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HowTo on booting Linux on iMac DV's
Shawn writes "We at iMac Linux have been working over the past few days to get the new iMacs to boot Linux. Well, make a long story short we managed to do so last night (really this morning =). There is a HowTo on how to do this, which enables mouse, keyboard, CD-ROM. We're working on getting X setup, and sound."
Not to mention the specs. Built-in DVD (as a slot, not as a tray), decent 3D card, great monitor (awesome picture quality, at 117 Hz), built-in video mirroring, 400 MHz PowerPC G3, 100 MHz bus, 100BaseT Ethernet, Airport. When anyone thinks an iMac, especially in its latest incarnation, is therefore "useless", then they must be beyond bothering to try and convince (though I will anyway ;-) ). Especially when you consider what you get for the price.
I also recently heard the new iMac's Harmon-Kardon speakers. They kick serious tookus for their size. The old iMac speakers sucked, but these are great. :-)
And if I can run Linux on it, so much the better. I like having a choice of OSes, and I happen to use both MacOS and LinuxPPC. I have a lime iMac DV 400 on its way to me, so thanks to the guys at iMacLinux.net, now I can use it with Linux as well.
Mind you, I'm not wild about the iBooks, mainly because of their lack of external video--a major minus for me. I also wish they had G4s in the iMacs and iBooks, but oh, well.
But the main point is this: don't go slagging a computer because you don't happen to like its looks, or imply that it somehow isn't worthy of running Linux. Both are ridiculous things to assert. The iMac's hardware is as demonstrably as good as any on the PC market in its price range, and just because it happens to be bright and colorful doesn't mean that "serious" OSes shouldn't run on it. In fact, the converse is true. ;-)
Anyway. 'Nuff venting my spleen fer t'day. :-)
Ethelred (he of LinuxMac)
Everyone wants to be Ethelred. Even I want to be Ethelred.
More seriously, porting Linux to non-PC platforms, and the iMac in particular, is great for two reasons. One, because they're out there -- people, companies, and schools out there already have the hardware. An Atari Falcon port is not useless if you have the hardware. Two, to get new adopters to try Linux, for which the iMac platform is a good place to look.
And let's not forget the fact that not everyone agrees with your assessment of the iMac. But what I'm trying to say is that it's useful to port Linux to platforms even if they actually are useless, deficient, poorly designed, etc. which the iMac is (in my opinion) not.
The obvious thing would be a nice iso image for burning as a boot cd. Much more room for rescue utils than on a stupid obsolete useless floppy.
I think Apple makes a fine product. My family's business gets approx. 50% of sales through a catalog, and every print company we've used ALWAYS uses mac. There is one computer in the whole joint of our current printer that isn't made by appple. It's stunning to see such market saturation - apple is the standard platform for desktop publishing (as far as I've seen at least and this is coming from experience). It does work very well for it as well
The Mac OS isn't as arcane as Linux, pretty much always a new-bie computer, yet, powerful enough for the most demanding media professionals. I know some trade graphics artists too, and if I sat them down in front of a Linux box they'd cry at the complexity. These are people driven by the creative process, not by the wonderful efficiency and power of an Operating System (Linux for example).
One more point, the iMac line has SAVED Apple. I've made good money on Apple in the stock market too, and I'm sure I wouldn't have been looking at Apple as a profitable investment had Steve Jobs not come back as the Interm CEO.
If you haven't visited the iMac Linux site, they in fact are running slash! How nice.
That's such a load of bull. First of all, architecturally, there's no basis for this argument. Nothing about the Macintosh makes it better "for graphics". Even from a software perspective, the industry standard editors/composers (like Photoshop and Illustrator) are available on *multiple* platforms. And when it comes to 3D graphics, I'd just as soon have an Irix or NT system.
Now, if one were to install Linux on a Macintosh, almost all the software issues (not that there are many) would vanish. The architechtural difference are encapsulated by the OS and the applications are mostly source-compatible between the Intel and G4 systems. It's not like you can't find a three-button mouse for a macintosh.
So not only is a mac not useless, but it is also not any "better for graphics" than the equivalent PC running NT or 98. This is basically stereotyping in the worst way.
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"You can't shake the Devil's hand and say you're only kidding."
That's such a load of bull. First of all, architecturally, there's no basis for this argument. Nothing about the Macintosh makes it better "for graphics". Even from a software perspective, the industry standard editors/composers (like Photoshop and Illustrator) are available on *multiple* platforms.
:-)
Sorry, but this just simply is not the case. There are two major things the Mac has that nothing else does nearly as well that keep it in the lead for graphics work. One is system-level color management through ColorSync. The other, perhaps even more important, is decent Postscript output. Windows simply does not do this as well. Many printing houses hate dealing with Windows files, because you usually don't get on the page what you see on the screen on the first try. These two things are just not an issue for most people, for for professional graphics work, they are almost essential.
You're right about 3D though. The Mac does have some decent 3D programs (Electric Image comes to mind), but it isn't really the strongest platform there.
'Course Mac OS X will change everything. A BSD Unix with Mac OS ease-of-use that runs both Mac OS and Unix apps is just about all you could ask for in an OS.
