensure that its software will continue to run on new Apple hardware in the future.'" The real question is will Windows or Linux be first?
who said "iron fist in a velvet glove" for linux on ppc/imac?
Linux will be first. Linux already supports the BIOS and should be ready to roll right out of the box.
... aside from the whole dual booting fad, why would someone go pay good money for a mac, only to install RadHat?
"When life gives you lemons, don't make lemonade. Make life take the lemons back!" -- Cave Johnson
... is what doesn't run Linux ?
It seems Ryan falls into the 'why run Linux on a Mac' camp - witness the pretty pie chart of "users that plan to install Linux on their new Macbooks"... It has two slices ... (a) Linux users who think Macs are pretty, and (b) Mac users who think a Linux partition makes them "L337"...
Comments like "User demand for Linux on Apple's Intel-based hardware does exist within the dual-boot crowd, but I doubt that anybody wants to run Linux exclusively on their shiny new Macbook", and "pretty cases aside..." don't help either. There *are* people who only run Linux on their laptops (hell, I used to be one), but the vast majority of people I've ever asked dual-boot a laptop. Any x86 laptop, that is.
I think it does a disservice to both Linux users and Mac users to dismiss the porting effort like this - people will buy Macs (when Windows eventually runs) to have the most-compatible machine (laptop or desktop). I think that's an advantage for the Mac (run corporate email and Final-Cut-Pro for example), and I think Linux has appeal too, at least, it does for me. I guess I don't really see the downside of the port...
Simon.
Physicists get Hadrons!
What about my Beloved BeOS?
Red Hat Plans for Linux on Intel Macs
1/25/2006
Red Hat representative Gillian Farquhar announced last week that the company plans to add support for Apple's new Intel Macs to its popular distribution.
Red Hat wants to ensure that its software will continue to run on new Apple hardware in the future.
EFI support is theoretically possible, but is still in development.
And to answer the question, Linux will be first.
He who knows best knows how little he knows. - Thomas Jefferson
Since apple has autorized yellow dog linux to resell macs preloaded with linux on them it surprises me that they weren't given development versions to have it running already. Then again, powerpc is the yellowdog deal - although their homepage proclaims 'we have an answer' to the intel move without really elaborating on the boot situation....
I'd think that it would be easier to get *nix running on the new iMacs than Windows, if only because one has the ability to modify the well-documented OS, rather than suffering through messy patches and hacks.
That said, I have a greater interest in seeing Windows on an iMac (for gaming and such). Perhaps Redhat's efforts would help this happen?
Its all fun and games until someone loses an eye... then its just fun.
Ballmer's laptop.
Get thee glass eyes, and, like a scurvy politician, seem to see things thou dost not.--King Lear
Run shrek run... King Farquad is putting on his Red Hat!
What is the fascination with getting your OS to run on the new Intel macs? What makes the mac so much different from a PC now? They use the x86 processor, the same ram, harddrives, video cards. They have a fancy case with an integrated monitor! big deal.
This reminds me of the iPod nano. People made such a big fuss over them (Oh my god, they're so small!!!); but they're not any different from any other small mp3 player with a color screen! They don't have the built in harddrive which is what made the ipod unique (and so much larger than the nano, duh)!
I'd be surprised if nobody's got an emulator or VM up and running with Intel-Linux and Intel-Windows running on it already. Can you say Bochs?
But that's too [relatively] easy so it doesn't count.
Knowledge is how to play a game, intelligence is how to win, wisdom is knowing what game to play.
Bruce
Bruce Perens.
That's not my reason at all. If I buy an intel Mac notebook, it's because of the ergonomics, the weight, the battery life, and Apple hardware support. If I can run Windows or Linux on it, that's a bonus. 75% of my notebook usage is on business trips where I just need something to run an office suite to create/edit documents and to do an occasional presentation. When it's not doing that, it's acting like an expensive DVD player while I'm stuck on long plane flights.
I like the way they look and behave a lot more than I care about whether or not I can boot Windows/Linux.
Windows XP should be easy to make accommodating to the imac with no traditional BIOS. Just open up the source code and change . . . oh wait. I guess it will be linux.
