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?

Comments

Im not sure I understand...

[TheRealMindChild]

... aside from the whole dual booting fad, why would someone go pay good money for a mac, only to install RadHat?

Re:Im not sure I understand...

[creepynut]

The question I want to know, is why would someone go pay good money for a Mac, only to install Windows.

Ars being an arse

[Space cowboy]

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.

Re:Ars being an arse

[99BottlesOfBeerInMyF]

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.

I agree with this. The fact is there are a number of reasons to want to dual boot a system, including lowering the cpu and memory footprint for a operation.

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.

Well, to be perfectly fair, I know a lot of people who have dumped Linux on the desktop to go to OS X and I only know one person who uses Linux on the desktop, regularly on the mac. For the most part OS X is a superior workstation UI and many of the people I know who did switch did so because either they saw people they were working with using it and became interested or they bought a system with the plan to try OS X, knowing they could just use Linux if they did not like it.

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.

This is entirely true. Having a familiar work environment that you like can make a huge difference. For some, moving to something different is just too hard. The people I know in this category are mostly old timers. People who have been using X-windows forever and aren't about to try some newfangled windowing system for their primary setup. That is OK, but don't expect not to take some teasing or ridicule for being inflexible and not wanting change.

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.

...unless you bother to learn how to tweak OS X, the way you learned how to tweak X.

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.

See this is what I was talking about earlier. Is /Users (it's /Users not /User) or /Library in some way a poorer design than you'd find on Linux or is it a simpler, more easily understood design with some real advantages. You're unwilling to even evaluate a slightly different file structure simply because it is different. Further you go on to try to imply some sort of ambiguous quality by stating it it works "for their intended audience." You're the one talking down here. Their intended audience is people who are not afraid of beneficial changes. Now if you feel like arguing a real reason why you think the difference is inferior, then go ahead. But if you don't like being derided for complaining about changes in general, perhaps you should quit whining about it. Next you'll be telling me all music today sucks and back in your day people had respect and did not dress funny.

The fact of the matter is, /Users makes a lot more sense to most people as a name and provides a location for user data that is less prone to breaking than /usr. /Library allows for the easy, flexible, and multi-user aware storage of application specific data that can persist across versions (simplifying upgrades and allowing multiple versions of software to coexist easily). It also allows for some of the real advantages of folder-is-the-app that lets users more easily install, uninstall, and copy functional applications than with the traditional Linux process. The system allows for the additional benefits of easily navigated/edited application resources, FAT binaries, and a number of other benefits. Arguing against an improvement that offers significant functionality on the basis that it is different, does not really help you

Re:Ars being an arse

[Kjella]

/User/Library...what the hell is this?

Correct me if I'm wrong, but that sounds like English. While I do appriciate that you can write /usr/lib and achieve the same, but for the middle ground between "point-and-click" and "mv cp df ps" TLA-user it might be easier to get at least *some* clue of what's going on. With tab-completion I'd probably prefer the latter after getting used to it.

power management in fedora

[pyros]

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.

This could make Linux as easy as Macs

[digidave]

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.

Re:My "Real Question"

[daveschroeder]

So you're saying Apple should have used a 20+ year old technology (BIOS) instead of the new emerging boot firmware standard (EFI), just to make alternate OSes easier to install in the first couple weeks of the machines being out, instead of using the standard that the entire PC industry is moving toward?

Over time, all of the various bootloaders for Linux, *BSD, and so on, will support EFI, including Apple's EFI implementation.

While Apple is not using EFI solely to tie Mac OS X to Apple hardware, the general lack of use of EFI, EFI's TPM tie-ins, and so on, will definitely make it harder to run Mac OS X elsewhere, especially in the short term. I'm sure Apple is intensely aware of this, but that's not the exclusive reason it's using EFI. EFI is simply the future.

This is just another case of Apple being one of the first vendors to use a technology in a widespread fashion in the mainstream consumer marketplace.

Wouldn't it be the same?

[tscheez]

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.

Re:Why bother?

[99BottlesOfBeerInMyF]

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.