[wplug] linux on mac?

David Gerard Matthews Jr. dgm4+ at pitt.edu
Tue Sep 4 08:49:46 EDT 2001


I have a little experience with Linux on a Mac.  A blue G3 will work
well, since all of the hardware should be supported by now.  (The
biggest problem with installing Linux on Macs is that since Apple comes
out with a completely new set of machines each year, support for recent
h/w can be flaky.)  Once you get it installed it really isn't that
different from Linux on X86 except that fewer precompiled binaries exist
and some third-party hardware won't work.  But Linux is Linux, and once
it's installed, the biggest thing to get used to is that your mouse only
has one button.
As for OSX, I used that at work for awhile, and I don't recommend it. 
It's slow, buggy, and h/w support is severely lacking (even worse than
LinuxPPC).  There are very few native apps available and building
generic Unix software from source is a lot harder than it should be. 
Besides that, it's possibly the most bloated operating system I've ever
used.  On the beige G3 (300 Mhz, 128 MB) that I used, many programs took
nearly twice as long to execute as their OS 9 equivalents.  (Not that
I'm sticking up for OS 9.)  Maybe after a few releases, and once
everyone has dual processor G4's with a gig of Ram, OSX will be a decent
OS.  (It is a great idea, and it's very pretty....)  But if you want to
run some Unix flavor on a Mac, I'd say stick with Linux.


Doug Green wrote:
> 
> Hi all-
> 
> Recently my boss offered to "trade" computers because he needs a windows
> 98 machine in the office. The deal would be that I'll inherit a 300MHz
> Mac G3 (the blue one) for a Hewlett Packard PII 450. Not a bad trade if
> you ask me... but I was wondering: does anyone have any experience running
> linux on a mac? How about OSX? I mostly use my laptop, so I really
> don't care what desktop is sitting in my home, but before I give
> away my PC, I'd like to collect some advice from any mac people... can I
> run linux on this thing and/or is OSX all it's cracked up to be (ie: can
> I compile packages native to linux or unix on it)?
> 
> Thanks
> Doug
> 
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