Terra Soft Ships Macs with Linux Preinstalled

dhovis writes "Do you think the Xserve is cool, but you wish it ran Linux? Well, MacCentral is reporting that Terra Soft Solutions, an Apple 'Value Added Reseller,' is now shipping Macs. They are offering several new Macs with Yellow Dog Linux preinstalled now, and are promising the Xserve will be available soon." They are currently shipping Power Mac G4s, iBooks, and iMacs, as well as AirPort cards. See the Terra Soft Store for more information.

Kudos

[rberton]

I run YDL 2.2 and before that I ran 2.1 on a QuickSilver (867 Mhz) PowerMac. I have been running glitch free for over a year now and my uptime is currently 85 days (power outage caused a reboot).

The one drawback is that setup was a PITA. I think it's great that Terra Soft is selling these pre-installed to take some of the ass sores out of the setup. Also Kudos to Apple for allowing them to resell with another OS on the machine.

Re:My two cents

[timothy_m_smith]

Is anyone really going to care if the XServe has the ability to run Linux? I really don't see the XServe as having that much value unless you really, really want to run Linux on a PowerPC rack-mounted server. The fact is that the XServe runs a bunch of IDE hard drives which would seem worthless for any real-world applications without any sort of RAID. What kind of business needs 480 Gb of non-fault tolerant disk space? In the end, why not just run on Intel or AMD hardware that will have much better software support.

Well, here's why I do it...

[Anonymous Coward]

There's been a lot of "why?" posts in this thread, so thought I'd respond. A couple of months ago I was looking for a laptop in general. I wanted a "real" laptop, something that was small, light, had a nice screen and good i/o ports. I looked at all the x86 machines, and some were nice, but it seemed the small ones were much more expensive than the large ones. I found a refurb ibook2, 500mhz, 15gb HD, CD drive, with a beautiful screen and 4-5 hour battery life for $799, complete with 1 year factor warranty.

I tried OSX, and it's OK, but as a person who only uses linux at home, it just seemed bloated, slow and not as "tweakable" as what I was used to. Then there's the problem with commercial software. I haven't been able to find any GPL apps for OSX that do what I'm used to doing in Linux, and I didn't feel like spending hundreds of dollars for software to recreate the functionality for what I do, which is mainly internet and office type of work.

So, I installed Yellow Dog 2.3 as a dual boot option, and I've been very happy with it. I have all my old familiar apps that look and work the way they do on my Athlon home computers, it came right up and detected all the hardware, airport wireless works BETTER in linux than OSX (better throughput), and KDE 3.01 looks fine to me for a desktop.

I still have OSX as an option for when I need one of the few features that I think OSX does better, but 95 percent of the time I use Yellow Dog.

A rather strange marketing strategy...

[MalleusEBHC]

Instead of delving into the OS X v Linux debate that this has pretty much become (OS X rules all btw... guess I couldn't go without adding my two cents on this one), I am more intrigued by how Terra Soft thinks they carve a slice out of the already small pie that is Apple hardware sales. Apple had about a 5% market share last time that I checked. Of the people buying Apple hardware, I would be willing to wager that 80-90% don't even know what Linux is. Of the people who would buy Apple hardware and would commonly be considered potential Linux users (wanting a good *nix OS, at least decently knowledgeable about computers, and willing to spend the time to install/learn Linux), a large majority are people who are in love with OS X because of its Unix foundation and beautiful GUI/ability to run most commercial software. So this leaves a very small portion of Apple hardware users (with Apple already being a small portion of the hardware market) who would want to run Linux. Of this small crowd, how many do you honestly think would want to pay about 200 extra dollars for someone else to install Linux which they could do for free?

Bringing the extinguisher...

[tuxedobob]

Geez, everyone, it's as simple as this:

Apple/OS X/Aqua fans, be glad the GNU/Linux users are supporting Apple in the form of hardware sales. No matter what a reseller does, Apple will get some portion of the price. (Probably the same no matter what the reseller does.) This will inevitably go to development of OS X, to some extent. However, if you flame them, you may shoo them off to some other architecture.

YDL and GNU/Linux fans, welcome to the club. Enjoy the hardware, but try the OS as well. If you need any help, be sure to check out Apple's support site, including the discussion boards. Just keep in mind that most people will be expecting Mac OS 9/X users, so they may or may not be of much help. And remember, it only gets better from here.

You'd think people would realize that this benefits everyone.

Re:I have to wonder why

[Artifex]

Your reasons are pretty much exactly why I want my next computer to be a mac - and I've been running PCs for 17 years or so.

A Mac with OSX would give me a stable OS with real apps (Photoshop, some office product) and still let me fart around with BSD pretending to know what I'm doing. I don't have to worry about "serious" apps breaking from dependencies on some package that just got updated, but I can still play around with the free stuff if I want to. Plus, I'm not a software developer, and I feel it's pointless for me to have to spend hours tweaking desktops and hardware drivers to get things useful.

I think their engineering is solid, but I am still waiting for them to get up to speed. Macs look pretty, but a 533MHz FSB on a Pentium 4 still makes me drool. And before you complain that I'm comparing things improperly, imagine your G4 with a 533 FSB. Then there would be no doubt that it rules, right?