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NetBSD released for iMacs and G3s
ChristianC writes "The latest release of NetBSD, 1.4, now supports iMacs and G3s. This is particulary interesting, as OS X is based on various BSD distributions, so NetBSD and OS X will be very similar under the hood. "
It's NetBSD!
/begin{grumpy_old_man_mode}
Can't you read?
/end{grumpy_old_man_mode}
Just a question. Now that NetBSD is supported on my Power Computing Powerwave, am I better of running NetBSD instead of Linux as far as reliability is concerned.
Informed opinions please.
If Linux does not run reliable on your system then dump it and go for NetBSD.
I've always found that both Linux and *BSD's have their place... (tho the effort often seems duplicated or triplicated when looking at the BSD's)
Linux is more of a continual effort to bring new features, and experimental stuff to the os.
*BSD's seem to stick with what they have for the most part and perfect it... so if they have all that you need or want, I would suggest *BSD.
On the other hand (left I guess) if your one of the guys that gets a thrill out of getting something to work, Linux is probably best...
on a very notable note... alot of the remote bugs aren't present in *BSD's..
for me they are all just another toy (in this game called life)
Its good to see more unix support on the Mac. But, I don't think Im giving my PC just yet.
/CTCP VERSION BillGates
-BillGates- VERSION X-Chat 0.9.4 By ZED - Linux 2.2.9 [i686/400MHZ] : http://xchat.linuxpower.org
This is cool news.
Linux/PPC (really awesome, have seen it)
and now NetBSD/PPC enters the arena. Apple
is doomed now with their MacOS. The days
that OS Vendors charge absurd prices for
their products are gone!!
The real edge is , that even the hardware
platform isn't an issue more nowadays.
OSS Os-es, run any hardware. Thats somethin
Comercial OS vendors like Microsoft can stick
in their ass.
Runs on more platforms then Linux does? You sure? Hold on, im going to check the webpages right now- brb.
Linux:
i386 (intel family)
SPARC 4m
SPARC 64 (Ultrasparc)
Alpha
m68k (Amiga, atari, mac, NeXT, Dragon Ball)
StrongARM
IBM/Motorola G3 (Apple Mac, RS/6000)
MIPS (SGI, others)
PA-RISC
VAX (still porting?) - as in not finished?
CL-PS7110l (palm top, still porting?) 0 as in not finsihed?
AP-1000+ (This fuji supercomputer thingy)
There are others as well.
NetBSD:
Alpha
m68k
arm32
powerPC
i386
ns32k
mips
Sparc 4m/3m
Sparc 64
vax
I'd say they're about even. remember, there are subgroups within each arch. In that case that gives NetBSD 21 (taken from the NetBSD homepage), and Linux (??) somebody more knowledgeabout then I can answer the Linux one.
Oh well, just thought I'd point this out.
not anonymous: gusmaster@mediaone.net
Thanks for the correction. I spelled awesome wrong too.;)
or NetBSD/macppc ? ;->
hrm. Why is NetBSD/i386 called i386 ?
Is it not NetBSD/x86 or NetBSD/{3456}86 , no ?
take it easy folks.
NetBSD 1.4 was relased on May 12.? list=port-macppc
:-/
For the installation question you should
subscribe to port-macppc and ask your question
there (I don't have a iMAC, so I can't help you.)
http://www.NetBSD.org/cgi-bin/subscribe_list.pl
Well, documentation out of sync with reality is a know problem with NetBSD. Like most OSS projects it's hard to find people volunteering in writing and maintaining better documentations...
But NetBSD people (AFAIK them) are very friendly, if you mail them enough information about your problems, I'm very sure they will help you.
Well since you count the VAX port of Linux, you should also add the sh3 port of NetBSD.
l
(Ok, NetBSD actually runs on sh3...).
And now go back and erase all ports that are not really usable...
BTW: There's a good page about this:
http://www.cynic.net/~cjs/computer/os-ports.htm
Big apps start much faster with UVM comparing to old Mach VM.
> Get your fresh, hot kernels right here!
> World domination: coming soon to a computer near you!
No, thank you. I want to dominate all computers near me and nobody to dominate the world.
Linux and Unix in general (especially on x86 hardware) is difficult to install first time. If you don't want to learn how unix/linux works and spend time how to set it up, don't. No-one actually said you had to do Linux. IMHO, linux if really easy once you know what you are doing. However I will admit linux setup could be a hell of a lot better.