My problem with Linux on a Mac, powerpc or otherwise, has been device compatibility. If I can have a BSD based operating system with vendor supported device drivers, why would I want Red Hat?
Some may claim dual-booting other operating systems is a general practice for consultants as a way to conveniently clone a system, but when we are talking about Linux running on an intel-based platform which is more convenient: dual-booting a Mac or simply replicating the target system on commodity x86 hardware?
If it were me, I'd say the latter since I wouldn't risk corrupting my main environment by attempting a dual boot.
What about my Beloved BeOS?
I believe the correct term for that sentiment is "necrophilia".
Why... Linux. But of course. It's always first in anything that's interesting in the IT industry. ;) 64-bit computing for the Intel desktop, Linux was there first. Internet connection sharing, Linux was there first. Remote application serving, Unix as a whole and Linux as a subset with the use of X Window System was there first. Unless Bill feels like licking Steve's ass again to get MS in first...
-"...bad old ideas look confusingly fresh when they are packaged as technology" - Jaron Lanier (Digital Maoism on Edge.o
Does that mean there will finally be suspend/hibernate built in the default fedora kernels? I switched to Ubuntu around FC2 because they wouldn't add any patches like swsusp2 or DSDT-in-initrd, and I just couldn't get a funcitoning custom compiled kernel.
as long as you'll eventually be able to boot OS X, Linux, and Windows. When you can boot all major OSs (and the more fringe ones like Solaris and BSD) from one machine, then you know the route to go is to buy an Apple--no other manufacturer will allow you to do that. Apple considers themselves a hardware company, and having the choice of any and all OSs (and creating a multi-partition/multi-drive system that gives you all the ones you need/want to use for your various computing needs) will certainly help make them a very popular computer hardware company. I know I'm in for a laptop once this whole booting mess is solved (I might buy one before, but I don't have the disposable income to experiment with it and possibly fry my machine...) I wanted a machine with OS X any way for testing/graphics/video stuff (nothing heavy that needs a lot of power, just some lighter editing/graphic creation), but being able to use it for gaming (Windows) and having my friend Linux on it will sweeten the deal. If it turns out to be impossible to dual boot (which I doubt will be the case) then I'll just get the mac mini as it's cheap enough...
Read my blog posts on usability.
It doesn't seem to make much sense to me to have Linux take over the entire box.
OS X is very stable, even if it's most common variant isn't server grade, and easier to administer. Paying Apple's hardware premium just to run Linux natively seems a tad screwy.
I'm far more stoked about getting Virtual PC or VMWare for OS X/Intel. If I need Linux, then a penguin-powered virtual machine can be a client for OS X's X11 server. (May as well let the prettier GUI do all of the graphical heavy lifting, no?) The performance hit would be bearable on a Core Duo (one core for OS X, one for the VM), so long as disk access isn't somehow hobbled (e.g. the files used as "drives" in Virtual PC).
Could someone explain to me what the advantages of booting Linux natively again would be here?
--- The American Way of Life is not a birthright. Hell, it's not even sustainable.
For me, a dye'd in the wool Mac-o-phile, the real question is not which alt-OS will come first...I know that they WILL come soon, so when is rather moot.
No, for me the "Real" question is "Why?", as in "Why was Apple so asinine and inane as to not just make the new Intel-based iron capable of booting Windows and Linux disros as is?" To save a couple of bucks? To restrict the practice (even after they said they wouldn't)? To be consistent (Apple's track record for doing stupid, head-scratching things)?
In the end it probably doesn't REALLY matter...the community will conjure up the fix and we'll go about our merry ways, installing whatever floats our proverbial OS boats on genuinely well-crafted hardware. But, somewhere deep inside, I guess I had been hoping that Apple might take this MOMENTOUS opportunity to do something unexpected, something out of character, something indicative of a company that -gets- the new culture, something "Not Evil": just make it so. Don't make the community struggle to come up with the fix, just make it work. Put it out there. Let us get on with the adventure.
They didn't. And, unfortunately, I'm sure it will come out that they not only didn't, they PURPOSEFULLY didn't. And that makes me sad, as a professed "Apple man".
Spirit of Woz, where are ye?
Scott
"Hokey religions and ancient weapons are no match for a good blaster at your side, kid."
