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Red Hat, Linux and Intel iMacs

Posted by ryuzaki0 on from the only-a-matter-of-time dept.

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?

3 of 313 comments (clear)

  1. Ars being an arse by Space+cowboy · · Score: 4, Insightful

    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!
  2. This could make Linux as easy as Macs by digidave · · Score: 4, Insightful

    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.
  3. Re:My "Real Question" by daveschroeder · · Score: 4, Insightful

    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.