Half the problems are due to the huge variety of hardware on the market for the x86 computer, and that most manufacturers don't write drivers for linux/unix. Thus not as much hardware is supported under linux.
Another problem is that people actually have to go through linux installation. Computers are still typically sold with Windows pre-installe. They use hardware that isn't supported under linux (like winmodems). Thus, when people try to install linux on their machines, they end up with horror stories of not knowing how to install it, trying to use unsupported devices, not even knowing what hardware is in the machine. Whenever I set up a linux box, I build it with the knowledge of what hardware linux supports. It sounds like you had one of these unplesant unsupported hardware problems.
I agree that linux probably won't ever entirely replace Windows/MacOS (at least in the near future).
Your final comment is uncalled for, since when has it been acceptable to take a cheap shot at people who know how to use linux.
Beau Kuiper
ekuiperba@cc.BROKE.curtin.edu.au
(remove my finacial status before using email address)
Any word on when the "Offical" CDs for 1.4 will be out?
www.netbsd.org says to download it from the 'net -
I don't have the bandwidth for such things.
Thanks.
why little rc files all over /etc? because if you know what you're doing, it actually makes it *easier* to maintain the system since those files are in mostly well-defined places--not some bloated "registry."
it's just a different model from what you're used to. pretty much the same as switching from your favorite editor to another one during the course of the day as an experiment and feeling like someone cut your hands off because it seems..awkward.
besides, i don't like spending 25% of my day manipulating a GUI when i'm doing system administration. =)
do stuff like account creation (on the order of 1000s) through perl and you'll appreciate the text-style configs of unix. i had a summer job at a place where the idiots there were NT peoples trying to get into unix. on their authentication box, they were using admintool under solaris to generate thousands of ISP accounts! i about laughed in their face..
give RH or some other distro enough time..someone will come up with a decent GUI based administration tool for configuring your sound card...
> ...was used in the Tandy 2000 computer in the mid-80s.
And in the PC Tech X16, a true "PC" in the IBM-compatible ISA bus, boots PC-DOS, etc sense, unlike the uncompatible Tandy. This was about the same time (maybe slightly earlier - it was one of the first IBM XT clones around, even before the Taiwanese 8088s)
(anyone remember Micro Cornucopia?)
If I walk into a new job, no matter what OS is
on the box on my desk, if there's no $80k/year
geek around to fix it, the first thing I'll use
it for is to print up my resume to send around
elsewhere...
Those geeks are absolutely necessary whether the
users get Windows or *Nix or Macs. I'll go home
and fiddle my system -- but at work I don't want
to jerk around with it.
> Since UVM is better than the Mache derived VM FreeBSD and OpenBSD still have, wich is better :-).
:)
> than the simple VM Linux has, this brings NetBSD in front. (Well, at least in terms of memory
Oh yeah? Well, Linux doesn't take any TLB flushes when a user process makes a system call and the kernel has to access physical ram. So there
The NetBSD people are exceedingly nice and helpful. The Linux dudes tend to be spoilt little brats with a bad case of megalomania. You decide.
it's hard to say that, since the Mac and the MacOS are one product.
Yeah, money made from upgrades doesn't balance out the cost of development, but there wouldn't be much mac hardware sold without the MacOS.
-David Krauss
> Well, Linux doesn't take any TLB flushes when a user process makes a system call and the kernel has to access :)
> physical ram. So there
Well, put some load onto a linux box and see it crawl.
>Since UVM is better than the Mache derived VM FreeBSD and OpenBSD still have
What do you mean Mach derived VM? You seem angry that NetBSD has bad things said about it in comparison to FreeBSD, which is how a lot of FreeBSD users feel about linux. Statements like "most modern VM in the OSS world" are fairly subjective. Do you even know how FreeBSD's VM works (I don't)? It is always mentioned as totally incredible and such, and responsible for FreeBSD's "grace under pressure."
I personally use FreeBSD 3.2-STABLE right now on my Celeron, but I know that NetBSD has been an incredible source of help to FreeBSD. USB stack was ported from NetBSD. The source of some of the drivers is the same on both OSes. NetBSD definitely doesn't lag behind FreeBSD from the info I get, rather the OSes (since they have different goals) improve on different things at different times. I'm planning to try NetBSD if (when) I get any hardware that doesn't run FreeBSD (or, if I get an Alpha b4 FreeBSD/Alpha is deemed production quality).
