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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!
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....
Run shrek run... King Farquad is putting on his Red Hat!
Bruce
Bruce Perens.
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.
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.
Why should Apple cripple their machines with inferior firmware, getting rid of a thing like Firewire target disk mode? You are saying that they did something that really doesn't matter, and that instead they should have done something that does matter in a bad way.
English is easier said than done.
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.
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
My commodore 64. But please, if you got a port I'm all ears!
Horns are really just a broken halo.
Is target disk mode not feasible on the standard BIOS? I honestly don't know, I know BIOS is troublesome to architect around and may be a good thing to get rid of. Target disk mode is nice to have, but it isn't something I need to have more than once or twice in any particular machine's life.
I believe the primary reason they went EFI was to run TCPM or whatever hardware protection the new chipset uses to make OS X only run on Apple machines.
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.
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!
The Intel Macs don't have a BIOS, and it's certainly not the same as the PowerPC Macs. They use a new EFI standard from Intel which no significant operating system (except Mac OS X for Intel, of course) supports at this time. I've heard that Windows Vista will support EFI, but I'm not aware if the current betas do or not (since there is no hardware, other than Apple's, that uses EFI, in order to try it out).
'' 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?
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.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.
That's what he meant. He just said BIOS out of habit i'm sure. This is such a non-issue it's almost funny. There was a thread on the FreeBSD list about this actually...it boiled down to this:
(non-dev) "Will freebsd be able to support these?! I heard windows is having problems!!!"
(dev) "We've supported EFI for a while now. should be non-trivial"
Actual Thread here
I mean, if FreeBSD is already a majority of the way there without having any machines donated...i'm sure redhat should be able to do it in about a day without any problems. Seems like just them trying to get some media attention to me.
I have definitely used Windows, even if it was the 64 bit edition, and EFI at the same time. Both operating systems (Linux and Windows) can support EFI, so it is just a matter of time before each of them releases it. I'll bet my dollar on Linux because there is a whole community of nerds out there who want it way worse than Microsoft does, in my opinion.