On 6/12/99 Evan Moore wrote:
i have heard of there being probems running linuxppc on new macs, but on
the 8600 in runs perfectly (well close to). The buggiest thing that i
ran accross was
messing in the open firmware (my 8600 had old firmware),
yup BrokenFirmware is the greatest blight of the PPC architecture
but bootx
came along and i never had to deal with that again. With bootx a person
doesn't have to worry about their video hardware (unless you want optimal
performance) or lilo or any dual booting issues.
bootx does not work on the new mac hardware (ibooks i think) and is
not going to work as its being abandoned in favor of a new OF
bootloader being developed by the BootX developer. the problem with
BootX is its fundamentally flawed: it requires Macos, and macos puts
the hardware into a inconsistent state as soon as it loads and it can
never be recovered fully until a reboot but then you just start over
wrecking it again with macos... BootX is also not very reliable on
any of the ROMless macs, so its deprecation is very welcome. the
older macs with ReallyBrokenFirmware will be getting a modified
version of the newworld bootloader that will function better then
quik did. (hopefully)
so even on macs you have to deal with the dual booting issues and the
bootloader.
but I personally think the PC BIOS is the best thing since sliced
bread when you compare it to BrokenFirmware :-) at least you can
easily boot alternate OSes without so much work... (or relying on
windoze^H^H^H^H^H^H^HMacOS
I agree there
are a few bugs in the installation the /dev/cdrom being one that i came
accross, but they are easy to fix, and i have heard that they have fixed
most of those problems in the Q3 release.
ah you must not have seen R5 :-) buggery buggery bug! Panic goes the kernel :P
I have found it more difficult
installing on i386 arch because you have to worry about hardware being
compatable, whereas the mac platform is much more simple, seeing as
they never got overly big into clonning. (I wonder how hard it is to run
linuxppc on one of the mac clones?)
aherm well, this blue G3 i try to get GNU/Linux on is a fairly large
chunk of Linux hostile hardware... (ATI cards anyone?) so no you
don't have to deal with finding compatible hardware your just stuck
with the nice incompatible stuff you get :-)
anyways, after spending forever trying
to get debian to install on a RAID system, i am inclined to think that
i386 is much more difficult to install on.
not to pick, but what does installing on a RAID system have to do
with i386 being hard? RAID on any archetecture is going to be a
general pain in the arse.
Another thing that i thought
was easier about the linuxppc installer was that you don't have to
configure everything at install time,
again this is Redhat's installer you get the same experience
installing Redhat on a i386 as you do installing linuxppc on a mac.
(except the end result on i386 works better :))
unlike debian, which is a bonus for
beginners who want a system up now, and will worry about configuring it
later as they learn more about linux (as i myself was when is started with
linux).
well I guess Redhat installs a package broken and leaves it that way
where Debian installs a package and asks how it should be setup so
its not broken :-) personally i like that (except for having to baby
sit the install but that is being solved with debconf as i understand
it)
really i think the problem here is more installing packages the
newbie has no need for...
then again i like the way debian configures their networking
better than red har (and linuxppc).
ugh yes ! redhat initscripts are a nightmare of spaghetti code...
even redhat 6.1 still creates at least 3 redunant and uneeded routes
for the network when you configure from the installer bleah.
I also like dselect and apt-get much
more than xli.pl (the buggy upgrade/install program for linuxppc). So i
guess each platform has their bonuses.
linuxppc is redhat rawhide, and thus uses RPM with all its deficiencies intact.
one thing that really annoys me is I cannot go to kernel.org and get
the latest kernel tarball, make config ; make dep ; make clean ; make
<whatever> ; install and have it work on a PPC like you can on most
other archs...
Ethan