Question though: which version of gcc does NetBSD 1.4 use? I know that FreeBSD -current is on egcs (kinda excited about that).
----
Congratulations Doug Rabson.
Thanks for the info - I'll watch that puppy.
"Linus decides" is democratic?!?
NetBSD page is much more specific about their ports. They don't just say "It suns on mips," it tells you specific machines. It even mentions DEC Alpha "machine types," which I believe NetBSD supports more of. The page also separates experimental ports too. I mean, you could say Linux runs on a PowerPC chip, but will it run on the BeBox? (But why would you remove BeOS?) NetBSD can run PowerPC on some machines, but BeBox port is marked experimental. You can tell from the webpage that NetBSD is really concerned about portability and hardware support.
1. AFAIK (I may be wrong) all *BSD had used nearly the same Mach based VM. Since I've used NetBSD before it switched to UVM I think I can say (from a users point of view) UVM is *much* better. This doesn't mean Mach's VM is bad, but UVM is just *MUCH* better.
2. There's a lot of code sharing between all *BSDs. And that is a dammned good thing IMHO.
3. NetBSD uses now egcs (1.4 and -current as of today: egcs 1.1.2 relase).
egcs 1.1.2 doesn't produce any better (in most cases quite worse) code for K6*. Since I boycott Intel I don't know for celeron, probably different.
I've tried 1.1.2 + those pgcc patches. Much faster code, but since I've experienced some strange code generation bugs (well, I think so) I backed it out. I hope egcs 1.2 will be better...
1.4 :egcs 1.1.1 -release
on -current:
gcc version egcs-2.91.66 19990314 (egcs-1.1.2 release)
Yes it is, and that's why they are treated
as one port. Check it out:
http://www.netbsd.org/Ports/macppc/
Yes I know. But the link from the poster above me explains it isn't "properly" supported. But can you really say linux has been ported to the BeBox when it only runs uniprocessor, just because it runs LinuxPPC? NetBSD project actually points to specific machines, and is very clear about which ones are stable or in development.
saying it supports iMacs and G3's is redundant becuase an iMac has a G3 processor in it. It's not really redundant since G3 is a more generally category. So if you say it supports "G3's and iMacs," that could be considered redundant.
Aren't Apples big boxes also called "(Power Macintosh) G3"?
yes
> Since UVM is better than the Mache derived VM
> FreeBSD and OpenBSD still have
That is just wrong. OpenBSD just has the same
VM as NetBSD. John Dyson wrote a new VM
for FreeBSD long ago. As I understand it,
NetBSD took a lot of elements from the FreeBSD,
but made it so it would work on more platforms.
Troll away you pc bigot. If you knew your cheese you wouldnt post anything quite so ignorant. I enjoy linux on any platform available to me, without the blinkers that come standard with either pc or mac bigotry.
I suggest you just run your 486 and be happy with it. They go well if you don't want fast X.
The folks over at NetBSD however, would NOT mark the BeBox supported unless it was really supported, ie, SMP and anything else that goes beyond making it "a usable system." As a general rule, if it boots linux, they say it's supported, but that is not the case with NetBSD.
At this point, people get mad at this post.
Please continue.
So there is no redundancy.
Cause Be doesn't really care.. they've pretty much dumped PPC, and just blamed it on Apple cause they don't like Apple.
And support for IDE devices in NetBSD is much better (thanks Manuel!). On NetBSD even my old
(pseudo)ATAPI CD-ROMS work without problems.
They failed on OBSD and one of them even on Linux
(on MB with SiS chipset).
Besides NetBSD supports (U)DMA devices.
BTW when Theo is going to remove this FUD about NetBSD/i386 ?
http://www.openbsd.org/i386.html
especially about ATAPI CD-ROMS and ISA cards with
more than 16M RAM
Since FUD is OpenBSDs real strength (and not security) I doubt that.
Maybe because it's (still) weekend. Wait for monday.
Crap, just like NetBSD's IDE support.
Since nothing is wrong with NetBSD's IDE subsystem I see we agree at this point.
Yes, in 1.4 is the new UVM. (After a year or so in the experimental "NetBSD current" branch.)
:-).
:-)
From my experience (old)VM to UVM is like night to day: page faults on our server went down to less than 1/4 after we have upgraded to 1.4.