This raises the question of when we will see the Xserve line updated. The original Xserve was a very nice server and the update was even better.
It seemed like Apple was going to make a serious push at getting it's servers taken seriously by business, but that seems to have been seriously side tracked. The current top of the line PowerMac is a more impressive machine than the "Ultimate" Xserve.
Will Red Hat's announcement revitalize the XServe and that push into mainstream business? I hope so and look forward to such an announcement from Apple.
obviously no deficiencies vs. no obvious deficiencies
Okay,
Linux running VMware with Windows as a client.
I think that's enough for me to get by as a Windows developer without ditching the Macintosh. (Or needing to buy a PC again. Yay! )
The blessing and curse with PCs, and Windows has this problem as well, has always been the plentiful hardware choices. Mac enthusiasts taunted PC users with their superior plug and play that was only made possible because of the limited hardware and controlled environment.
Linux on PowerPC was never big enough nor important enough to reach that level of hardware support.
Linux on Intel Macs might just do that. For one thing, there is a lot less work to do. Presumably Intel Mac Linux apps will be binary compatible with x86 Linux apps. This leaves the Linux developer community to work on hardware specifics and Mac plug and play compatibility. There is no reason why Linux can't work with all the same devices that work on Mac OS.
The global economy is a great thing until you feel it locally.
I would imigane that the reason why it is important to Red Hat is that they have traditionaly supported Mac hardware in the past, and they don't want to loose something that they had before.
If it's dead, you killed it.
Why is 'that' the 'real' question? The First OS on the IntelMac is BSD. The first Open Sourced OS is Darwin.
Xen and Vanderpool is a far more important question. But you'd have to know what Xen and Vanderpool is.
Well, one possible answer is that Apple was smart enough to realize that the hacking community would solve this for them. They could either hire a handful of really smart, and therefore expensive, software developers for six months to develop and test everything, and then have a userbase that demands that they support that codebase indefinitely, or they just migrate the hardware first and let grassroots projects like www.winxponmac.com solve that problem for them. My take is that Apple's just being smart about all of this. Why work more than you have to? Besides, when it comes to negotiations with Microsoft, they can just point at the community of Mac hackers and say "We didn't put ourselves in this situation of competing with you, they did it to us! Damn hackers."
http://tinyurl.com/4ny52
Better yet, how sweet would it be to have a laptop that would boot Windows, OSX or Linux?
Sweet.
That's our life, the big wheel of shit. - The Fat Man, Blue Tango Salvage
There's some usefulness in it, particularly for Linux. One long standing problem has been the millions of possible configurations a standard PC has, while a Mac tends to have only a few slight variants. This could benefit people trying to make "Linux On The Desktop".
In reality, the opposite is more important, getting OS X on vanilla PCs. That may help turn the tide slightly against Microsoft enough to get something like competition on both hardware and software products.
Why do you care? Just shut up and go elsewhere if you are not interested.
http://www.hardwaresecrets.com/news/656
$400 though for a VT enabled P4
Even if I don't turn out liking OSX, it also gives me the ability to run my favorite platform most of the time and still demo OSX for my less technical end users. Because even if it doesn't meet my needs, seeing it in action might convince them to at least consider an Apple platform for their next upgrade. And if I do end up liking it, I can always buy an Apple desktop and stop using Linux. I hae no platform loyalty. I'll use whatever works best for me.
It also lets Windows users dip their toes into OSX the same way, if you can boot Windows on the machines. Making the leap to a completely new OS is a scary step, especially for a non-technical user. Having the ability to run both would encourage people to buy the hardware no matter what they want to run on it.
I'm trying to teach myself to set people on fire with my mind... Is it hot in here?
Until Xen can work without mods to the OS, you can't get it to host on anything but Linux (which HAS the mods available...) and it won't hypervisor for anything without mods (Again...)
The ability to handle doing it's magic mojo without OS modifications is still waiting in the wings from AMD and Intel in the form of extra hardware to allow it to do it's thing.
I am not merely a "consumer" or a "taxpayer". I am a Citizen of the State of Texas
What's the point in buying overpriced, specialized hardware only to delete the operating system?
Just because?
