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Apple Businesses

LinuxPPC R5 Ships 65

Posted by Hemos from the c'mon-and-get-it dept.
Kevie-poo writes "According to LinuxPPC Inc - LinuxPPC R5 started shipping June 10th to CD-ROM customers. LinuxPPC says that they are in the process of upgrading their FTP servers for the download rush expected next week. Check it out at LinuxPPC "
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LinuxxPPC R5 Ships! More

LinuxxPPC R5 Ships!

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  • Given that the kernel supports the Blue & White (or, as I like to call it, the Smurf Tower), and all Smurf Towers include the RAGE 128 card, I'd say you're safe.
  • What to do? Go to the mailbox and see if my CD is here, or read more /.? Such a difficult choice.

    I sure hope they supported the Adaptec SCSI cards in the kernel this time - I don't want to yank the card out to boot it this time around.
  • So don't run Linux.

    But you're missing out. I love the MacOS as much as anybody, and I think that as a USER's OS, it beats the pants off 'most any other. With the possible exception of BeOS, which (alas!) I can't run on my 8600/300. Linux is a hacker's OS. Learn. Make your brain more crinkly. Expand your mind.

    Or don't. Smarter Mac users are up to YOU.
  • Are certain about that? I'm running a preview on my 8600/300 right now and haven't ever had any problems. From what I've seen, all Mach5 PPCs can run it. My Quin-booting right now. MacOS, MacOS X Server, MkLinux DR3, LinuxPPC R4 (soon to be R5), BeOS preview. Its very busy. ;-)

    Justin
  • This was, Uh, borrowed from a friend.
    ---
    What's this script do?
    unzip ; touch ; finger ; mount --verbose ; umount ; sleep


    Justin
    ---
  • http://www.macselect.com/desktops.html

    There, now stay w/ us mac users.

    It's a Blue G3 300/64MB RAM/6GB HD/100Mbit EtherNet/FireWire/USB/easy-open/will work w/ OSX Server/easily overclockable to 350/400/maybe 450

    This is the same machine I have, and it's nice. get it and stay Mac.
  • Been there done that with the 2940U2W. Its a pain. Another pain is /dev/sdXXX. The Adaptec card screws with my IDs which means that Mk sda while LPPC boots from sdb even though they are on the same drive! Something about card names and alphabetical order. MESH, ADAPTEC or something. Oh well. I'm off to the mailbox even though I know it won't be there yet!

    Justin
    --
  • Not really....a machine can be supported, inclucing video hardware, without support for acceration. Actually, I doubt Rage 128 is supported, given how shortly its been out. That doesn't mean it isn't though...
  • I downloaded and installed it - it seems to be the final (got lots of updated rpm's) but I'm not totally sure.

    It sure beats R4 right out of the box though...
  • I've been mucking around on a friend PowerBook G3 and Yellow Dog Champion Server 1.0 for a couple of weeks and for the life of me I can't get X to work (or networking for that matter).

    Has anyone had success with a PBG3 and LinuxPPC? From the looks of most of the message lists this seems to be an elusive goal. Its really one of the only things keeping me from buying my own powerbook g3.
  • So yank out the power supply and take it to the closest computer store with people who actually know how to build and repair PC's. All of the Power Computing systems I've seen use PC standard PS/2 power supplies. If you show your power supply to someone who knows what to look for they should be able to tell you if you can swap yours out for a generic one. It shouldn't cost you more than $50 and hopefully that'll carry you over til when the G4's ship.

    On the other hand, if you need to slap together a quick and dirty X86, you could likewise keep your current hard drive and CD-ROM drive (maybe with a cheap Linux compataible SCSI2 card if either is SCSI) and probably buy the rest of the parts you need (even good quality ones) for about $500.
  • I'm told you can get Debian installed on PPC, just no t exactly sure how. I believe the only way to do it is from an existing installed linuxppc/redhat. Problem is the only guide I could really find searching around was written sometime last year...
  • So has anyone gotten Debian installed on a PPC? I know it can be done, I've found sites of people who have done it, just no real current instructions on doing it. I'm loving Debian on my server machine at home, and I'd like to try it out on this new Powerbook G3 400mhz ;)
  • Actually, there was a speed bump recently, and $1600 will now buy you a 350 Mhz G3.
  • One of the best things about R5 is that the kernel supports the Blue & White G3s. Although unless you've got more money than brains, you'd be insane to buy the hardware to run soley LinuxPPC -- it's just too expensive compared to Intel/AMD-based machines.