System even "feels" faster (especially on old "handicaped" hardware like my old RISC PC).
Since UVM is better than the Mache derived VM FreeBSD and OpenBSD still have, wich is better than the simple VM Linux has, this brings NetBSD in front. (Well, at least in terms of memory management
NetBSD was first with working USB, NetBSD has the most modern VM in the OSS world and NetBSD even supports my ALi chipset better than Linux!
(The story: My Linux using (and advocating) brother has the AT version of my board and he said, Linux 2.2.I-dont-know-anymore doesn't support IDE-UDMA with this board.)
This should show people that all the FUD about missing support and lagging behind FreeBSD and no new features, NetBSD is dieing, etc is nonsense.
Yeah sure, once someone like me who WANTS
to use linux has an easy time configuring
and setting it up and getting everything to
work, maybe. But that day will probably never
happen.
Grab a notebook, go outside. Randomly say you
are doing a survey and ask the first 20 people
you see passing by if they know what The windows
OS is, Ask 20 others if they know what an imac is,
then ask 20 other random people if they know
what linux is. Compare, and understand.
Linux is still a bear to install. I just got
Suse Linux 6.1 which made it a lot easier, but
its still hard. I was messing around thinking
I'd have to download and purchase OSS when
I suddenly came upon a section in the SuSe manual
which was almost in a language that was easily
understood. I tried it a couple different ways
and finally found that with one line I could
get my SB PCI 128 (ensoniq or someting chipset)
to work fine in linux.
Of course the next thing I discovered is for
some reason my memorex cdrom recordable/rewriteable 1622 won't play audio
cds in linux. It does under windows easily
but after scouring the net this seems to be a
problem with it, I don't know why. But mp3's are
fun.
The point is that I just screw around with Linux, I don't program - I don't know how not
even in the simplest language. I'm just a user.
And I have trouble in linux sometimes, but to
my friends and family, I'm a computer god.
I could walk into their house, install windows
95, set up their modem and sound card and every
thing, and they'd lick my boots and worship me.
But I'd have trouble doing even those simple
things under Linux. It might even be impossible
depending on the hardware they had.
It takes a whole lot of people to make the
mac OS and Windows OS so even a moron can use
them. Those people make a lot of money, the
OS costs money. It takes a whole lot of geeky
people to make linux, those people make it
so they (the geeky people) can use it. AND THAT
is why it fails. (Of course it never fails since
it is free. I mean, if everyone suddenly did
use linux who'd win? no one owns it!)
In order to use windows or mac at work, you need
maybe a couple people who know just a little bit
more, to keep it running. In order to use linux
at work you need at least one guy making
$80,000 a year( or more). That guy can smugly laugh at the people working there how they need
him to set things up for them, but they also
laugh at him how he is a huge geek with no life.
$89.95 is an absurd price for a product that costs millions to develop?
Amazing.
If dropped from higher altitude nothing can withstand the might of a VAX.
k top10.html
I found this goody:
http://world.std.com/~bdc/projects/vaxen/vaxgee
"It doesn't matter to you if someone else's computer is faster because you know your system could smash theirs flat if it fell over on it."
It was also used in the Hewlett Packard OmniGo a few years back.
All it takes is one person to write some stupid GUI to parse an RC file and create dialog boxes and radio buttons for it.
:)
I'm not flaming you, but Windowmaker is a perfect example of this. Each and every one of those wonderful textfiles, since version 0.20, has had an equal and usable GUI to wrap around it, providing full functionality at the point, click, and destroy level.
It's just a matter of time before enough programs come with a gui config, and write that config to a text file. I have tons of programs that do this already (licq, windowmaker, netscape, xfmail..)
It's not the file format, it's the usability layer. I wish people would recognize this.
After all, if windows programs required you to edit the registry instead of using a gui config that's provided by the program, people would be flocking to linux in droves.
-Erik-
Well, I'm not sure, but NetBSD/x86 would imply support for all x86 chips, including 8086 and 80286 (yes, there was an 80186, but I don't think it was ever used as a PC CPU).
--
Get your fresh, hot kernels right here!
>Apple is doomed now with their MacOS.
Ummm, try publishing a commercial-quality magazine on something other than the Mac. I've been doing a lot of research on color management, and the Mac OS is still *light years* ahead of even Windows... I don't know when you'll see something like ColorSync for Linux, but until we do, we'll be using our Macs for professional color scanning and color correction, graphics, and publishing.