I can guarantee you for the price you paid for that MacIntel (Intelitosh?), you'd be much better off spending half of the cash and buying from another retailer. It's like buying a Porsche and taking out the engine and putting in a Chevy 350 and replacing the tires with big rockcrawlers.
Why read the article when I can just make up a snap judgement?
OK, all I have to say is that I will name my first child after the one who first gives me a MacBook tri-booting (is that even a word/concept?) OS X/Linux/Windows XP Pro. Email me when it's done, and I'll send you my address... Hear that? Right now, someone on Slashdot just lost their social life. While others are surpised that someone here could actually produce a child.
Jester
Warning: This sig may be legally binding in England.
As has been pointed out before, with processors that support the VT extensions (or AMD's equivalent) Xen will run unmodified OS's just fine. I believe the Intel chips with VT started shipping towards the end of last year.
There will however be a performance gain if you have native Xen support.
"The real question is will Windows or Linux be first?" Both. The biggest hold-up for both of them is EFI. When a bootloader is modded to work with EMI, then both Linux and Windows should be bootable.
"I don't see any point in dual-booting a Mac with Linux..."
Maybe you want to test your web pages with different HTTP clients?
No 'Focus Follows Mouse'
There is no technical reason to that - it's just that everytime Bally's laptop wants to break free and run Linux, it gets busted under a pile of chairs. So there can't be a Ballmer laptop which runs Linux - it's dead well before..
MAC hardware?
I don't get it either.
Actually, NetBSD would be an excellent OS to port over to these machines for one reason: COMPAT_DARWIN
COMPAT_DARWIN (which sits atop COMPAT_MACH) is NetBSD's kernel emulation of the Darwin environment which allows it to load, link, and run various OS X applications (currently a fair amount of simple ones along with XDarwin). As an extreme (assuming the emulation becomes perfect) one could remove the xnu kernel in OS X and replace it with NetBSD's. Then one would have a hybrid machine which looks like OS X but can run apps for other OS's too (tossing in COMPAT_LINUX for good measure).
An even cooler prospect for generic x86 machines runing Net with COMPAT_DARWIN is the ability to use drivers designed for OS X. Some work on IOKit has been done in this direction to get XDarwin to work (the support is very rudimentary). Although native support is always best, it will be neat to work with hardware in this manner.
Unfortunately, x86 support of all this is far below that of the PPC. That may change with the advent of consumer-available x86-based macs.
It'll run NetBSD first :-)
t ml
Has anyone tried running Darwin / FreeBSD?
--
Please sign the native Flash player for FreeBSD petition:
http://www.petitiononline.com/flash4me/petition.h
I run Linux on Intel, AMD64 and PPC hardware. I do that because I need/want to run Linux (FC4), and I'm not particular about the hardware brand - as long as the price and performance are right.
Linux provides me user interface uniformity across the hardware, as well as access to the suite of application software that I need and want to use. It's not that difficult to understand.
Can You Say Linux? I Knew That You Could.
I think you mean someone's first child just lost their social life.
In general, it is safe and legal to kill your children. -- POSIX Programmer's Guide
I'd think that it would be easier to get *nix running on the new iMacs than Windows, if only because one has the ability to modify the well-documented OS, rather than suffering through messy patches and hacks.
I would bet on Linux simply because there is a mere Cohort or two of developers working on Windows development while there are entire Legions of Developers/Nerds (Is there difference?) working on Linux development. That plus the Linux geeks are motivated by the prospect of humiliating Microsoft by beating them to it, the Microsoft developers, however, are motivated by mere money. It must be rather embarrassing for Microsoft to have to live through the shame that the Macs are so cutting edge that even Vista won't boot on he InteMacs at the moment and having Linux of all OS'es beat their flagship product to the punch would be even worse.
That said, I have a greater interest in seeing Windows on an iMac (for gaming and such). Perhaps Redhat's efforts would help this happen?
At first I was going to say no but now that I think about it the humiliation of having Linux beat them to it might actually result in some asses getting kicked at Microsoft.
Only to idiots, are orders laws.
-- Henning von Tresckow
How is the parent post 'offtopic'? The editor made a reference to Windows and when it might get running on the intel macs, so why is a question asking about another OS running on the macs offtopic?
