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Overview of Linux on Macintosh Hardware
1millionmhz writes "Upside Today is running a piece on the relationship between Apple and the various groups creating Linux distributions for the PowerPC platform, including MkLinux, LinuxPPC and Yellow Dog Linux. Interviews with main figures from each company and covers how open source development model does an end-around on Apple's efforts to "keep Linux at arm's length." "
This is what I thought, too, but from Debian's PowerPC port page:
Status
Debian/PowerPC is considered to be stable as of February, 1998, and is currently being consolidated for release. More than
90% of the Debian packages are available, with the remaining packages being processed. Debian/PowerPC will be officially
released with the next version of Debian (2.2; code-named potato).
Now -- it's possible that the first major PowerPC release will be finicky until they get all the bugs shaken out, but it looks like they're coming along pretty well. Unless you're working on the port and know something I don't. (I just hopped over to the page so I don't know what's going on on the lists)
Daniel
Hurry up and jump on the individualist bandwagon!
Um (donning rubber waders and gloves) you wouldn't happen to have the addresses of those dumpsters, would you? ;)
On the one hand, they have a pretty solid, Mach/BSD-based server OS (MacOS X Server) that includes all the essentials for Internet operation, runs MacOS apps, and has a client version on the way. And they've released significant portions of it as pseudo-Open Source. They hope all this will sell more Macs, and give them a free development team for additional services.
Then again, they sell a proprietary, single-tasking (Any system that stops processing when the mouse is held down is single-tasking, AFAIC) OS with loads of chrome on proprietary hardware.
People often forget that the only way (technically) to legally buy a copy of the MacOS is to have a Mac to run it on. And every Mac includes the MacOS, like it or not. Apple doesn't lose any sales up-front when a user buys Linux for their Mac, but they do lose the upgrade revenue stream. This obviously concerns them more than a little: Apple has made quite a bit of revenue off their more frequent MacOS upgrades since they started charging for them. It's quite profitable.
In the end, Apple has to decide whether Open Source is something to embrace fully or shy away from. They seem, in fits and starts, to be heading towards it - ultimately I think they'll open up more of the OS in an effort to wedge into as much software market share as possible. They may even plunge back into the clone market now that Apple has the ability to churn higher-performance designs quickly. One of the reasons they bailed out of cloning was that Apple took so long to design system in the old days that clone makers could easily beat them to market with the super high-performance systems that generate all the revenue. Power Computing did very nicely for a while on that model. Now Apple can ship the fastest systems as the CPUs are ready, and they make an increasing percentage of profit from software. The process is interesting to watch.
What is saving the Linux/PowerPC vendors right now is that a Mac is far from an ideal Linux platform - it's relatively expensive and non-expandable for the MIPS compared to a cheap PIII system that'll run the same OS. For the most part, Macs lose as a Linux platform, so Apple isn't losing too much software profit to the Linux vendors (remember, the upgrades cost money now!). If they were losing more, Apple would squash them like bugs.
- -Josh Turiel
-- Josh Turiel
"2. Do not eat iPod Shuffle."
For a few months now, I've been booting into LinuxPPC or MacOS as it suits my mood, and I'm pretty happy with it. But there's no way I can format my MacOS partitions and run Linux alone. I'm going to be dual booting for a long time to come.
I have to admit that I never used Linux much until then, but I'd been working professionally on Solaris for years (so flame me to a crisp, dear Slashdotters). I was excitedly looking forward to Linux, and have found it exhilerating. I've never had so much powerful software on a single installation working with Solaris, and some programs seem to run faster on my 300 Mhz PowerMac 6500 than on many Sun machines. Linux also seems to be making better use of the hardware than MacOS does, as well.
But there is no way I could dispense with MacOS now, probably not ever. Although I recognize that support for peripheral hardware under Linux has gotten very good over the years, it's not even close to meeting my needs. I have a Sagem Spiga for networking, an ISDN TA that runs under the Geoport protocol. It's not supported under Linux, and may never be, so I have no networking under Linux (try to imagine that). Sooner or later I'll have to shell out some $$ for a new solution. I still haven't figured out how to get my Epson 600 color printer to work (the LinuxPPC Faq-o-matic allegedly has a solution, but it does nothing for me). And I don't have the first idea how to get my scanner and CD recorder working under Linux.