...end of transmission...
Isn't supporting imacs and G3s a little redundant?
=)
I'm not a smorgasbord.
at least in theory. They're relatively easy to program and understand, and in an emergency the hand-editability becomes a great asset.
But programmers forget one problem: the average person. The average person is not a programmer. They get no masochistic joy from hunting through cryptically-named directories to find the file, change it, and then restart the program, especially a big one like X.
This wouldn't be a problem is most programmers provided other means of configuring the program. But in the *nix crowds, they don't tend to do that (it's getting more popular but is still relatively rare). That's why things like iceconf, e-conf, and wmakerconf are getting so popular; I don't want to have to hunt down, for example, each of the config files WindowMaker uses (~/GNUstep/Defaults/WindowMaker, ~/GNUstep/Defaults/WMWindowAttributes, ~GNUstep/Library/WindowMaker/Menu, and so forth), learn the different syntaxes on each file, and hand-edit them. And the hell of it is, I do know what I'm doing with those files; I've done it before.
(By the way, WM fans, please don't flame me for this one; I use WindowMaker every day; I'm just using its multiplicity of config files as an example).
Having multiple config files is a Good Thing; certainly better than having them in a Registry. But it needs to be done right; put them all in a consistent, well-defined place, like the Preferences folder in MacOS, so you at least know where to look for them (if you have lots of them; make a subdirectory of this place and put them in there to keep it organized; but at least get them in one good spot). And to all the coders out there, add a somewhat more convenient way of configuring programs to supplement the config files; your users will thank you for it.
Or they just don't want to support the couple of engineers needed to get any of the specs they could possibly need from the LinuxPPC, NetBSD, or Darwin source code and keep it legal to make their software proprietary (still a possibility, but it involves cleanroom techniques, which means sacrificing several engineers since they have to document the specs but then cannot code).
This is a bit of annoyance, since so many people seem to think the iMac was such a grand leap forward, that it's entirely unlike other Macintoshes. For a while, the page for Yahoo! Pager referred to "iMac OS 8.5," and the morons at Bell Atlantic tried to tell some poor saps that iMacs were of fundamentally different hardware.
So the better headline would have been "higher-end Macs" rather than "iMacs and G3s."
damned vulpine http://sb.drtwister.com/
Mea culpa,
J.
damned vulpine http://sb.drtwister.com/
...was used in the Tandy 2000 computer in the mid-80s.
The NetBSD project demo'd NetBSD on the iMac last week at USENIX. They had a booth over in the vendors area where they were showing this spiffy iMac along with an old VaxStation or somesuch -- this iMac probably outperformed that VAX 20:1... hehe.
Nice guys too.
I'd be looking more at what you want to do - AFAIK, the *BSD's have more emphasis on network throughput (ref: ftp.cdrom.com), whilst linux supports everything under the sun 8-)
:-)
:-)
The NetBSD project doesn't state "Of course it runs NetBSD" for nothing. That OS is about the most portable *BSD around, and this is their primary objective (along with "correctness", whatever that means). I'd say NetBSD probably runs on more hardware platforms than Linux, though it's pretty close race.
NetBSD is a great OS. I run it on my Sun 3/80's because nothing else will , reliably anyway. Who wants to run SunOS 4.1.1?
I'd say the primary difference between Linux and the *BSD's is not technical, because they're both pretty damn good, but one of licensing terms. The BSD's allow one to take the source and rework it into a completely commercial project, thus allowing re-distribution without releasing source. This is in stark contrast to Linux, released under the GPL, which requires those who both derive from from a GPL'd source tree AND distribute a new product based on said derivative, must also release the new source tree.
I'm not a licensing zealot, so I think there's a place for both licensing schemes. For example, I suspect the *BSD's would make a better OS than Linux for commercial embedded devices simply because of their licensing terms. However, as an end user who prefers keeping a code base to my OS free and open, I prefer using an OS released under the GPL for my day to day work... so I run Linux on my PC's -- unless I don't have a choice (like with my 3/80's), then I'll run whatever's available. Just a personal preference which says nothing about the quality of the BSD codebase. Those who hack BSD because they prefer the additional freedom of the BSD license have every justification to do so. In fact, the success of BSD in attracting quality developers is in and of itself a validation of their licensing and development model, just as is the success of Linux.
