I'm afraid all of MacOS X's vaunted Unixness is little more than FUD.
OS X is based on Darwin, which is a full-fledged Unix kernel that complies with every relevant standard: POSIX, XPG, you name it. Because of this fact, software written within those standards compiles and runs with no problems.
Just this morning I wanted to download some big ISOs to my iMac at home while I was away; why waste that expensive DSL line just 'cause I'm not at home? So I logged in to my iMac with SSH and used NcFTP to download the source code for GNU Screen from the GNU FTP site. Then it was "configure && make && sudo make install." At that point, I was able to run "screen" and use a detached terminal session from the office to download my ISOs.
If that's not pretty damn Unix-like, I don't know what is.
Of course, that doesn't mean OS X is just like Solaris, or HP-UX, or IRIX, or FreeBSD, or Linux any more than those OSs are all like each other. The definition of "Unix-like" is defined by a set of standards, and OS X meets 'em.
You're talking about how different OS X is from your expectations, not how it fits the definition of "Unix." They're not the same thing.
Also, I don't think "FUD" means what you think it means.
Who cares how bad the economy is, good developers can get a job anywhere.
That's simply not true. I've recently found myself in a situation where I was forced to either accept a promotion at my present job or hit the street. I don't consider myself middle-management material, and I don't particularly want that job, but my efforts to find another job have gone nowhere. I'm not a great programmer, but I'm good, and several companies told me that they'd be happy to make me an offer just as soon as their executives lift the hiring freeze.
Don't be arrogant enough to think that just because you're good at your job you can find employment in bad times. More likely you'll be unpleasantly surprised.
My solution? I'm taking the promotion. Better hours and a lot more money, but more responsibility and I don't get to do the fun stuff any more. But it goes down on my resume while I keep looking.
I have to buy a adapter to get the vga-out to work?
If it's like the iBook, the VGA adapter is just a little pigtail to convert from the microscopic port on the computer to a standard HD15 socket. And it comes bundled with the computer.
I'm sure this guy will be changing over from Solaris servers to Imacs...
Maybe you were trying to be facetious or funny or something, but you just ended up looking dumb.
Take an iMac with OS X. Mount your server's filesystem via NFS. Dump the filesystem to DVD with the OS X disk utility. What's the problem?
If you don't want to back up a live filesystem, then drop to single user and do a dump, then burn the dump to DVD.
Either way, it's a hell of a lot easier to do stuff like that with OS X than it is with Windows (Unix interoperability not included) or Linux (DVD burning not included).
(This is so off-topic it's silly. But I'm posting it anyway.)
The simple fact is, however, that Microsoft is not only a monopoly, but a maker of horrid products.
I agree that their products are pretty unpleasant-- ugly, clumsy, tasteless-- but I think the quality argument is getting weaker and weaker across the board.
I've been using a Windows 2000 system on my desk at work for over a year. The OS has never crashed in that time.
I own an iBook that I've had since September. I've been running OS X on it since that time, and it hasn't crashed on me, either.
I also have a dual-processor G4 at work. It's never crashed, either.
It's not all that hard to find a Windows or a Mac OS computer these days that has never crashed. The classic argument for Linux-- it doesn't crash-- isn't a very strong one these days.
In fact, in my world, Linux is less reliable than Windows 2000 or OS X. I spent several hours last week debugging a USB problem on one of my coworker's workstations. Whenever he plugged in his USB-serial adapter, the machine would kernel panic. Turns out some driver modules were loading in the wrong order. Yes, it's good that I had everything I needed to fix it myself. But it's bad that I had to.
I'm not trashing Linux in particular; I'm just saying that PC-class software quality overall has improved dramatically in the past two years. I think Linux advocates are going to need a new killer argument.
And how would you go about knowing this without paying attention to what kind of DVD burner it is? DVD+RW is more compatible with existing players than DVD-RW. Ok, so maybe your burned DVDs play in your DVD player. Good for you. Will it work in your friend's? Your parents'? How will you know without looking up compatibility information or doing your own testing?