None of this is ever a problem with MacOS. You pop in the CD, install the driver, and you're done.
LinuxPPC is also simply lacking where some of my software needs are concerned. Just this week I formatted and printed a stack of announcements with QuarkXPress; I couldn't even consider such a project with Linux. And while word processing apps for Linux are getting better, they still can't compete with the options available for MacOS.
I can understand Slashdotters passionately supporting Linux over MacOS. Believe me, I'm on your side (despite what I've said). Linux is the future and I'm glad I'm on board. But it's far from the point where it can supplant MacOS on my machine. I need both.
Always keep a sapphire in your mind
"I own an Apple and I like the OS, but I beleive Apple's business practices are designed to drain every last cent from the consumers pockets."
...as opposed to those other publicly traded companies that are in business for the good of the common man, right? Your statement about Apple's business practices is basically a crude restatement of what the law requires of every public corporation. Welcome to America :-)
The current thread manager only supports cooperative threads. Previously, 68k threads could be preemptively scheduled, but apparantly even that is gone. The Multiprocessing Services manager lets you create preemptive threads, even on a single processor machine, but these threads can't make system calls.
Of course there are all kinds of tricks apps can play to work well, "even when the mouse is down". Anarchie, a popular FTP client, does a lot of stuff using asynchronous network calls, so it works well in the background. There's also a hack called the "Menutasking Enabler" that lets other apps run while menus are down. I don't know how well it works on recent systems, haven't tried it lately.
Reference to information about threads manager (It also mentions this on page 9 of this PDF.)
Menutasking Enabler
Sun sells to the Slashdot market; Apple, largely, doesn't. In the Slashdot market, the computer is the job, and the customer gets the highest benefit from the most direct possible access to the workings of the machine as a machine.
In Apple's market, the computer is not the job. It is a tool that must support the mental model the customer has of his own job. The customer gets the highest benefit when the computer presents nothing dissonant with (or even irrelevant to) that mental model.
Apple is a systems-integration house that turns out machines that are ruthlessly designed to get the computer out of the way of the customer's work. They do this by integrating the design of the Macintosh from motherboard through OS to GUI design. There is a large market of decent, intelligent people who need such machines. If you don't want to say Apple serves that market well, at least admit they serve it better than anyone else.
The cost of a Macintosh, its usefulness, and its excuse for existing, come from its tight integration. Apple is uninterested in Linux because Linux boxes don't need an Apple Computer, Inc. to build them. Put Linux on a Mac, and you've thrown away most of the value Apple adds (and charges for).
My rule of thumb is that a new Macintosh is wasted running Linux, and any Pentium is wasted running anything else. I'm writing this from a Mac running LinuxPPC, but it's an amortized Mac on a second career.
As the article said, Linux can help get Apple into markets it simply couldn't penetrate. Yes, OS X is UNIX-based, but there is still considerable porting that has to be done in order to make it work, and the app availability is pretty low. Linux, OTOH, has thousands of apps that require minor changes to get running on PPC.
.02
I think LinuxPPC will get Macintoshes into markets Apple never thought unreachable, like, dare I say it, ISPs. Think about it though, with a really good networking OS those Macs would actually make great file / print (SAMBA) / web / mail servers due to their design - small form factor, integrated components, low heat, etc. Sure it wouldn't fit every need, but it looks like a Good Thing to me, that Apple would be a fool to crush. While software sales is important to them, it's pennies compared to what they make on hardware. Crushing LinuxPPC to fend off potential loss in software sales (Forget the gains in higher-margin hardware sales!) would cut off another revenue stream and do them more harm in the long run.
Just my
He may be "clearing talking about MacOS X", but he's equally clearly not talking about MacOS X in his second clause, as he speaks of MacOS X Server in his first clause, and contrasts it in his second clause with the other OS Apple is currenly selling, which is not MacOS X, unless they've started selling the non-server version while I wasn't looking.