There. That's about as Politically Correct as I can get.
Being glad for more UNIX "support" is good, but not really a concern. After all, the next major release of the Mac OS will essentially be a UNIX, complete with the command line, unofficial (but virtually 100%) POSIX compliance, and pretty good Mac OS backwards compatibility. Or didn't you know?
"Microsoft killed my company, I hold a personal grudge. I don't use Microsoft products and neither should you."-JWZ
I recently bought and iMac, and, of course, put Linux on it. (Yellowdog, if anyone cares). Now that FreeBSD run's on it, it may be a good incentive to play with it, as I don't have any non-important machines on which I can mess around.
Cool.
--Rob
Comics:
Sluggy.com - It rocks my nads.
Schlock Mercenary.
It's called a Thinko 8-)
--Rob
Comics:
Sluggy.com - It rocks my nads.
Schlock Mercenary.
Well, my main mail/web server running 2.0.35 was up for 220 days (until 24 hours ago, when a hardware failure took out the root/usr drive). I haven't used NetBSD (see, I got it right that time 8-) yet, so, we'll see what happens.
But, on that subject, the open source Unices are getting to the very-low bug level, and they're getting quite hard to crash from a software perspective.
I'd be looking more at what you want to do - AFAIK, the *BSD's have more emphasis on network throughput (ref: ftp.cdrom.com), whilst linux supports everything under the sun 8-)
--Rob
Comics:
Sluggy.com - It rocks my nads.
Schlock Mercenary.
I dunno who said this works on iMac's, but I think they're lying. If I explicitly boot the kernel (bf=/tftp/netbsd), it loads, and the first thing it does is say 'USB Not found' -- considering that the iMac is -based- around USB, it's not going to work all that well..
False advertising? 8-)
--Rob
Comics:
Sluggy.com - It rocks my nads.
Schlock Mercenary.
A few questions.. Why are the datestamps on all the files May 11?
/usr/mdec/ofwboot.elf as the actual bootloader (That's kinda useful, having the network loader packaged up inside the install. Sigh) - BUT, it's not there. Not at all. There's a file there that's called 'ofwboot', which I thought would be the one, but it seems like the Mac's OF doesn't like it as it says 'unrecognized Client Program format' (case exactly as displayed). I had a quick search through altavista and found precisely zero hits on 'ofwboot.elf' and zero on the message above.
Am I looking in the wrong spot? I went happily to my usual mirror (ftp2.au.netbsd.org), thought there was some NetBSD secret that files are hidden for 2 months before being put on show? Anyway....
I have an iMAC (as mentioned above), and I'm trying to get the bastard to boot. Not being at all new to bootp, and extremely comfortable with it, I've fired it up, and set up a root filesystem, etc. This is where the clues are needed.
The page here hints slightly that I need the file
Help?
--Rob
Comics:
Sluggy.com - It rocks my nads.
Schlock Mercenary.
The eMate is a strongarm based system, and NetBSD has been ported to lots of ARM based systems. I'd suggest the only real problem would be the lack of mass storage.
I doubt that this means OpenBSD will support the iMac. The kernel has bears little in common with NetBSDs any more. They may be working on their own iMac support, of course, but NetBSD's working on a platform tells you nothing about whether OpenBSD will run.
By the way: I know the OpenBSD people will claim otherwise, but NetBSD is more or less as secure as OpenBSD. We generally just aren't as loud about it. They sometimes have bugs we don't have, we sometimes have bugs they don't have. In general, NetBSD is very secure.
A Paraphrase/Interpretation of Be's Position:
-----------------------------------------------
*BSD and Linux developers don't get irate phone calls if a chipset revision breaks the OS release on new machines sold under the old name. You see, Be-on-PPC was sold/given mostly to people who were using Macs. Accordingly, they expect the OS to "just work", and get irate if it doesn't.
The compatibility expectations of Wintel users adopting an alternative OS and of Unix users wanting to run something on a Power Mac are lower. Accordingly, Be not running on your oddball-clone-PC or Linux not running on your undocumented-chipset-revision-G3
aren't seen as deep failures of the OS vendor, but a ordinary (if irritating) phenomenon.
Accordingly, Be won't support the new Apple computers until Apple provides the necessary documentation.
