[wplug] linux on mac?

Evan DiBiase edibiase at mac.com
Tue Sep 4 16:12:27 EDT 2001


Doug:

I've been running OS X on my new 2001 iBook (500MHz G3, 384MB of RAM) 
and I absolutely love it. With a (mostly) excellent GUI with a BSD 
backend, I'm in geek paradise.

I'm not sure about running Linux on your machine; I haven't even yet 
tried it on mine (and, going against my distro-hopping past, may never 
do so). OS X is pretty much all it is cracked up to be, although even 
the latest available release can be unstable at times and is slightly 
slow, although I have found neither of these to be major problems. 
Supposedly OS 10.1 has a 3x perceived speed increase (according to 
third-party reviews I've read of developer builds) over the current 
release and also includes several new fixes and enhancements. It's due 
out in September; more information is available at 
http://www.apple.com/macosx/newversion/.

As for Linux/UNIX programs: I have not done much of this yet, but as far 
as I understand most things work well without patching, since OS X is 
Mach with BSD userland stuff at heart. There is a project called Fink 
(http://fink.sourceforge.net) that claims to be "[A]n attempt to bring 
the full world of Unix Open Source software to Darwin and Mac OS X." It 
appears to use the Debian packaging utilities plus some custom stuff to 
make common open-source packages available.

If you have any specific questions, ask away; I'll try to answer them as 
best I can.

-Evan

On Monday, September 3, 2001, at 11:04 PM, 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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