ACME Septic. We're #1 in the business of #2.
Never ask why with OSS, the answer will always boil down to "because we can". (This is not nessacerally a bad thing or a good thing.) Also it's important for hardware not to be tied to a single OS. Ok, so I lied with the first bit.
My commodore 64. But please, if you got a port I'm all ears!
Horns are really just a broken halo.
MMX used to cost extra too.
Bruce Perens.
I love OS X. It's an awesome OS. But as another poster mentioned, the GUI is not built for power users--ask any fluxbox or evilWM user which GUI they'd prefer. I can configure my Linux desktop such that I rarely, if ever, have to touch the mouse. That's just not possible with OS X.
... that, to me, is more than worth the Apple premium.
So for me, that ability to do most of what I need to get done with Linux, in my uber-customized window manager, with a beautiful and typically silent box sitting on my desk, plus the ability to dual boot (or preferably vmware- or even wine-style) to run Photoshop or Quark or video editing software (in other words, apps that don't exist on the Linux platform)
Dlugar
Computer Go: Writing Software to Play the Ancient Game of Go
If (When?) Apple comes out with an Intel Mac Mini, I will purchase one to be a Mythfrontend on Linux. Plus I'm going to tweak the dickens out of it (software). I may actually purchase 2, one for Myth, and one running OS X for the wife and kid.
Squidward: "Spongebob, If I had a dollar for every brain you don't have, I'd have 1 dollar."
Bruce
Bruce Perens.
'' It's like porting Windows to MAC. Why bother? Most, if not all, MAC people don't want or require it. Granted there are a few people with exceptions but for the 99.9% why is so important? ''
The problem with your argument is that the number "99.9%" is not correct. It is more like 80% or 90%. And you forget that there are considerable numbers of Linux users and Windows users who would just like to buy a computer that is completely contained in the LCD screen (without having to run MacOS X).
Imagine an VMware OS that could actually run other OSes as huge applications on a single computer.
You could run a Linux app and it would run. Choose a Mac app and it could run at the same time in a seperate window. And the same goes for a Windows app.
It would be great if this could be made to happen, then you could choose whatever app you wanted to run no matter which OS it was designed to run on.
here :P
s p) which is in the wild.
Vista supports EFI natively as of build 5231 (source: http://www.pcmag.com/article2/0,1895,1872067,00.a
Mac on Linux is one thing, but I've still got 680X0 apps that I like to run from time to time. (Not many, but there is no reason to 'switch')
Errrr - '64-bit computing for the Intel desktop' - as far as I know, FreeBSD also was an early adopter. Same for 'internet connection sharing' as in NAT? It has been available in a lot of other operating systems even before iptables supported it.
Sure there is:
I'm sure there's other things as well, but those would be my reasons if I were to do it.
"Most of the ppl that got into Linux so they'd look l337 have already jumped onto the OSX bandwagon anyways."
Sure, and some people that got into Linux did it had a technical motivation.
I rarely criticize things I don't care about.
OK, Macs used to have a reputation for having nice hardware, that was probably 50% of the reason for owning one (25% being marketing BS, and 25% for the nice GUI they put on FreeBSD).
So, Apple move to a regular Intel processor, a regular ATI graphics card, and a regular Intel motherboard with some modifications to remove a regular BIOS. That nice Apple hardware that we would have paid a premium for is essentially now a Dell PC.
Soooooo, if we no longer have nice hardware, then why bother trying to run Windows or Linux on this thing, when we can do it for a third of the cost and without hacks, on regular x86 hardware?
You also need to consider that Apple is not going to support anything but MacOSX86 on this hardware, and for that matter, Micro$oft won't support Windows on it either!
Personally I'd see getting official support for it running under VMWare, like Solaris x86 now has, or even under Xen3 would be more exciting.
#include <sig.h>
Linux and its bootloaders (at least GRUB, I don't know about LILO) can already deal with EFI. Itanium uses EFI and Linux has been running there since Itanium came out.
