Linux beats Windows to Intel iMac

Ctrl+Alt+De1337 writes "The Mactel-Linux folks have now successfully booted Linux on a 17" Core Duo iMac. They used the elilo bootloader, a modified kernel, and a hacked vesafb to boot from a USB drive. No GUI pictures for now, just white text on a black background. The distro of choice was Gentoo, and instructions and patches are promised this weekend."

Comments

Oh boy!

[WebHostingGuy]

White text on a black background; that sure beats that old OSX graphical interface.

Re:Oh boy!

[DrEldarion]

Yeah, but now you can actually play games on the mac!

Oh, wait... never mind.

Re:Oh boy!

[Alex P Keaton in da]

Yes, I agree, the OSX GUI is awesome, and why would you be excited that someone booted Linus onto a MAC and got a b/w screen!?!?!
I can answer that- Because this is an important step into something we have all been interested in, i.e. whether or not we can boot something other than an apple os onto an intel mac...
A thousand mile journey begins with a single step, and all that jazz...

Re:Oh boy!

[caseih]

Am I the only one who finds OS X's user interface to be just as inconsistant as any other current Linux desktop UI? Here's a number of my pet-peeves that seriously affect my efficiency in OS X:

• Inconsistant PageUp/PageDown use. Some programs move the cursor, some just move the screen. Very annoying when only the page moves. Now if all aps standardized even on the annoying behavior at least we'd be consistant.
• Home/End keys. If you understand the logic, it's not bad. Command-left_arrow and command-right_arrow do the trick. But if you go in and change your OS X keybindings to restore normal windows/linux home/end behavior, you only get very spotty coverage with some apps honoring the keybindings, some not.
• Click to focus a window absorbs that click. But not always. Depends on the app. Really slows you down if you use dual-monitors and have lots of windows spread between them.
• Scroll wheel can only affect a focused windows. This means you can't have your browser slightly underneath your program editor and scroll up and down through API docs without clicking away from the editor window. This one is pretty close to being a show-stopper for me. Combined with the previous problem with the focus these leads to some serious impedence of work. In essence the UI fails in this aspect because it doesn't get out of the way and let you work. Instead it is in your face.

So I just laugh whenever people talk about one UI (be it Windows or Gnome or KDE or OS X) being so much more consistant and usable than any other UI.

Why the delay...

[Syberghost]

. The distro of choice was Gentoo, and instructions and patches are promised this weekend. ...when Gnome finishes compiling.

Damn, now I feel depressed....

[Anonymous Coward]

The distro of choice was Gentoo, and instructions and patches are promised this weekend."

I'm not even smart enough to get Gentoo booting off my PC! :(

Saves memory

[77Punker]

See, because the background is black, you can store the color in a single 8-bit register instead of taking up a whole 32-bit register and it saves so much space in the L1 cache that it makes the computer go so much faster. Also, from a usability standpoint, the console is much better because it doesn't have any of those confusing buttons or hard to install mouse drivers. Just type the command and it's been done before you know it; no more waiting for the GUI to load its fancy pictures.

The worst thing is that I'm actually going to college with people that have that very same dinosaur mentality that I just spoofed. Then again, a little fancy ASM code in all of the C++ flying around really could speed things up, but I just have more of a preference towards ASM over higher level stuff.

Re:Saves memory

[Bob of Dole]

8 bits? Are you mad? If only we had that much ram to waste!
Black on white. Two colors: ONE BIT DISPLAYS!

Re:Saves memory

[Ford Prefect]

The worst thing is that I'm actually going to college with people that have that very same dinosaur mentality that I just spoofed.

A friend I went to university was recently boasting about his latest hardware acquisition - a colossal Apple monitor (I'm pretty sure it was the 30in Cinema display) and an appropriately speedy graphics card for his PC to drive it.

He uploaded a photo. He runs nothing but Xterms, tiled across the display thanks to some ultra-primitive window manager.

I nearly flew across the Atlantic in order to beat him to death with my prehistoric gaming CRT...

Call CNN!

[w0lver]

Wow, Linux is more flexible and you can customize the installation routine! This is completely unexpected... In other breaking news, water still wet and gravity still in effect

Slashdotted

[dch24]

The link is to the coral cache of the original page. Even that is slashdotted right now. Here's the article: (it's a Wiki)

Main Page

Mactel-Linux is the effort to adapt the GNU/Linux operating system to Intel-based Apple Macintosh hardware.

This requires changes/additions to at least the following projects:

• the elilo bootloader
• the Linux kernel
• several drivers

This site is not about Linux distributions for Intel-Macs, but about developer communication.