  • This is pretty cool- I've been using the development release for a little while its been pretty solid the kinks have been bad enough that I haven't been able to use it as much as I'd like. If it's stable then then only thing I'll use mac os for will be midi and quicktime stuff.
    I hope/wish they'd package the video input drivers with the distribution.
    Now I'll be watching their ftp site for it to pop up - can't wait!
  • Dust off your iMacs folks! It's time to make
    those little suckers way more useful!

    I remember hacking R4 to work on the iMac. Even then linux on an iMac was a cool workstation idea.
    - Paradox
  • I've never been able to find them. MkLinux always posts them, but LinuxPPC doesn't.
  • It seems that getting Netscape compatible with the new libs, is what was delaying things and keeping it in the pre release stage.

    Hell Yes. Netscape seemed to port the PowerPC-Linux version of Netscape 4.6 to glibc 2.1.1 in about 5 months. Why it took so long, we may never know.

    Although, from what else I understand, there is also a Mac Based installer, for installing RedHat!


    Well, it's not all a Mac installer. But it's not a RedHat installer. The install process consists of like 5 different installers. The standard one uses a Aladin Stuffit Installer to install Mac OS files in the right place (such as BootX extention, Kernel, Ram-Disk. Then you use BootX to boot into Linux. (That step is skipped if you are using OpenFirmware)

    From their you get a perl script that finds a LinuxPPC-1999-Live-Install image on your disk which boots you into a gtk+/X11 based point and click installer. If you don't have the Live-Install image / with OpenFirmware, you just get the old RedHat-type Installer 6.0. Of course if you hate both Live-installer with X/gtk or RedHat-type installer you can always use a command-line perl script installer via. typeing control-z.

    The install process is pretty easy to use, although the installer system is pretty big (almost 30 megabytes), not including any RPMS.

    The installers (guides) make it definatly more usable.

    GNOME seems to work great in LinuxPPC R5, the speed in much improved over LinuxPPC R4 GNOME and Yellow Dog Linux's GNOME.

    It's been tweeked and ready to install on your machine now!
  • I'm still waiting for R6, code named LinuXXX. Features include new programs like Xnudetorvalds and nhooker, an ncurses based frontend to the old prostitute database 'hooker'.
  • Woohoo! I pre-ordered R5 a few months ago. My PPC box needs some serious updating.
  • All I know is that you can convert your LinuxPPC install to debian easily. I don't know about just debian, don't think they got any PPC installer ready yet.
  • Has anyone seen an ISO image of the LinuxPPC CD out there? I searched on http://ftpsearch.lycos.com for a long time and didn't find a thing... but I did find lots of RedHat 6.0 CD ISO images... argghh!
  • I just went to the apple site, and for $2600 could get a 450 Mhz G3, Zip drive, 12 gig Ultra ATA HD, 64 meg of RAM, USB, 100Mhz bus, and four PCI slots (one has the video)

    PLUS it comes with two Firewire ports, TWO USB ports, 10/100 enthernet, Top of the line video card, easy access case, for $50 bucks can get another 64mg RAM (third party), and since I don't know who put together your box, I am assuming it is another "generic" box, and who knows where the parts came from .

    And this doesn't even count the added extra's you could get by buying from a re-seller.

    Apples are pretty inexpensive now-a-days, all things considered.

  • Why not stick to your guns and get another Mac, since you seem to want one so much?

    You could get an old 7x00 mainframe and drop in a G3, overclock it, add a good SCSI card and be pretty stylin' for less money than you're talking about.

    You're asking us all to support alternatives but you're going to buy a peecee... man, who needs a warranty? If you get that 7x00 you can replace whatever you need to for very little money and you won't have the kinds of problems associated with Apple's crappy IDE-based systems.

    Have courage! You don't need that warranty if you pick your hardware carefully.
  • I don't know about conversions... but if you already have LinuxPPC installed you can get Debian going from a tarball on a separate partition without too much hassle. I did it several months ago and it was good aside from feature-incompleteness and random crashing one would expect from an early development build. This could be a very nice PPC distro if they ever finish it.
  • Whoooo Hooooooo !!!
    Allright , it's not much of a reply ... but what the hell , you can't sue me . ( Virginia residents must take a deep breath and consider that this is not a defamating statement )
  • Performance is nice, but it's not everything.

    The poster expressed a desire to continue running MacOS and BeOS in addition to Linux.

    You're not trying to suggest e can do that with a cheap peecee...?

    Honestly, unless your only interest is running a super-tweaked server, what possible advantage exists in a PII/450 over a G3 tower? Both have far more processing power than most individuals can readily take advantage of. Although, the PII is clearly the better choice if your computer needs to double as a space heater.

