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iMac Linux
slim sent us
linkage to a detailed guide to
installing Linux on an iMac.
" There are comments about LinuxPPC R4 and R5, but
its come a long way. If those iMacs were a few hundred
bucks cheaper I still think they'd be fun thinnish
linux workstations. And the pretty colors.
Posted by wonderpop:
Try this one on for size. Adobe Photoshop 4.01, running an action involving mode conversion, shadows, blurs, and a whole slew of other things, on a 50 meg file, on a Compaq 400, G3/233(basically an iMac), G3/300 and G3 350, all configured as close to equal as possibel(RAM, cache, HD, etc.). The Compaq lost, by a significant margin, to all the machines, including the 233, whixh, as I stated before, is basically a Rev A & B iMac. Now then, I know this isn't Linux, but I have LinuxPPC running on my machine(a G3/233, coincidentally) at home, and it SCREAMS. Not to mention that other forms of Unix, such as NetBSD, run at a fast clip, on an SE/30, which came out in the eighties.
USB keyboard and mouse work fine.
USB is (and has been) working fine under NetBSD.
On the other hand, it makes a kick-ass second computer, because it has built in 10/100 Base-T ethernet. Hook it up with a crossover cable, and set it copying overnight, and use the more traditional ports of the older machine to attach a zip, Jaz, Superdisk, or whatever. This saves the added expense of a floppy drive, scsi, ADB, and serial ports, which you don't need if you have another ethernet-enabled computer. Remember also that pretty much everything it comes with on its hard drive is on the included CD's.
The only reason you Linuxers need fast CPUs at all is for recompiling your kernel every night, or for playing those unaccelerated X-windows games.
I have two 68030-based machines that are plenty fast enough for 80% of what I do, one Mac and one BSD box. I have a PPC 601 and a P5-90 that are plenty fast enough in MacOS or Windows (resp.) for 95% of what I do. Oh, yeah, they both run Linux in alternate HD partitions. Linux is fast enough too.
If an iMac isn't fast enough for 100% of your computing needs, my friend, you are not sane.
I agree. Yes, PPC machines are more expensive and may not run your favorite games and desktop productivity apps, but if you need speed, RISC is the way to go. For a lot of scientific computing and engineering applications the PPC chip is vastly superior to anything in the Intel world. True, the imac is not very expandable, but I really don't think too many people will be running servers off of them - there are plenty of G3 towers for that. What this lack of expandability does do is give you a small transportable desktop quality machine which does FFTs damn fast and doesn't cost more than $1000 -which is very good thing. Now that it runs Linux (and MacOS X) it has the stability to be used all over the place.
More importantly, I believe that supporting alternative CPU architechtures is just as important as supporting alternative OSes. If Intel had no competition, it is doubtful that they would be upping chip speeds and dropping prices like they are. And RISC and other architechtures provide fundamental advantages over CISC. The advances in RISC and high-performance chips work their way into every desktop in a few years (backside caches, pipeling, etc...) with an Imac you can have these advantages NOW and at a reasonable price.
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BSD is here for iMac. ./ folks?) Mac OS X Server runs quite well. It's BSD 4.4.
While the iMac isn't officially supported for this use by Apple (and since when was that a big deal to
If 640 KB isn't big enough for 100% of your computing needs, my friend, you are not sane.