Jeezus, doesn't anybody on Slashdot read any more? I already said that every disc I've burned has worked every way I've tried it. Data DVDs work in my and my coworkers' and my clients' and my vendors' and my friends' DVD-ROM drives, and video DVDs work in all the video DVD players I've tried. Why is this difficult for you to understand?
Maybe I'll run into a compatibility problem someday. I doubt it. I've been using my drive pretty regularly for about six months, and haven't had any problems during that time. There's always a possibility that the winds will change direction and manufacturers will start making new drives and players that can't read these discs, but I don't worry about that because there's nothing I can do about it.
See, here's the thing. I have a job. I don't have time to waste worrying about DVD standards. (Although, apparently, I have time to waste arguing about them.)
And as for media, I'll just have to look at it when I get to the office. My admin takes care of buying office supplies, so she just orders more of whatever kind of we have. I don't even know if they're R or RW, because to date I haven't tried to RW one of them.
I guess it's all about priorities. You care about DVD specifications. I care about getting home to my family at a reasonable hour.
Obviously you don't know that theres a vast difference between DVD-R, DVD+R, DVD-RW, DVD+RW, and DVD-RAM.
Obviously you didn't read my comment. I burn a DVD on my G4, and I can read it in the other DVD-ROM drives I've tried, and I can play it (if it's a video disc) in the DVD players I've tried. So I really don't give a rat's ass whether it's DVD-RW or DVD+RW or DVD-BIPPI or whatever. The question just isn't relevant to me. I don't care.
Of course, they don't ever tell you anything about what kind of DVD burner it is, which is much more important than with CD burners (there are numerous types).
Why is it important? My iMac has a CDRW in it. How fast is it? I don't know. Fast enough to burn a whole CD in about five minutes, which is fast enough for me. I don't worry about it.
My G4 at work has a SuperDrive. It reads CDs and DVDs, and it burns CDs and DVDs. How fast is it? I don't know; see above. I know that I can burn a DVD-ROM and read it in any computer I've tried so far, and I know I can burn a video-DVD and play it in every video DVD player I've tried. That's good enough for me. I don't worry about it.
I don't care what kind of CDRW or DVD my computer has, because it works perfectly every time (knock wood).
FWIW - My next laptop is probably going to be a Titanium Powerbook - fast, quiet, and with a beautiful display.
And hot enough to burn your lap, and with skins so soft they can be scratched by the inside of a nylon backpack.
The G4 is beautiful, but I'm a little too rough on my laptops to own one. I have an iBook, which cost $1,000 less than my best friend's G4, and I couldn't be much happier.
Just think before you throw out all them bones, that's all.
Am I the only one that wishes Apple would dump Ive's "style" in favor of the classy NeXT machines?
I don't know. The NeXT cube gave the impression of being carved out of granite. Good for a server or a supercomputer, but as a workstation it was just kind of silly.
Re:Worse than running something as root
on
Linux Virus Alert
·
· Score: 2
Which autoconf-generated Makefiles? Try diffing your favorite write-only Makefile against its corresponding Makefile.in - I think you'll find that autoconf isn't doing the damage here. Maybe you meant automake, which takes a Makefile.am and produces Makefile.in.
I stand corrected.
In my experience, automake produces write-only Makefiles.
Re:Worse than running something as root
on
Linux Virus Alert
·
· Score: 5, Interesting
how many people fully read & understand the Makefiles in the above scenario?
Which brings up an interesting point: write-only code. I've tried to read and understand autoconf-generated Makefiles a few times, and given up with my head spinning. They're a tangled web of M4 macros and such.
Computer-generated code is notoriously hard to read, and install scripts are one instance where reading the code is important.
I only wish there were a way to improve autoconf and other code generating programs without having to have a massive security breakdown happen first to inspire the work.
I think a big part of the answer might lie not in hardware, but in software.
As you know, the scientific and technical computing world still runs on Fortran. I know the SGI and Cray Fortran compilers are fantastic, especially the Cray vector-optimizing compiler; I would expect that the compilers NEC and Fujitsu use are similar. But as I understand it Absoft's Fortran compilers for Linux and Windows aren't up to those standards.