Status

Using elilo and a modified Linux kernel, we can boot from a USB hard disk on the 17" iMac Core Duo. We are using the hacked vesafb driver to inherit the bootloader's framebuffer, keyboard and a USB network card work. Gentoo runs and can compile the Linux kernel with a compiler that runs on linux, which was compiled in linux, on a mac running the new intel duo processors.

lspci
00:00.0 Host bridge: Intel Corporation Mobile 945GM/PM/GMS/940GML and 945GT Express Memory Controller Hub (rev 03)
00:01.0 PCI bridge: Intel Corporation Mobile 945GM/PM/GMS/940GML and 945GT Express PCI Express Root Port (rev 03)
00:07.0 Performance counters: Intel Corporation Unknown device 27a3 (rev 03)
00:1b.0 Audio device: Intel Corporation 82801G (ICH7 Family) High Definition Audio Controller (rev 02)
00:1c.0 PCI bridge: Intel Corporation 82801G (ICH7 Family) PCI Express Port 1 (rev 02)
00:1c.1 PCI bridge: Intel Corporation 82801G (ICH7 Family) PCI Express Port 2 (rev 02)
00:1d.0 USB Controller: Intel Corporation 82801G (ICH7 Family) USB UHCI #1 (rev 02)
00:1d.1 USB Controller: Intel Corporation 82801G (ICH7 Family) USB UHCI #2 (rev 02)
00:1d.2 USB Controller: Intel Corporation 82801G (ICH7 Family) USB UHCI #3 (rev 02)
00:1d.3 USB Controller: Intel Corporation 82801G (ICH7 Family) USB UHCI #4 (rev 02)
00:1d.7 USB Controller: Intel Corporation 82801G (ICH7 Family) USB2 EHCI Controller (rev 02)
00:1e.0 PCI bridge: Intel Corporation 82801 Mobile PCI Bridge (rev e2)
00:1f.0 ISA bridge: Intel Corporation 82801GBM (ICH7-M) LPC Interface Bridge (rev 02)
00:1f.1 IDE interface: Intel Corporation 82801G (ICH7 Family) IDE Controller (rev 02)
00:1f.2 SATA controller: Intel Corporation 82801GBM/GHM (ICH7 Family) Serial ATA Storage Controllers cc=AHCI (rev 02)
00:1f.3 SMBus: Intel Corporation 82801G (ICH7 Family) SMBus Controller (rev 02)
01:00.0 VGA compatible controller: ATI Technologies Inc Unknown device 71c5
02:00.0 Ethernet controller: Marvell Technology Group Ltd. 88E8053 PCI-E Gigabit Ethernet Controller (rev 22)
03:00.0 Network controller: Broadcom Corporation BCM4310 UART (rev 01)
04:03.0 FireWire (IEEE 1394): Agere Systems FW323 (rev 61)

dmesg click if you want to see it

Instructions and Patches

Coming this weekend.

FAQ

Can I already run Linux on the iMac Core-Duo?

Not quite. The kernel boots, and you can interact with the system on the command line, but that's as much as you can do with it at the moment. If you're a developer, though, that's a starting point.

[edit]
Why Linux? OS X is so great!

Sure OS X is great. But this is fun.

[edit]
Why Linux? Why not Windows?

Windows isn't fun.

[edit]
Why not OS X on non-Apple PCs?

That's way uncool.

[edit]
The Intel-based Macs are standard PCs, aren't they?

They share many characteristics with PCs, yes. Though, their firmware is EFI, not the old 1982 PC-BIOS.

[edit]
Then what took you so long??

In other news....

[Ledsock]

...it was recently announced that Linux had been ported to run on a standard wrist watch. Developer John I. Ronman stated, "This is really only a tech demo. Currently, the display only shows 18:88:88, but we are confident that not only will this allow the watch to display the time, but it will be Open Source time!"

Re:Modified kernel?

[archeopterix]

And has anyone tried sticking in a pre-release DVD of Windows Vista, holding down the D key, and seeing what happens?

I did 2 of the above. Here is the result:

dddddddddddddddddddddddddddddddddddddddddddddddddd ddddddddddddddddddddddd

Re:i wasn't aware there was a competition

[tciny]

John Dvorak begs to differ. Apples move to Intel will harm Linux!
Clearly its obvious this will show computer users worldwide that OSX' graphical user interface is far superior to the Linux' shell, thus making them buy Apple boxen.
Netcraft confirms it: Linux is dead.

Re:Great!

[Kadin2048]

World's most expensive desktop linux machine

No, I think that dubious honor belongs to this: the IBM IntelliStation A Pro. Take it home today, only $11,779.00.

And that's for a dual-Opteron system with RHEL, it's not one of the big RISC-based AIX workstations. Granted, it does come with 8GB of RAM, Ultra320 SCSI, and a ridiculous display card (3DLabs Wildcat Realizm 800).

Frankly though, I think the Mac looks cooler.

Re:Modified kernel?

[Bill Hayden]

And has anyone tried sticking in a pre-release DVD of Windows Vista, holding down the D key, and seeing what happens?

I tried a few times to compose an answer to that question without being sarcastic, but I couldn't pull it off. In short, yea, pretty much everybody who has spent 2 seconds thinking about Windows on Mac has thought of this idea and/or tried it. I'll just point you to here, here, and here. I'm sorry to be pissy, but the forums where people are actually trying to work on this problem are so cluttered with this "novel" idea that it gets really annoying after a while.

So as not to be a complete rant, I'll explain why this doesn't currently work. The Mac uses the new UGA standard for video cards, and does not support VGA at all. Windows (even Vista) only supports VGA (or UGA with VGA fallback, which Mac doesn't have either). There are also drive partitioning issues, among other problems. Basically, any feature that Apple didn't need for booting MacOS was left out of the EFI, including BIOS-compatibility mode as you noted. No current PC hardware is so legacy-free. However, with a bit of massaging, the Vista install disc does boot, you just can't see anything on the screen. When Vista gets a real UGA driver, we should be able to make quite a bit more progress.