    With reference to the original post, it seems this is more of an issue of compatibility with installed software and feeling good about choosing alternatives than of having the faster hot-rod.

    For a CS student, I'd go with a RISC machine. The x86 instruction set doesn't have much life left in it.
  • All ATI "rage" video cards, including the 128 used in the B&W towers, use the Mach64 2d chipset, thereby making them accelerated in X. Thank you for your time.

  • The people that put together the box I mention is a quote I got from Penguin Computing. They're site for building custom systems doesn't have the latest prices.

    But what you're saying is, for $2600 you get only one processor, only a 12 gig HD, only 4 PCI slots with no AGP, so so video card (by today's standards, TNT 2's are MUCH better...remember, that card on the new G3's is already out on the PC's and while good, is not "top of the line").

    I get all the extra's from Penguin Computing, including support and warrenty. It's not a generic box at all and they even load the latest version of Linux and recompile the kernal for the custom systems.

    Yes, Mac's have come way down in price. And yes, I use Mac's 8-12 hours a day (I'm a Photoshop professional). Not to mention the fact that I'm even writing this on a Mac, but I'm finding I just get more bang for the buck with PCs. I mean, it's like night and day! I started out configuring a G3 with the $2500 budget and thought I had a pretty good deal. Then just for laughs I went by the Dell and Gateway sites and was totally blown away on what you get for the price.

    By the way, I could make this system much cheaper if I were simply to drop down to one processor...but then doing that I could send it back up to near the 2500 mark with a DVD or RW-CDROM drive and Dolby Digital 5.1 speaker system. Apple simply doesn't offer this. But that's ok. I'm personally looking for a Linux system.

    Will I come screaming back to the Mac folds after a few months of running this thing? Who knows!
  • Anyone know where to find an ISO of R5? Thanks.

    mTor
  • Does anyone know what kind of video accelerator support R5 comes with? I hope it has built in support for the various ATI chips, seeing as how they've been in every mac with one of these for quite a while now. I know that previous releases didn't, making the gui slooooow.
    --Matt
  • ftp://ftp.linuxppc.org/linuxppc-R5-final/

    woohoo!

  • On every PC I've ever owned, I've spent a significant amount of time futzing with the retarded 1980s-style hardware settings such as IRQs and IO ports. Fine for me, because I know how to do it, but quite a few people do not (and nor should they have to in this day-and-age,)

    So, is being able to avoid this by running Mac hardware worth the couple hundred bucks extra? It is if you look at the market rate for PC hardware technicians.

    (What I'd expect, though, is that the Linux/PPC driver support for expansion cards is more limited than x86, so maybe the point is moot.)



    --
  • I think Apple still needs to come a long way, like shave at least 15% off prices and go back to SCSI.

    Besides, no matter what Apple says the performance over a PC is, consumers see the MHz, RAM, and HD numbers as the end-all be-all indication of the bang the machine will give them for their buck. If you put a 450MHz G3 next to a 450MHz P2, both with 128MB of RAM and 13GB HD, they'll buy the PC because it's $500 less, even if it does perform disproportionately slower (pricewise) and is technically inferior.

  • Re:Um...not really... (Score:1)

    by Anonymous Coward
    but I'm finding I just get more bang for the buck with PCs. I mean, it's like night and day! I started out configuring a G3 with the $2500 budget and thought I had a pretty good deal. Then just for laughs I went by the Dell and Gateway sites and was totally blown away on what you get for the price.

    Look, it's plainly obvious your main criteria is price. For you and anyone else out there, price is not the main criteria for everyone. The iMac showed that. While PCs dropped below $700 including monitor, iMacs were being sold.

    You want to run Linux only? PCs and probably Alphas are best in price/performance, maybe the latter even more. If you want the cheapest thing on the face of the earth, sheer market economics tells you PCs are going to be cheaper before you even go out to price them.

    You want to run any version of MacOS? You gotta get a Mac. For many people, they like MacOS. For many people, they like Mac hardware. Whatever the reason, you don't have much other option.

    I wanna run MacOS and Linux as fast as possible? Get a B&W G3 300 mhz, remove the daughterboard, slap in a 3rd part card, crank it to 533, and be happy. Need PCI slots? Get an expander. They work well. Want SCSI? Get an Adaptec or something.