You might be able to run benchmarks or other C or assembly code as fast on a cluster as on a commercial supercomputer, but if the compilers aren't as good, your application will suffer.
It's important to note that this is just speculation on my part. I've only ever used SGI's and Cray's Fortran compilers, so everything I know about Absoft's comes to me second-hand. If Absoft rocks and I don't know it, it's not my fault.;-)
WTF would you even bother going out of your way to add an advanced filesystem to a machine that was essentially being a dumb text terminal?
I'm an SGI guy. My life is easier if I only have to keep one set of filesystem commands in my head. Since the option was there, a better question would have been, "Why not use an advanced filesystem?"
If I am not mistaken(which I may be:), one of the tenants of the $150 million dollar "investment" Microsoft put into Apple several years ago was to not port there software to Intel/AMD chips.
Who knows? Come next week, we may both be surprised.
What we really need is decent privacy legislation so that we don't have to opt out of these things.
I mean no offense, but whenever I hear the phrase, "What we really need is... legislation," it makes me want to head for the hills. Society is obviously teetering on the brink of collapse when people can say things like that with a straight face.
What I was trying to say with my original post was that Linux distributions fill the same role as the *BSD distributions. They represent the safe, stable solution for the end user.
Okay, I'll buy that. I only wish in my case my choice of distribution and hardware had been safer and more stable.
Obviously you're going to give up something in the trade-off between "easy to use and stable" vs. "bleeding edge".
If I were trying to do anything "bleeding-edge," I'd be the last to complain. As it is, I was trying to use supported (whatever that means in this context) hardware with a packaged distribution.
My point is simply that the distributions with which I have had experience (not all of them, by any stretch) are incomplete. They do not support, out of the box, everything they claim to support.
A counter-example is my QL2200 fibre channel adapters. Thanks to Red Hat, those suckers work as soon as you plug them in.
That level of functionality should be there for everything on the "supported" list. It doesn't appear to be.
I'm glad you're happy with BSD, but really you could have had the same thing by ignoring the various development trees and optional components and sticking with a distribution you like.
This is, of course, crap.
Here's a real-world example. The story began early last year. I had a spare PC with USB at the office, so I thought I'd put a couple of Keyspan USB-Serial adapters on it, load Red Hat 7.1, and use it as a console server for our SGI Origins.
Standard Pentium III PC-- no unsupported parts in it. GeForce2 graphics card, but I had no intention of installing X anyway, so minimal support is all that's required. The Keyspan USA-49W serial adapter is, according to the source tree, to Red Hat, and to Keyspan, supported completely under Linux 2.4. I felt pretty safe.
I don't enjoy messing with Linux, but I do prefer XFS to EFS for several reasons, so I thought I'd try SGI's modified Red Hat 7.1 installer that supports XFS. It installed a 2.4.3 (I think) kernel, which wasn't too far behind at that time. I'd used that installer before, so I felt safe with that, too.
I installed the OS, then I put the Keyspans on. They didn't work. Why not? Despite the fact that the Keyspan driver had been installed as a module with the Red Hat default install, it had been compiled with no firmware in it. So I had to load the sources, load the compiler, and recompile the kernel modules to add Keyspan firmware support.
Then I installed the new module and found that one of my Keyspans was working, but not the other. Turns out whichever one was plugged in first worked, but the subsequent ones wouldn't. Driver problem.
Frustrated, I gave up for the weekend and didn't touch the system again for several months.
Earlier this fall, I happened upon a mention of this bug being fixed in the Keyspan driver. Cool. So I downloaded the latest Keyspan driver source and put it on my machine and rebuilt modules. Only the new Keyspan sources wouldn't even compile. I'm sorry that I don't remember the error, but it had to do with the layout of a struct. The 2.4.3 source tree had a different struct than the Keyspan driver expected.
(An aside: it has always been my understanding that minor version changes must not introduce incompatibilities. I mean, that's what 2.5 is for, right? To have a data structure that's laid out one way in 2.4.3 and another, incompatible way in 2.4.9 strikes me as just wrong. End of aside.)