And until then, I'll just dual-boot Linux
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Mac fanatics have been dropping a BS line of a better interface for way too long. If the isolarion of a user from such concepts as the manual ejection of removable media, a heirarchial file system,
Sorry. You're confusing OSes. It's Windows that isolates the use from the hierarchal file system with the Start menu. The Mac encourages users to directly interact with the file structure on their hard drives in a way no other OS really does.
or even the concept of a power switch is a Good Thing©
Soft power renders the power switch obsolete, and is very nice for server machines and the like (hint: it works just fine from Linux).
that makes everything so easy to use, why the hell does it have stupid things like like the Chooser,
The Chooser sucks, and Apple has been slowly replacing it for years now. It should be gone totally with the next OS release.
why does its file table corrupt so easily,
Um... It doesn't, especially when compared with ext2.
and what is the deal with that LAME-ASS broadcast AppleTalk protocol?
Again, it sucks. Apple has been phasing it out in favor of TCP/IP for many years now, and this is almost complete.
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In addition to the other comments, there is also the issue of prior investments. Do you have any idea how much good DTP software costs? Quark alone is nearly $1000. Photoshop is ~$600. Illustrator is ~$400. Freehand is about the same. And let's not even get into various plug ins and highly specific utilities etc.
Plus, there are FONTS. Not only would large numbers of fonts have to be repurchased, or tediously converted from the Mac to Windows (or whatever), but it is of critical importance that everyone use the same damn fonts as everyone else, or you'll wind up with type scattered all over the place.
The massive number of entrenched Macs (who won in this market fair and square) and tendancy of graphic designers to not want to learn a new platform now that they've used the Mac for years (computers are generally thought of as handy tools, but not ends of themselves) provide more inertia than even Bill can overcome.
Macs have a crappy OS in fact, though there's a good GUI and some nice APIs on top of it, but it's better for graphics b/c of the above reasons. If you were starting from scratch and worked in a vacuum you might use Windows. Linux doesn't have the right tools and support yet.
-- This and all my posts are in the public domain. I am a lawyer. I am not your lawyer, and this is not legal advice.
Ah, but iMacs are so amazingly uniform in design that it should be simple to make a boot CD for all iMacs, including support for USB devices like Zips and such. I think that it would sell pretty nicely.
-- This and all my posts are in the public domain. I am a lawyer. I am not your lawyer, and this is not legal advice.
The only well-accepted non-Macs I know of in DTP are turnkey RIPs. Usually in my experience they're SGI's. But it's not as though anyone has to do much with them unless there's a particularly demanding project or something unusual.
I've seen people try to use IBMs for PageMaker. I laughed, and indeed they had a huge amount of trouble keeping it working. Inclined as I am to blame PageMaker, I did grow up on it, so I feel the IBM was at fault.
-- This and all my posts are in the public domain. I am a lawyer. I am not your lawyer, and this is not legal advice.
I have heard that to many times, and for to many reasons to believe that OS x is the end all and be all of Operating Systems. There doesn't seem to be much information available on OS X, except that it crashes when to many threads are spawned(the apache server test I belive).
Yeah. That's Mac OS X Server, which has been shipping since March, is $500, and needs to run old Mac apps in a seperate virtual environment. It's a very different OS from what the general use Mac OS X and new versions of Server will be. It isn't even based on the same kernel (Mach 2.5 vs. Mach 3.0).
Information about Mac OS X is rather hard to find, because Steve Jobs loves suprises. There's plenty about OS X Server, but it really isn't the interesting one.
For information about Mac OS X Server, try Apple's web page on the product here.
You can get some information about the general version Mac OS X from the archives of Mac OS Rumors, but be aware that these are rumors.
Basically, what's known about it is that it's core is BSD on top of a Mach 3.0 microkernel. It has several APIs, including Carbon, which is an API mostly like the existing Mac API, but it fixes the issues that prevent current apps from working in a modern environment (so old Mac apps can be ported to OS X fast; apps like Photoshop take a week of work to convert to Carbon), Cocoa (formerly called YellowBox), which is mostly an updated version of the NeXT API (can be programed in Objective C and Java), and "Classic", which is really just a backwards compatibility environment to run old Mac apps. Old Mac apps will all run as one task in one memory space, but won't be able to hog CPU time from (or crash) Carbon apps, Cocoa apps, or the OS. Mac OS X will also have an advanced new graphics model called Quartz that's based on PDF. Unfortunately, it isn't a client/server architecture like X, but it does do some rather amazing things. And there should be full access to a complete BSD commad line.
Apple's focus with Mac OS X is to create a kick-ass modern OS that even hard core geeks can respect, but that won't alienate Mac fanatics.
The OS's entire core (all the Mach and BSD stuff) will be open sourced under the Apple Public Source License.
Current planned shipping date is "early 2000", whatever that means. Apple just seeded the second developer build of the OS last week, but everyone who has a copy in NDAed.
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Just out of curiosity, has anyone been able to run Linux on a PC emulation program on a Mac, for instance Connectix Virtual PC? I tried it, failed, and gave up, and I'm curious to know if anyone else has had better luck. Would this even be possible?