I think, given the contest Windows will be first
http://winxponmac.com/The%20Contest.html
Umm, no. Windows CANNOT boot off of a computer that is using EFI without a backwards compatible BIOS mode, because Windows makes direct calls to the BIOS to do its magic. The GRUB bootloader already supports EFI, and it should be trivial to get GRUB onto your new Intel Mac. Once you have GRUB on, it's not any harder to install Windows than it is to install Linux, it's just that Windows still won't be able to boot -- once the bootloader passes control to Windows, Windows simply cannot start without being able to make certain calls to the BIOS.
#include ".signature"
(without having to run MacOS X)
In the case of Linux users, it's usually because they're:
(40%) stubborn and used to Linux.
(50%) using an app that is developed for Linux first, usually FOSS (including window managers, but those almost fall into the "stubborn" category).
(10%) uppity and elitist and won't give MacOS X a shot because it's not free-as-in-lost-cause.
In the case of Windows users, it's because they're:
( 5%) curious to see if it can be done.
(20%) wanting to play the latest game on their cool new hardware (these people generally also boot Linux, and fall into the 50% above).
(75%) fucking retarded... but that's the norm for Windows users, especially the Microsoft fanbois.
Having an everyday-use Mac without a bootable MacOS X partition is pure fanboyism. Removing it from servers and appliances I can forgive, but desktops and workstations... criminal.
I keep seeing comments about how macOSX is the same as Unix/Linux just with a prettier desktop, so I'd like to provide a little information for those that do not understand that they are completely different.
OSX is actually an operating system called NeXTSTEP that Apple got when they purchased NeXT. The NeXT OS is based on Mach which is an experimental OS designed at CMU. MacOSX also contains a sprinkling of code from BSD, as Mach was originally developed inside of BSD. Apple has also added many things such as the Aqua interface.
Mach is a microkernel where as the Linux kernel is a module-loading monolithic kernel. I will leave the reader to follow said links or utilize Google to understand the massive difference between the two architectures.
The kernel that Apple is currently using in their OS is called XNU, and would technically be described as a Hybrid kernel, although it is basically the Mach microkernel with a few bits stolen from BSD.
Basically the point i'm getting to here, is that while OSX offers a Unix-like command line which may fool the casual observer, it is actually very unrelated to unix/linux.
That being said, Mac OS X seems to be a very nice operating system which is based on some very widely used kernels, and provides enough unix-like behavior to satisfy many.
Big ones, small ones, some as big as yer 'ead!
Give 'em a twist, a flick o' the wrist...
No, actually, it isn’t. Sorry.
Join Tor today!
Why Redhat? Debian runs on Macs now, and is much easier to keep up to date.
"We are all geniuses when we dream"
- E.M. Cioran
Does it matter if Linux or Windows boots first? Whichever succeeds first will allow the other to suceed almost immediately thereafter.
Any method that can boot Windows is guarunteed to allow Linux to boot. And any method that Linux uses to boot is a backdoor (admittedly less so) that Windows can exploit.
For example, consider the worst case scenario. Linux is bootable through some means which requires source modification that Windows can't do. If you can boot Linux, you can boot Xen. And if you can boot Xen, you can run Windows inside of Xen (with Xen 3.0 on modern CPUs with the virtualization extensions, which the iMac should have) at native speeds.
The downside in that worst-case scenario is hardware support; Xen doesn't have Xen-aware Win32 video drivers. As I understand it, the two current solutions are to use VESA mode, or an emulated VGA device. And of course VNC and remote desktop.
Anyhow, my point is that if Linux boots on an iMac, you should be able to run Windows without the overhead of VMware or QEMU.
Because once you get grub or elilo working with EFI, you would be able to boot what ever you want, windows, linux, whatever, since both of those boot loaders understand how to load windows. Would it really be that easy or am I missing something?
I guess technically then linux would win that race.
Supplies!
Most replies to your question tend to be of the "because we can" variety.
However, there are real practical reasons. First, the development environment on Linux is different ranging from the UI (I like a very custom fvwm + vim setup) to software architecture issues (linking dynamic libraries, particularly with visibility nuances, differs between the two...or three throwing in win32).
Second, many of us can only afford so much hardware AND we work on cross-platform packages (C++ plugin framework in my case). In addition to this, living in a location such as the Bay area or SoCal with a family severely limits computer space. Triple booting a laptop for development is very attractive.