By that time, I thought I understood my problem. I would dump Red Hat with XFS and install vanilla Red Hat 7.1, then install the latest kernel sources and compiler, then install the new Keyspan sources, then compile the module, then it'd work.
Well, it didn't quite work that way, either. What with one thing and another, I was unable to get a working kernel.
Again, I gave up for a few months.
Then SGI released their modified Red Hat 7.2 installer, with a 2.4.9 kernel, so I decided to try just one more time. Install Red Hat 7.2 with XFS, install the sources, install the compiler, install the new Keyspan sources, make the module.
Success.
So I got my system working the way I want it to work, and I'm now very happy with it. But it took me three long weekends, spaced out over several months, and three start-over-from-scratch attempts.
I'm frustrated that Red Hat decided to include the firmwareless version of the Keyspan driver, since it would have been so much simpler to just compile the firmware into the module so it would work out of the box. I'm disappointed that the person who maintains the Keyspan driver was unable to QA his work sufficiently to prevent the only-one-adapter bug from hitting the streets. And I'm mad that a driver module should compile cleanly only under 2.4.9 or later, but not earlier versions. That's not the right way to maintain an OS.
Sorry for the overlong post, but your contention that the distributions are out-of-the-box solutions is just plain wrong.
How far did the projects get, and what were the reasons for their being cancelled?
"Star Trek" got far enough along to have a working prototype; I don't know about TNG. As to why, exactly, they were cancelled, I'm not sure. I'm certain it had something to do with putting the engineers where they could do the most profitable work.
That isn't true. For a long time Apple funded their "Star Trek" project, which was a ground-up port of Mac OS to the IA-32 architecture. (Going where no man has gone before... get it?)
Both "Star Trek" and "TNG," the follow-up project, were cancelled.
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I'm afraid all of MacOS X's vaunted Unixness is little more than FUD.
OS X is based on Darwin, which is a full-fledged Unix kernel that complies with every relevant standard: POSIX, XPG, you name it. Because of this fact, software written within those standards compiles and runs with no problems.
Just this morning I wanted to download some big ISOs to my iMac at home while I was away; why waste that expensive DSL line just 'cause I'm not at home? So I logged in to my iMac with SSH and used NcFTP to download the source code for GNU Screen from the GNU FTP site. Then it was "configure && make && sudo make install." At that point, I was able to run "screen" and use a detached terminal session from the office to download my ISOs.
If that's not pretty damn Unix-like, I don't know what is.
Of course, that doesn't mean OS X is just like Solaris, or HP-UX, or IRIX, or FreeBSD, or Linux any more than those OSs are all like each other. The definition of "Unix-like" is defined by a set of standards, and OS X meets 'em.
You're talking about how different OS X is from your expectations, not how it fits the definition of "Unix." They're not the same thing.
Also, I don't think "FUD" means what you think it means.
Who cares how bad the economy is, good developers can get a job anywhere.
That's simply not true. I've recently found myself in a situation where I was forced to either accept a promotion at my present job or hit the street. I don't consider myself middle-management material, and I don't particularly want that job, but my efforts to find another job have gone nowhere. I'm not a great programmer, but I'm good, and several companies told me that they'd be happy to make me an offer just as soon as their executives lift the hiring freeze.
Don't be arrogant enough to think that just because you're good at your job you can find employment in bad times. More likely you'll be unpleasantly surprised.
My solution? I'm taking the promotion. Better hours and a lot more money, but more responsibility and I don't get to do the fun stuff any more. But it goes down on my resume while I keep looking.
I am amazed that this off-topic screed got moderated up in the first place. If I hadn't used my last mod point this morning....
I have to buy a adapter to get the vga-out to work?
If it's like the iBook, the VGA adapter is just a little pigtail to convert from the microscopic port on the computer to a standard HD15 socket. And it comes bundled with the computer.
I'm sure this guy will be changing over from Solaris servers to Imacs...
Maybe you were trying to be facetious or funny or something, but you just ended up looking dumb.