It uses the Squishdot System which is desinged to look and act like slashdot. Squishdot is written in Python and uses Zope.
IMO, of course :)
I'm taking a computing course as part of my physics degree, and it involves basic C programming. We're being taught on macs, using codewarrior.
Compared to my programming experiences in Linux its terrible, do anything that would just cause a segfault in linux brings the mac down... all of it.
And I cant get the debugger to work. I've resorted to loading up ncsa telnet and working on my PC running linux at home.
Additionally the way that you need to allocate memory to an app before running it seems bizzare.
I guess I just suffer from CLI withdrawal.
-Yarn - Rio Karma: Excellent
Yes. Two screws (coin-operable) on the bottom of the iBook open the battery door.
Problem is, there is no interim power source. You have to shut the iBook down before any battery change.
Cool OS trick: It can write an image of RAM to the hard drive. Then you can restart the iBook and be right where you left off.
Now I'm WAY off-topic. I'm sure gonna miss that Karma.
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NetInfo connection failed for server 127.0.0.1/local
First of all, architecturally, there's no basis for this argument. Nothing about the Macintosh makes it better "for graphics". Even from a software perspective, the industry standard editors/composers (like Photoshop and Illustrator) are available on *multiple* platforms. And when it comes to 3D graphics, I'd just as soon have an Irix or NT system.
.ps files that don't choke commercial RIPs. While Photoshop is available on a variety of systems, many of the plug ins and helper applications are Mac only. Colorsync is far more well integrated on the Mac than any other available color matching system. There are Mac specific networking platforms optimized for transporting large graphics files. If you go to a print shop they often charge extra or even refuse to take non-Mac generated files.
Originally the Mac was better suited. Postscript came first on the Mac. Pagemaker and so on too.
Architecturally Altivec IS superior to what is available on other systems for Photoshop applications.
A big problem with these other systems now is simply software maturity. Mac postscript print drivers are far more reliable at generating
While you may like the idea of SGI or NT for one reason or another, they are just not practical for a graphics professional.
So were 5 megabyte hard drives. What's your point? If your point is that things change in the computer industry and that it somehow follows that the floppy disk drive should be abandoned, I have to disagree with you.
The floppy disk and diskette drive are very useful if and when Shit ever Happens to your machine and you need to get it up and running again. (Forgot that root password? No floppy? Oops, you're screwed.) Sure, you can boot off a CD-Rom, but what happens if and when your machine dies and you *don't* have a boot CD? You can't just download one on another machine and burn it most times. You *can* do that with a floppy, and I've *had* to do that on a few occasions. Floppy drives are (were?) ubiquitous. Everyone has one. Not many people I know have a CD-R, or a Zip drive, or some other means of booting their PCs.
Think of the floppy drive as a glorified emergency escape hatch on your computer. (Would you feel safer on a plane with no emergency exits?)
Food for thought.
=A.P.
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"One World, one Web, one Program" - Microsoft promotional ad
"Remember when the U.S. had a drug problem, and then we declared a War On Drugs, and now you can't buy drugs anymore?"
Um... It doesn't, especially when compared with ext2.
It would be awfully hard for ext2fs to corrupt its file tables since it doesn't have any. It uses inodes, like all real filesystems do.
-A.P.
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"One World, one Web, one Program" - Microsoft promotional ad
"Remember when the U.S. had a drug problem, and then we declared a War On Drugs, and now you can't buy drugs anymore?"
In any case, most modern intel chips are RISC at heart... they re-construct x86 CISC instructions into smaller instructions. PPro and up does this, I think.
And RISC isn't inherently superior, just different. As it turns out, it's easier to implement a lot of things if a nice RISC-y architecture is used, but RISC itself isn't special.
-- Erich
Slashdot reader since 1997
Mine can't.
Installing OS's isn't trivial. Fortunately for a lay-user, most computers come with an OS pre-installed. I think that Linux pre-installed systems will become popular over the next two years.
If your grandma Can install MacOS onto an otherwise-dead mac, my guess is that she could install Red Hat 6.1... I was pretty impressed.
-- Erich
Slashdot reader since 1997
A lot of Apple _users_ have been Anti-Microsoft. Apple itself is not antimicrosoft- however, Apple has been an ALTERNATIVE to Microsoft for a very long time. And, indeed, that's something to appreciate. Alternatives are good...
Well... I don't know how familiar you are with this industry, but the stuff described in the article was basically using Linux boxen for file servers and RIPs. The first of these tasks is generic, though the files will be larger than you'd see in an office. RIPs, when they're used (typically only for high-end proofs and imagesetting - important but not as a workstation or creative tool) are already typically NT or Unix systems. I see SGI RIPs a lot, but remember that the RIP software is all proprietary.
Neither of these have to do with the designer workstations, and those are what I'm referring to as being all basically all Mac. It's not as though graphic designers insist on a Mac email server either, you know.
But this doesn't mean that Linux 'isn't that far off' [from being a comprehensive solution] by a longshot.
-- This and all my posts are in the public domain. I am a lawyer. I am not your lawyer, and this is not legal advice.