[lug] Mac Hardware

[Bill Wimsatt]

SuSE on Mac G3 works well (not sure of SuSE on current hardware). I know
this is not current hardware, but is a decent implementation. OS X is
ok, but a lot of projects have not ported to it.

To digress a touch -- I used to be an Apple engineer and had extensive
work with A/UX which was Unix System V with a Macintosh desktop. This
platform was phenomenal in the early 90's. Apple had more open
technologies at that time than almost any other company. We actually
took part in an Open Systems Olympics put on by the Office of the
Secretary of Defense and were one of three platforms that could even
compete. In fact, they had to remove some of the requirements to allow
IBM to compete (DEC dropped out, so did almost all the others)! We had
ODA (Open Document Architecture), CALS (Computer Aided Logistics
Software - an SGML project), SGML editing, X.400 Messaging, X.25, POSIX
(via A/UX) and a host of other technologies running. The Mac we used
actually was the communication gateway between IBM and HP for X.400 and
we were the only ODA platform. 

Sorry, I am an Apple bigot at heart and just had to rant.

Regards,
Bill Wimsatt

-----Original Message-----
From: lug-admin at lug.boulder.co.us [mailto:lug-admin at lug.boulder.co.us]
On Behalf Of rm at fabula.de
Sent: Friday, July 26, 2002 11:22 AM
To: lug at lug.boulder.co.us
Subject: Re: [lug] Mac Hardware

On Fri, Jul 26, 2002 at 09:04:40AM -0600, Peter Hutnick wrote:
> I'm looking for someone to discuss the ins and outs of running Linux
on
> current PowerMac systems.
> 
> The main thing is I don't want to blow a bunch of cash on a PowerMac
just
> to find out "oh, the video in X sucks"* or "Apple uses some freakish
IDE
> system that only works at a snail's pace with the Linux driver." or
> something like that.
> 
> I'd also like to know the ins and outs of dual booting with MacOS X.

I finally overcame my natural lazzyness and installed Debian woody on
my PowerMac last week. I run it as a tripple boot box with MacOS 9, Mac
OSX
and Linux, the later on a separate harddisk (currently trying to compile
my first PPC-kernel to get MacOnLinux working -- cool thing). I got the
thing more-or-less for free so i never really had to think about the 
pros and cons of running Linux on PPC (i do have a DEC Alpha as a toy
;-)
So far i'd say: really nice hardware (not as crappy as your average PC),
really nice video (iff you have the right graphic card -- mine is an
ATI rage 128P), i didn't come across software nit available for PPC so
far.

BUT: for the same money you probably get some quite impressive
Inteloids.
You have to throw away both mouse and keyboad (the s__ck! but that's 
plattformindependend -- same as with Java ;-).
The box is _awfully_ noisy! Are all these graphic artists deaf? 

Some pros: You can run Mac OS9 apps. from within Linux if you install
MacOnLinux. It's nice to be able to run FrameMaker and Quark without
having to switch away from your OS of choice. 
You can play with OS X: Apple has done a nice job of combining *nix and
Macintosh. I'm not talking about the Aqua interface -- it get's boring 
after a while (and i personally find it gets in may way more often than
i like). Also, the programming environment ( Cocoa with ProjectBuilder
and InterfaceBuilder is _quite_ impressive -- Gnome & KDE, have a look
at this. Looking at ObjectiveC's runtime environment one wounders what
M. d. Icasa finds so impressive about .NOT's component model and CLR).

Ups, way longer than it should be -- send me mail if you want further
exchange.

  Ralf 
 

> Pointers to more appropriate places to ask this stuff are welcome, but
I
> mainly would like to find someone to talk this over with one on one.
> 
> -Peter
> 
> * I just found out that YDL doesn't support the GeForce 4 at all :-(
> 
> 
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