Take an iMac with OS X. Mount your server's filesystem via NFS. Dump the filesystem to DVD with the OS X disk utility. What's the problem?
If you don't want to back up a live filesystem, then drop to single user and do a dump, then burn the dump to DVD.
Either way, it's a hell of a lot easier to do stuff like that with OS X than it is with Windows (Unix interoperability not included) or Linux (DVD burning not included).
Personally, I'm fed up of random lusers from the interent....
Coming from an AC, that statement seems to lack a certain credibility....
(This is so off-topic it's silly. But I'm posting it anyway.)
The simple fact is, however, that Microsoft is not only a monopoly, but a maker of horrid products.
I agree that their products are pretty unpleasant-- ugly, clumsy, tasteless-- but I think the quality argument is getting weaker and weaker across the board.
I've been using a Windows 2000 system on my desk at work for over a year. The OS has never crashed in that time.
I own an iBook that I've had since September. I've been running OS X on it since that time, and it hasn't crashed on me, either.
I also have a dual-processor G4 at work. It's never crashed, either.
It's not all that hard to find a Windows or a Mac OS computer these days that has never crashed. The classic argument for Linux-- it doesn't crash-- isn't a very strong one these days.
In fact, in my world, Linux is less reliable than Windows 2000 or OS X. I spent several hours last week debugging a USB problem on one of my coworker's workstations. Whenever he plugged in his USB-serial adapter, the machine would kernel panic. Turns out some driver modules were loading in the wrong order. Yes, it's good that I had everything I needed to fix it myself. But it's bad that I had to.
I'm not trashing Linux in particular; I'm just saying that PC-class software quality overall has improved dramatically in the past two years. I think Linux advocates are going to need a new killer argument.
It's simply astounding that a screed this long and rambling could have been inspired by two low-resolution pictures taken from a distance.
Can't wait to see what you come up with in a few hours when the high-res marketing photos come on line.
And how would you go about knowing this without paying attention to what kind of DVD burner it is? DVD+RW is more compatible with existing players than DVD-RW. Ok, so maybe your burned DVDs play in your DVD player. Good for you. Will it work in your friend's? Your parents'? How will you know without looking up compatibility information or doing your own testing?
Jeezus, doesn't anybody on Slashdot read any more? I already said that every disc I've burned has worked every way I've tried it. Data DVDs work in my and my coworkers' and my clients' and my vendors' and my friends' DVD-ROM drives, and video DVDs work in all the video DVD players I've tried. Why is this difficult for you to understand?
Maybe I'll run into a compatibility problem someday. I doubt it. I've been using my drive pretty regularly for about six months, and haven't had any problems during that time. There's always a possibility that the winds will change direction and manufacturers will start making new drives and players that can't read these discs, but I don't worry about that because there's nothing I can do about it.
See, here's the thing. I have a job. I don't have time to waste worrying about DVD standards. (Although, apparently, I have time to waste arguing about them.)
And as for media, I'll just have to look at it when I get to the office. My admin takes care of buying office supplies, so she just orders more of whatever kind of we have. I don't even know if they're R or RW, because to date I haven't tried to RW one of them.
I guess it's all about priorities. You care about DVD specifications. I care about getting home to my family at a reasonable hour.
Obviously you don't know that theres a vast difference between DVD-R, DVD+R, DVD-RW, DVD+RW, and DVD-RAM.
Obviously you didn't read my comment. I burn a DVD on my G4, and I can read it in the other DVD-ROM drives I've tried, and I can play it (if it's a video disc) in the DVD players I've tried. So I really don't give a rat's ass whether it's DVD-RW or DVD+RW or DVD-BIPPI or whatever. The question just isn't relevant to me. I don't care.
Of course, they don't ever tell you anything about what kind of DVD burner it is, which is much more important than with CD burners (there are numerous types).
Why is it important? My iMac has a CDRW in it. How fast is it? I don't know. Fast enough to burn a whole CD in about five minutes, which is fast enough for me. I don't worry about it.