Third, OSX is a better casual end-user (like for my wife) desktop than Windows, gnome, kde, fvwm, etc. Windows has the games I need (like rfactor), and some applications (like the MyChron telemetry software for my kart racing). Linux supports my favored development environment best. Again, we have a HW budget limit.
In summary, one broken assumption you have is that one home computer supports one end-user (a MAC supports a MAC person). The other related assumption is that one home computer supports predominately one usage pattern.
...and beating it to death with your reinforced concrete head. Seriously, I bet there are at least one thousand different people who have already posted the car analogy. There are at least 10,000 people who have posted one of these irritating WHY? questions. WHY DO PEOPLE WANT TO DO THINGS? I DON'T WANT TO DO THINGS. EVERYONE SHOULD STOP DOING THINGS.
Most of the people posting this useless, annoying garbage are just trolling. What's your excuse?
Please.
I buy a Mac because OS X is wonderful and the bundled apps are great. I don't have to deal with spam, viruses, and a fresh install every 8 months to a year (as I do with Windows). My wife can do everything she wants without bothering me for tech support (only once did the printer on the Airport get messed up to where I had to get involved). The UI is more consistent and better than Windows or Linux.
With OS X I get a CLI when I want it, but my preferred software development environment has a very customable desktop. Window focus should follow the mouse without a click and should not jump to the front. I can type and don't always want to see the window that I'm typing in.
With Linux I get my preferred development environment, with OS X I get my preferred application environment.
People need to realize that OS (and the apps built for that OS) are tools some tools are better than others for different jobs. An Apple computer will give the user the most flexibility, and that is what is so great about Apple going with Intel. The user can buy one machine and have the top three OSes on it!
I still don't understand why anyone would do embedded software development on a Windows machine.
http://qemu.dad-answers.com/viewtopic.php?t=223&po stdays=0&postorder=asc&start=0
I suspect this means we'll have OSx86 running on a Linux host on Intel Macs in no time.
Groovy
WhiteWolf666 an exBush supporter. All you new-school,compassionate,save the children Republicans can rot in hell
Truth is Yellow Dog has always been a PowerPC distribution and that's where it is good at. On the x86 side of things there are plenty of distributions to choose from, including Suse and Redhat. Doing a search for "EFI Linux" with Google gives me the following links amongst others:
- http://sourceforge.net/projects/elilo
- http://docs.hp.com/en/5991-1247/ch05s21.html
- Search for EFI at RedHat
From reading the above sites it would seem that if you are ready to diverge from a standard install, then it should already be possible to run Linux on EFI based Macs. Linux has the biggest advantage of having code which is easily modifiable by whoever has an itch to scratch, whereas MS-Windows depends on Microsoft having a business case for doing so.
Jumpstart the tartan drive.
Just because OSX is unix based, doesn't make it a replacement for desktop Linux or vice versa. There are a lot of things, that are a whole lot easier for me to do in Linux, when compared to OSX.
- Run the latest Java release
- Have a total package management solution
- Developer tools easly installable through package management
- Run the latest Openoffice.org
- Run a gnome desktop
- Run Evolution
People have different needs. OSX is a great OS, but its not the solution for everybody. PPC Linux has been around for a long time, but its always been a second class citizen. Being able to run OSX and Linux on one machine, where everything works, could be very powerful.I find your views intriguing and would like to subscribe to your newsletter.
but this is far bigger news than getting MS Windows running on Macs. OS X will get (and for a long time now, has already got) far more from the Linux world than it has ever got from the MS Windows world. This is where all the attention should be, especially on slashdot, fer cryin' out loud.
you can't get it to host on anything but Linux
When did NetBSD and FreeBSD become 'Linux'? Because both OSes can act as a Xen host.
Go read the Xen 3 docs. They are claiming *IF* Vanderpool extentions are supported, you can xm start non-modified OSes.
But Apple has not pubically said anything about Vanderpool or Silverdale support.
