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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?
... 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
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!
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.
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.
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.
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."
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.
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.
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.
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!
'' 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 ''
So where exactly can you buy a notebook with Core Duo processor for half the price of an Intel MacBook Pro?
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).
Actually, I'd say about 80% of Mac users buy them for the OS, which you mischaracterize as "the nice GUI they put on FreeBSD." You obviously don't understand the real architectural advances/differnces in OS X.
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.
Dell sells the cheapest junk they can buy in bulk thrown together with little or no design work. The same machine bought in bulk may have significantly different parts inside. The only constant is they are really cheap. As a result Dells break, often. Dell's support model is basically ship a lot of DOA and funky machines and replace them if anyone complains. Dell has mediocre customer satisfaction.
Apple has shipped mostly commodity gear for a long time. They did have some advantages and disadvantages being a PPC shop, but they were largely unimportant compared to the other differences (from an end user perspective). Apple, however, buys middle of the road quality components and then spends significant time engineering them into a machine and they spend time tweaking the software to utilize all the features of the hardware. Take the g5 towers. They put off a lot of heat, but still run fairly quietly. The reason for this is Apple put in a lot of fans and wrote software to run them slowly or not at all in the areas that were not putting off much heat. Should you peg the processors and run a bunch of heat producing cards, they may get loud, but few people do that. As a result they can sell a quiet machine that produces a lot of heat. Since Dell does not bother trying to engineer small variable speed fans and then tweak the OS to use them properly, Dell cannot really do the same thing. As a result of all of this, Apple machines tend to be some of the most reliable machines in their price range and Apple consistently has the highest customer satisfaction in the industry.
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?
Obviously this statement is built upon the previous implying that Apple hardware is no longer "nice." The truth is, you just did not understand what makes Apple's hardware well regarded.
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.
It is possible OS X will run under VMware some day, but unlikely. It is probable that a VMware workstation edition for the mac will be sold that can run Linux and Windows.
I used to work on SunOS 4 which was known as a BSD variant of Unix, and Sun payed the license for the use of Unix software and the name. It came from what was known as BSD Unix. BSD and Unix got separated with the whole BSD-lite thing, although BSD maintained its feel and the way it worked. The Mac OS X command line is much more like the traditional Unix command line than Linux will ever be. The fact that you're putting Linux together with Unix before putting BSD together with Unix makes no sense at all.