Terra Soft Reveals Linux/PPC Hardware Solution 192
Gentu writes "OSNews features an article revealing a new product from Terra Soft, makers of the popular PPC Linux distribution Yellow Dog Linux, which effectively enables YDL to run on its own platform. Terra Soft is offering a motherboard and a complete PC based on the 600MHz G3 (G4 is also planned). This is of course still PPC, but it ain't a Mac. However, the article hints that it might be technically possible to run Mac OS and Mac OS X via Mac-On-Linux." Prices start at about $500, with 1U rackmounts starting at $870.
OS X (Score:2, Interesting)
Versus orginal MAC hardware. (Score:2, Interesting)
Re:OS X (Score:5, Interesting)
From the MOL FAQ (Score:5, Interesting)
FreeBSD? (Score:3, Interesting)
FYI (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:Why You Really Do Want a Beowulf Cluster of The (Score:2, Interesting)
Terra Soft's BriQ might be a better solution for some people since it is smaller (fits in a 5.25 bay) and available now. I really think they are well suited to lots of different uses. clusters, monitoring, IDS, logging, security devices.
Of course these new boards will be more expanadable and a little cheaper. Just depends on what you want it for.
not really (Score:3, Interesting)
In any case, I actually doubt that "G3 kicks the bejeezus out of the EPIA". I have both an iMac and an 800MHz EPIA, and I actually run compute-intensive stuff on them.. A 400MHz G3 is probably no faster than a 400MHz P3, and a 933MHz C3 probably is somewhere around a 300MHz P3 since the 800MHz C3 comes in at around the same speed or faster as a 250MHz P3 in the benchmarks I tried.
As for gcc maturity, the C3 is Pentium compatible. Linux just runs on it. If it's not as well optimized, that only means that there is more room for improvement over the above comparison; PPC optimization for gcc looks like a done deal--it won't get much better. What I do know from personal experience is that "porting" to the EPIA or any desktop PC is much easier than to the iMac/PPC: again, code just runs, while on PPC, you face byte order issues and x86 assembly doesn't work (e.g., for MPEG codecs).
Re:What's the point? (Score:3, Interesting)
I don't worry so much about DRM / TCPA / Palladium as I used to.
Why? Governments all over the world (outside the US) are jumping on the open source bandwagon. Other countries outside the US will make hardware and have local software development efforts. The only way that hardware DRM can really be truly effective is to get all hardware to use it. Since this appears like it will never happen, then DRM hardware efforts will be defeated or ignored. In either case, you won't have to be tormented with DRM hardware.
If China / India / Japan, etc. make their own PC's, and support Linux, then there is no way all (any?) of these PC's will have hardware drm. In fact crap like this could perhaps accellerate Microsoft's downfall.