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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?
Simon I agree, I'm tired of reading this crap, the whole "Who would run Linux on a Mac? OS X is Unix after all" type of comments do not help. The idea that anyone who does this hasn't seen what OS X has to offer, and after they will they'll dump Linux on the desktop. Other comments like "You can run all the apps you can run in Linux on OS X" also don't take into account that some people *prefer* to work in a Linux/BSD desktop environment. I'm sick of reading about how OS X is the best UI and such, while it's very nice, it's not for everyone. My main gripe is that it's not as configurable as desktops or window managers in Linux. I'm used to being able to change every thing I can so it's how I just like it, in OS X you're pretty much stuck with the options they allow you to tweak. But that's not just it, what is it is the *feel* of the OS. Yep, you can drop to a term and bang around, but wait, /User /Library...what the hell is this? Does it work for their intended audience? Sure, but people that talk down to ppl that suggest that Linux is a great fit on ppc/laptops are annoying; just because they don't get it doesn't mean it's not for anyone.
Disclaimers: I run Ubuntu Linux / OS X (for iTunes to sync my iPod only) on my iBook (800mhz dual-usb) and it's a great fit with all hardware (perhaps save for the modem, I'm not sure) is supported. I can run iTunes from within Linux via Mac-on-linux, which gives me access to iTunes w/o having to leave Linux. Also, at work I *have* to run XP (yeah, I'm looking for another job right now) but I run bb4win - a blackbox desktop for Windows, which keeps me pretty happy.
fak3r.com
My notebook is an Apple iBook. Most of the time, the apps are more than enough to get my work done. Not to mention the stability I get from OS X Tiger.
However, sometimes I wish I could install RedHat on my iBook, so I can test Oracle server products. As most of my work is done from afar, ssh'ing to the servers, it would be nice to be able to have a test environment before commiting any changes to current production servers' configuration.
Why not use a typical Intel book for that? Because I just love the Tiger experience: great GUI, a cool Unix terminal at my disposal, and a set of multimedia tools that do what I want to do with my "digital life stuff" (iLife, Final Cut).
It's cool that a lot of people work with open source software exclusively, and get to use their Linux distro of choice. But for those of us who need to use a particular distro AND also don't want to give up Tiger, the new Apple Intel machines are something to look forward to.