My G4 at work has a SuperDrive. It reads CDs and DVDs, and it burns CDs and DVDs. How fast is it? I don't know; see above. I know that I can burn a DVD-ROM and read it in any computer I've tried so far, and I know I can burn a video-DVD and play it in every video DVD player I've tried. That's good enough for me. I don't worry about it.
I don't care what kind of CDRW or DVD my computer has, because it works perfectly every time (knock wood).
FWIW - My next laptop is probably going to be a Titanium Powerbook - fast, quiet, and with a beautiful display.
And hot enough to burn your lap, and with skins so soft they can be scratched by the inside of a nylon backpack.
The G4 is beautiful, but I'm a little too rough on my laptops to own one. I have an iBook, which cost $1,000 less than my best friend's G4, and I couldn't be much happier.
Just think before you throw out all them bones, that's all.
Am I the only one that wishes Apple would dump Ive's "style" in favor of the classy NeXT machines?
I don't know. The NeXT cube gave the impression of being carved out of granite. Good for a server or a supercomputer, but as a workstation it was just kind of silly.
The magnesium case burned nicely, though.
Which autoconf-generated Makefiles? Try diffing your favorite write-only Makefile against its corresponding Makefile.in - I think you'll find that autoconf isn't doing the damage here. Maybe you meant automake, which takes a Makefile.am and produces Makefile.in.
I stand corrected.
In my experience, automake produces write-only Makefiles.
how many people fully read & understand the Makefiles in the above scenario?
Which brings up an interesting point: write-only code. I've tried to read and understand autoconf-generated Makefiles a few times, and given up with my head spinning. They're a tangled web of M4 macros and such.
Computer-generated code is notoriously hard to read, and install scripts are one instance where reading the code is important.
I only wish there were a way to improve autoconf and other code generating programs without having to have a massive security breakdown happen first to inspire the work.
Can anyone confirm/deny the 3 hour rule?
Titanic was 3 hours and 18 minutes. Of course, very few theaters ran that small independent film....
Why not just use a cluster of pc's/macs?
;-)
I think a big part of the answer might lie not in hardware, but in software.
As you know, the scientific and technical computing world still runs on Fortran. I know the SGI and Cray Fortran compilers are fantastic, especially the Cray vector-optimizing compiler; I would expect that the compilers NEC and Fujitsu use are similar. But as I understand it Absoft's Fortran compilers for Linux and Windows aren't up to those standards.
You might be able to run benchmarks or other C or assembly code as fast on a cluster as on a commercial supercomputer, but if the compilers aren't as good, your application will suffer.
It's important to note that this is just speculation on my part. I've only ever used SGI's and Cray's Fortran compilers, so everything I know about Absoft's comes to me second-hand. If Absoft rocks and I don't know it, it's not my fault.
WTF would you even bother going out of your way to add an advanced filesystem to a machine that was essentially being a dumb text terminal?
I'm an SGI guy. My life is easier if I only have to keep one set of filesystem commands in my head. Since the option was there, a better question would have been, "Why not use an advanced filesystem?"
If I am not mistaken(which I may be :), one of the tenants of the $150 million dollar "investment" Microsoft put into Apple several years ago was to not port there software to Intel/AMD chips.
Who knows? Come next week, we may both be surprised.
What we really need is decent privacy legislation so that we don't have to opt out of these things.
I mean no offense, but whenever I hear the phrase, "What we really need is... legislation," it makes me want to head for the hills. Society is obviously teetering on the brink of collapse when people can say things like that with a straight face.
What I was trying to say with my original post was that Linux distributions fill the same role as the *BSD distributions. They represent the safe, stable solution for the end user.
Okay, I'll buy that. I only wish in my case my choice of distribution and hardware had been safer and more stable.
Obviously you're going to give up something in the trade-off between "easy to use and stable" vs. "bleeding edge".
If I were trying to do anything "bleeding-edge," I'd be the last to complain. As it is, I was trying to use supported (whatever that means in this context) hardware with a packaged distribution.
My point is simply that the distributions with which I have had experience (not all of them, by any stretch) are incomplete. They do not support, out of the box, everything they claim to support.
