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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?
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....
Bruce
Bruce Perens.
What about my Beloved BeOS?
I believe the correct term for that sentiment is "necrophilia".
> .. aside from the whole dual booting fad, why would someone go pay good money for a mac, only to install RadHat?
/etc/passwd. OS X is better than Windows, in my opinion, and it's nice to have a Unix back end and a terminal window that's actually functional, but NetInfo and Aqua aren't innovative, they're restrictive.
For my part, it's because Apple produces excellent hardware, but their operating system isn't configurable enough. Most obvious example of this: focus behavior. Second most obvious example: vi
cswingle Fairbanks AK
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.
You're new here, aren't you?
It's Because. We're. Geeks.
Seriously, you've managed to find your way to Slashdot, you must at least have some understanding of the mindset that drives this kind of thing?
Real Daleks don't climb stairs - they level the building.
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.
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.
I'm a student who hates Windows as much as the next guy. I like using the Mac, and the Mac will always be my primary workstation, and I use it whenever possible. I don't want to carry two computers around, but I still need to be able to run Xilinx ISE and AutoCAD and ANSYS and Fluent and all the other things that won't run on the Mac. Fortunately, I can run MATLAB on the mac side of things with the rest of my life, but when I need to design or simulate something, I have to use Win32. It'd be nice not to have to use a separate machine for that.
Dual-booting isn't a fad for some of us, it's what we have to do if we want to be able to use the Mac and still get work done.
-twb