Pick one.
a) Because I like Linux?
b) Because there are things I prefer to do from within Linux?
c) Because there are things Linux does better?
d) Because I can?
e) Because that "omg uber interface lol" nonesense is just that, I prefer e17?
f) Because all I really need OSX for is the Macrodobe tools, which Mac-on-Linux allows me to run from Linux, arguably better than doing so through Wine?
g) Because I believe in using the best tool for the job, and booting the big three OSes from the same maschine allows me to do that more effectively, considering the hardware premium is still less costly than buying three seperate maschines, one of which is an intelmac to begin with?
h) Because contrary to what seems to be consensus amongst fanboys, Steve Jobs, although brilliant, is not Jesus, and his tools aren't the best for everything?
i) all of the above
j) AM FANBOY YOUR ARGUMENTS MEAN NOTHING OGMBBQLOL!!!!!1111eleven.
I believe the primary reason Apple went with EFI is because if you want a BIOS for your machine you have to pay AMI, Award or Phoenix a couple bucks per machine you ship. EFI is free.
It's a cost measure as far as I can tell.
As an added bonus, EFI allows added flexibility over BIOS. BIOS is really crappy now, it's far beyond its actual usefulness.
If Apple used BIOS, you'd have to go to your BIOS to select your boot device (like on a PC), instead of doing it in the Preferences app under the OS. Does that seem like the Apple way?
http://lkml.org/lkml/2005/8/20/95
Neither Apple nor Microsoft have said they intend to support Xen 3.0 and Vanderpool.
I do not know if it ignorance of Xen and VT or a viewpoint that such would create licencing (and therefore revinue) problems.
I recently installed Linux on a Powerbook laptop. Why? Because the laptop was only $40, it works, and it runs my favorite OS. The question is why not?
Working in a DevOps shop is like playing in a band made up entirely of keytarists.
Because I am wondering why others would want to do it.
If you had read the article it states there is no performance gains, so it begs the question--why would you want to? Just because you don't like the question or are too afraid to answer it doesn't mean the question is not valid. I understand the motivations of Redhat wanting to port their product but under what circumstances would the ordinary user want this.
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Since I have no hope of writing a better answer, I'll link you to a thread a little further up the page - both the linked post and its child.
c id=14558478
http://apple.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=175093&
Bruce
Bruce Perens.
and NetBSD
http://michaelsmith.id.au
from the linked discussion:
tjost Posted: Thu Nov 24, 2005 4:17 pm
[snip]
It is sooooo slow, it take more than 2 hours to boot and for show the System Profiler.
There is no right to feel safe thru security vaudeville at the expense of everyone's freedom, privacy and tax money.
it could have something to do with wanting to run a system based on free software? the fact that Gnu/Linux also works extremely well sweetens the pill, but in my case the choice is mainly moral. howie
Yeah, yeah, but that's because the non-open-source accelerator module is not running.
It doesn't support OSx86 as a client or host, yet. The developers of the competing open-source accelerator module are working on it.
WhiteWolf666 an exBush supporter. All you new-school,compassionate,save the children Republicans can rot in hell
And that makes sense. Thanks.
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At work use Linux predominately, but Macs are very popular and getting more so, particularly for laptops.
At the moment, a convenient way to move large data sets is to unplug the USB hard disk and move it to your other workstation, rather than pull that data across the network, because:
1) Portable machines which are used half the time "off net" do not lend themselves well to file-server usage.
2) Scientific data-reduction packages typically involve processing of multi-gigabyte data sets.
OS X 10.4 broke the ext2 project for Mac OSX, alas. As other Linux-supported filesystems:
* HFS+ -- OK, but it doesn't support the journal. Risky?
* FAT32 -- limited. File sizes less than 2GB, and volume sizes are limited, too.
* UFS -- Linux doesn't yet support read-write; has endian issues when trying to share between Macs.
I'm hoping that some sort of Linux emulation on the Mac will allow Macs to access Linux data for filesystems that are not yet ported (ext3) or won't be ported anytime soon (Reiserfs).
Has anyone successfully run a Darwin kernel in OS X?
Software sucks. Open Source sucks less.
Port grub to EFI and you're all set.
Yeah: Apple.
In the last 2 weeks, this guy Colin has raised over $6000 USD as a bounty for getting win xp onto "the scottish laptop"
That amount of cash, and growing, will focus the minds of many geeks out there... and one would think once its cracked for a wee little laptop, the ayeMac would soon follow...