----------------------------------------------
Actually, the NetBSD system is superior. The VM system for NetBSD was recently replaced with a new design that is superior to the Mach-based VM design present in the MacOS X implementation. I am under the impression that the new VM design is in this port, someone from NetBSD can verify this. Also, NetBSD traces its lineage to the 4.4BSD Lite release whereas MacOS X traces back to the Next implementation which uses the 4.4BSD server on top of the Mach ``microkernel''. These two implementations are significantly different. The main similarity is at the kernel API level.
Frank W. Miller
This also mens that the next OpenBSD 2.6 will likely support the iMac. FYI: OpenBSD is a security focused BSD that broke off from the NetBSD team in 1995.
xm@GeekMafia.dynip.com [http://GeekMafia.dynip.com/]
If your brother happens to have an ALi 15xx chipset, the support's in 2.3.x, and there are patches for 2.2.x. (Probably in Alan Cox's 2.2.x patch tree, before they were moved out and into 2.3.x). Obviously, 2.3.x is the development branch, and the support is labelled as being in development, but they seem to work pretty well by now, and the Mandrake 6.0 distro includes a 2.2.9 Kernel RPM with the ALi 15xx support patch backfolded in.
Choice of masters is not freedom.
Or they got all pissy 'cause Apple bought NeXT instead of Be...
-------------------------------------
- if the alternative is FREE
-- your knees hurt, don't they?
nah, nevermind. /. effect might be too much for the poor newtons...
-- your knees hurt, don't they?
I always thought apple lost money on MacOS, and their entire profit came from selling hardware.
Opinionated Law Student Strikes Again!
So there are other OSes on the new G3's and iMacs...so why can't "Be" get with it and get BeOS onto the new G3's...I have BeOS on my PC and love it....it would be even better it I could get it on my G3 also...
Actually, you can carry it around and serve your website from it as long as you can get a modem or ethernet connection. Matthew Vaughn has written a web server for Newton devices running NewtonOS 2.x. Of course it runs a bit faster on a 166mhz StrongArm MP2100 than the 25mhz eMate, but the eMate looks way cooler.
Newton Personal Data Sharing (the web server) can be found at http://come.to/lightyear_media
Since the Newt OS is so embedded, I don't think that anyone has tried a *nix port yet. There was a GNUton effort to reverse engineer the system that started a year or so back when they were discontinued, but I don't think it has gone anyhwere.
Thanx for the mention.. I'm the "Matthew Vaughn" that wrote NPDS and I guess I have hit it big-time since I got mentioned on /. !!!
There are a couple guys who use my system to carry wireless web servers in the LA area and one guy who works for NSF is taking his server to the South Pole this spring...
It would be pretty funky carrying that around and running my web server from it.
Well, maybe not a Syntax Error... More like a logic error, unless you mean to send the IRC nick "VERSION" the "BillGates" CTCP message.
^ Now we're talking.
Just doing my duty as the Nit-picking Policeman of Inconsequential or Irrelevant Things.
If a BeBox runs LinuxPPC then I would say linux has been ported to it. It may not fully support all the hardware, but it supports enough to make a usable system.
The NetBSD 1.4 release uses egcs on all platforms. NetBSD -current has been using egcs for some significant time :)
:)
The Mach VM system is a general purpose system, not designed specificcally for unix.
FreeBSD took turned it into a high quality, performant system, and by all accounts it took one hell of a lot of work.
Chuck Craynor specifically designed UVM for unix VM needs; it has some optimisations and extra features which are not feasible in a Mach derived system.
FreeBSD has a UBC (Unified Buffer Cache), which is still under development for UVM, which gives FreeBSD a significant advantage in filesystem caching.
By all accounts they are both very good systems,
and both work very well, but I believe the underlying design of UVM is cleaner and better suited to unix. (The NetBSD way
'Linux' runs on more different platforms than NetBSD, but what is 'linux'?
The linux that runs on the palm pilot is a totally different product/source tree that just happens to be called 'linux'. Even the sparc and ultrasparc linux sports have split the source tree (though they are working on merging them back).
The different linux source trees can release at different times. This makes it much easier for each platform to develop at its own pace, but makes extra work synchronising between source trees.
NetBSD has one central source tree, and has to synchronise all platforms to release at the same time (sixteen architectures as of 1.4). The fact it can do this is a credit to the almost fanatical desire for clean code, particuarly given the massive developer base available to linux.
I dont believe _any_ OS supports anything like the number of platforms as NetBSD out of the same source tree.