A counter-example is my QL2200 fibre channel adapters. Thanks to Red Hat, those suckers work as soon as you plug them in.
That level of functionality should be there for everything on the "supported" list. It doesn't appear to be.
I'm glad you're happy with BSD, but really you could have had the same thing by ignoring the various development trees and optional components and sticking with a distribution you like.
This is, of course, crap.
Here's a real-world example. The story began early last year. I had a spare PC with USB at the office, so I thought I'd put a couple of Keyspan USB-Serial adapters on it, load Red Hat 7.1, and use it as a console server for our SGI Origins.
Standard Pentium III PC-- no unsupported parts in it. GeForce2 graphics card, but I had no intention of installing X anyway, so minimal support is all that's required. The Keyspan USA-49W serial adapter is, according to the source tree, to Red Hat, and to Keyspan, supported completely under Linux 2.4. I felt pretty safe.
I don't enjoy messing with Linux, but I do prefer XFS to EFS for several reasons, so I thought I'd try SGI's modified Red Hat 7.1 installer that supports XFS. It installed a 2.4.3 (I think) kernel, which wasn't too far behind at that time. I'd used that installer before, so I felt safe with that, too.
I installed the OS, then I put the Keyspans on. They didn't work. Why not? Despite the fact that the Keyspan driver had been installed as a module with the Red Hat default install, it had been compiled with no firmware in it. So I had to load the sources, load the compiler, and recompile the kernel modules to add Keyspan firmware support.
Then I installed the new module and found that one of my Keyspans was working, but not the other. Turns out whichever one was plugged in first worked, but the subsequent ones wouldn't. Driver problem.
Frustrated, I gave up for the weekend and didn't touch the system again for several months.
Earlier this fall, I happened upon a mention of this bug being fixed in the Keyspan driver. Cool. So I downloaded the latest Keyspan driver source and put it on my machine and rebuilt modules. Only the new Keyspan sources wouldn't even compile. I'm sorry that I don't remember the error, but it had to do with the layout of a struct. The 2.4.3 source tree had a different struct than the Keyspan driver expected.
(An aside: it has always been my understanding that minor version changes must not introduce incompatibilities. I mean, that's what 2.5 is for, right? To have a data structure that's laid out one way in 2.4.3 and another, incompatible way in 2.4.9 strikes me as just wrong. End of aside.)
By that time, I thought I understood my problem. I would dump Red Hat with XFS and install vanilla Red Hat 7.1, then install the latest kernel sources and compiler, then install the new Keyspan sources, then compile the module, then it'd work.
Well, it didn't quite work that way, either. What with one thing and another, I was unable to get a working kernel.
Again, I gave up for a few months.
Then SGI released their modified Red Hat 7.2 installer, with a 2.4.9 kernel, so I decided to try just one more time. Install Red Hat 7.2 with XFS, install the sources, install the compiler, install the new Keyspan sources, make the module.
Success.
So I got my system working the way I want it to work, and I'm now very happy with it. But it took me three long weekends, spaced out over several months, and three start-over-from-scratch attempts.
I'm frustrated that Red Hat decided to include the firmwareless version of the Keyspan driver, since it would have been so much simpler to just compile the firmware into the module so it would work out of the box. I'm disappointed that the person who maintains the Keyspan driver was unable to QA his work sufficiently to prevent the only-one-adapter bug from hitting the streets. And I'm mad that a driver module should compile cleanly only under 2.4.9 or later, but not earlier versions. That's not the right way to maintain an OS.
Sorry for the overlong post, but your contention that the distributions are out-of-the-box solutions is just plain wrong.
How far did the projects get, and what were the reasons for their being cancelled?
"Star Trek" got far enough along to have a working prototype; I don't know about TNG. As to why, exactly, they were cancelled, I'm not sure. I'm certain it had something to do with putting the engineers where they could do the most profitable work.
Apple has never tried on x86.
That isn't true. For a long time Apple funded their "Star Trek" project, which was a ground-up port of Mac OS to the IA-32 architecture. (Going where no man has gone before... get it?)
Both "Star Trek" and "TNG," the follow-up project, were cancelled.