Hopefully there is still some ability of recent versions of MacOS to run on some of the clones ( e.g. UMAX, StarMax, Motorola, ...), but outside of the rather small population of "clones," there's hardly any hardware out there that MacOS will run on that isn't from Apple.
I suspect that you've missed the flame wars surrounding contentions over whether successive editions of MacOS will continue to support pre-"G3" PPC Macs...
If you're not part of the solution, you're part of the precipitate.
With published specs out there for PPC CHRP (PPCP) machines out there it's only a matter of time until someone produces a PPC machine on the cheap that will run linux. All you really need is open firmware and you're in business.
With an ATX style MB you'd pay a slight premium over x86 hardware, but they benefits would be great. Lower power consumption and therefore less HEAT. You could put such a beast into a small enclosure with a modest fan to disperse heat.
Imagine running down to your next local computer show and picking up a PPCP mb and ordering a CPU card from Pre-owned electronics and throwing together an SMP PPC machine for under a grand.
The PPC is obviously not perfect, but it's raw number crunching ability makes it a good buy.
Hopefully Apple isn't able to put pressure on anyone to prevent them from doing this.
LK
"Hi. This is my friend, Jack Shit, and you don't know him." - Lord Kano
Both Apple and Sun have powerfull Unix based operating systems marketed as proprietary products. Both make a considerable part of their income from hardware - high performance desktop machines, and in Suns case *really* high performance servers.
One area in which they differ is in their attitude towards Linux. While Apple did have a Linux-like project under their wings, they have abandoned it for their own Mach based OS. Sun meanwhile seem to be on course to make Linux support part of their OS, while encouraging users of older Sun hardware to make the switch to SparcLinux.
Obviously Suns attitude make good business sense - shunt users of old hardware onto a similar platform and get rid of the support headaches. but Sun do seem to have a more supportive attitude all round than Apple. They are far more keen to get people using their hardware, even if it means losing software revenue.
What would be great is if Apple could recognise that they can make much more revenue from hardware than from software. Their support costs would plummet had less software to be rsponsible for. So, until such a time when Apple see the light, they are destined to keep Linux 'at arms length'.
Chris Wareham
I've been told that there's an old DPS wrapper library floating around that should function as a drop-in replacement for Xlib.
Berlin-- http://www.berlin-consortium.org
DNA just wants to be free...
Don't count me in that group. I actually own a PowerBook 3400, iMac, and PowerMac 7200, all running OS 8.6 back at home (to go with my Win98 game PC, my Mandrake-based workstation, and my RedHat 6-based server - yes, I know I need a life!). The 7200 runs my home email server (Eudora's EIMS), and my wife uses the iMac. MacOS isn't bad for what it is, but there are issues that are fundamentally broken in the design that are only now getting dealt with after 15 years (and several false starts). Thread Manager is a decent implementation of preemptive multitasking on a limited basis for the platform, but I'm still from Missouri (the "Show Me" state) when it comes to fixing an issue as fundamental as the mouseclick.
But you're right - Apple's OS has the perception of being a toy, and that probably won't change in many minds even when OS X Workstation comes out, even though it'll be drastically wrong by then.
- -Josh Turiel
-- Josh Turiel
"2. Do not eat iPod Shuffle."
Macs do lose as a Linux platform, but not for the reasons you describe.
One of the biggest obstacles to Macs as a good Linux platform is that the kernel source is *still* not integrated into the main source tree. Every time one asks when this will happen, the answer is always Real Soon Now -- Maybe. Also, there are no good distributions that will run on a Mac. While the LinuxPPC group is to be commended for their kernel efforts, the LinuxPPC distribution can't compare to anything on Intel. Yellow Dog isn't much different; nor is Turbolinux; and Debian is still in the distant future.
The oft-cited non-expandability argument against Mac hardware is ancient history. When was the last time you saw a Mac that didn't have several PCI slots, several DIMM slots, and easy CPU upgrades? It's been years, folks.
I have an old 7500 chassis which has been upgraded through several generations of processors (now running a fast G3). I could put a swell G4 card in here if I cared to spend the money. Can you take a n old Pentium 75 box and put a 550 MHz Pentium III in it without a new motherboard? I hardly think so.