On Thu, 4 Nov 2004 11:45:23 -0500
linux r <linuxr@xxxxxxxxx> wrote
> ...
> Thanks for all the detailed info. It's really great. This happens to
> be a school, and for all I know, I will get the hardware ONLY and thus
> not OS X or whatever, but I am not sure.
Wild concept, that. Can't imagine why they would assign you the hardware
without the OS unless they _want_ you to install Linux or one of the
BSDs.
> Not a big deal. I agree,
> Mac OS is mighty cool, with the BSD kernel and all of that.
netBSD and openBSD also run great on many of the Macs. I'm sure you can
find their compatibility lists on their sites if you're interested.
openBSD is a really clean system install, but you do have to use the
command line. Also, you may end up compiling packages from source
because they are trying to keep their package tree as unencumbered with
complex licenses as possible.
netBSD can be a bit of a rough ride. You have to do a lot for yourself.
And, if the object is to just install an open source OS, you might also
be interested in Darwin, which is Mac OS X without the gui parts that
Apple has kept proprietary.
(Is it a BSD system? It's actually got the Mach kernel underneath, so
you can definitely argue it is not BSD. And they've done funny things
with automount, although I understand they've made it possible to use
fstab without fighting the system in recent versions. But a lot of
Apple's work on Darwin is getting fed back into FreeBSD and the others,
so it's a kind of a blurred line.)
>From my experience, you might not want to assume that Mac OS X will
be all that foreign, if they leave the OS on the hardware. I've been
running a (okay, _really_ small) personal site on an iBook with Mac OS X
10.2, no real problems.
> The main thing is to get it up and running fast/stable/secure, so (in
> this project) I am not really wanting to learn a new distro, package
> manager, etc etc. I am a Red Hat guy mainly, and I don't have 20
> years of UNIX and C programming experience (unfortunately for me).
> Although generally I love learning new things of course, which is why
> I am on this list ...
YellowDog is basically RedHat. Or Fedora. Dang, I forget which.
http://www.yellowdoglinux.com/
One thing, they really want their customers to pay, so it's hard to
figure out where to go if you don't want their support. In fact, I can't
find it any more.
Can't find the ppc or Macintosh project on RedHat's site any more,
either. Why didn't I bookmark those? Hmm. Maybe it's at IBM, instead?
> I think I am gonna do my damndest to lobby for i386 and save myself
> architectural headaches. If there is no i386 hardware available, I
> will get it running on the ppc based on some of the links and advice
> posted here. I may give Yellow Dog a try, if it is reasonably easy to
> install it should do the trick for us.
Dead easy from what I hear.
(From my experience, even MkLinux and Linuxppc are/were pretty easy,
really.)
One more link that might be useful:
http://penguinppc.org/
--
Joel <rees@xxxxxxxxxxx>