    Do I pay more? Yeah. Could I get an equivalent performing machine for less? Yeah. Would I be happy with it? Hell no. No MacOS. No MacOS X server. No nice GUI (don't even compare the Linux desktops--not even close). With a PC, people spend more time configuring and tinkering with the damn things, iguring out its next quirk or fighting viruses than doing work on it.

    btw, I've got a C610, Q650, a B&W G3, a P90 running Linux and OpenBSD, and a P200 running Win98 (my entertainment system) and BeOS. PCs and Linux are fun and they have their places, just not yet the desktop. I do more of my work (papers, graphics, presentations, organization, etc.) on my Mac.
  • Glad to see you guys finally got this out!
  • >Has anyone had success with a PBG3 and LinuxPPC?
    I'm running the pre-R5 release on it now.

    XF68_FBDev (the default X server) died on me with a "no valid modes error" which was fixed by running Xautoconf, Xconfigurator doesn't seem to work for me, go figure. Doing this gives you X accellerated IIRC, but a messed up mouse/keyboard. (Emulate3Buttons doesn't seem to work with the mouse, and the backspace key is mapped to forward delete on the keyboard in some apps)

    If you don't know how to fix these, you can do what I did, which was to make the Xpmac they also you the X server, which is also called "giving up" :)

    Harvey
  • The PowerComputing PowerWave (IMHO) is one of the best Macintoshes ever made. My PowerWave 604/150MHz has been running non-stop since the day I brought it home from the Macworld Expo.

    Over the years I've upgraded the processor to a 604e/200Mhz, added more memory to the 8 DIMM slots (try and find that in a machine today), replaced the 1.2 GB hard drive (it still works, I just needed more space), and replaced the CD-ROM (the tray motor failed, so I put in a nice 32X).

    This was the first machine I purchased with my own money - it had a special place in my heart. When I finally needed a newer computer I didn't want to get rid of my old PowerWave. So I slapped down the bucks and bought a copy of LinuxPPC R4. With that and a second network card my old box shines as web server and firewall for my private network.

    I can't wait to upgrade to R5 and I heartily reccomend LinuxPPC to anyone with an older Power Macintosh. (if you've never used Linux before, this is a great way to learn) You've still got a great piece of hardware there, LinuxPPC breathes new life into it!

    Hmm, I wonder if I should get one of those of those G3 daughtercards to go with my R5 upgrade?

  • Well, I've had my share of troubles even with non-ISA hardware. (PCI IRQ sharing that was broken, PCMCIA modems on IRQ 9, Laptops that ship from the factor with NO free IRQS making expansion impossible, I could go on forever...)

    If someone who doesn't understand PC AT IRQs (let's say your average Mac user, even the hardware techs), you honestly expect them to build their own AMD system?
    --
  • Posted by oNZeNeMo (guns'n ammo):

    I've always loved the PPC architecture, but I never could afford it. I was able to get linux installed on a G3 notebook that I had for a while. I was simply amazed at how well it ran compared to intel notebooks.

    I just want to know where they got the Star Trek enlightenment theme, it would work well with my GTreK theme that I am trying to put together.
  • I tried to get acceleration to work with a Desktop G3, but I cannot find the right params for BootX. Did anyone else?
  • It does have some ATI support, though it was written for the Mach64 if I'm not mistaken (works just fine on my Rage Pro, and should work on their other chipsets too).

    I know it also supports the IMS Twin Turbo (which was popular with the clones) and the Matrox Millennium. Then there are the Control and Valkyrie chipsets (used in older PowerMacs before Apple used ATI's stuff).

    After that, I don't know. Have I missed any?

  • Hello Alpha ;-) (Score:1)

    by Anonymous Coward
    Alpha is tempting, but they come at quite a premium.

    Nowadays? DEC Alpha 21164A is *very* inexpensive, and the 21164PC systems even more so.

    Just last week I purchased a Digital Personal Workstation 500a (500Mhz, 21164A) with 2MB cache, 64MB ECC, 4.3GB UltraSCSI (on a QLogic controller!), DEC 2114x ethernet, etc. for under $1300.00 from Great Lakes Computer. REfurbished with a 30-day warranty, the unit looks brand-new - had Debian running on it within an hour of receiving the unit.

    Mind you that I've seen these systems go for even less on Ebay (though without a warranty), and bare 21164PC MLB's go for under $300.

    Why settle for 32-bit CPU's (x86 / PPC) and 64-bit wide memory when 64-bit CPU / 128-bit memory is roughly the same price? BTW, the Linux-Alpha port is 64-bit clean and is progressing very rapidly - it's definitely nice to be ahead of the curve ;-)

  • heh, don't jump the gun, I dunno if its really ready...

    ftp> cd linuxppc-R5-final
    250 CWD command successful.
    ftp> pwd
    257 "/linuxppc-pre-R5" is current directory.
  • The motherboard can handle up to 700mhz processors. Very good for future upgradability.

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