[Wolves] Macs, Linux et al

[Steve Parkes]

On 8 Apr 2005, at 16:04, Katherine Goodwin wrote:

> Kevanf1 wrote :
>> I know that you can run Linux on a Mac using the Yellow Dog distro.
>> But, can you run FreeBSD?  What about running XP on a Mac? Is it
>> possible?  Just curious as I don't own one but I'm plain interested
>> and being as one or two people on here have Mac's :-)))
> I can't give a technical answer on this..
> You can run lots of other varieties of Linux on Macs - I run Ubuntu 
> for PPC on my ibook
> I don't think you can install Windows on them, but I believe there are 
> windows emulators
> you can get...

you can run loads of linux distro's (currently Linux uses a PPC 
machine), and as MacOS X is built on a freeBSD base you can also run 
the BSD's.  I think netBSD was the first to offer support but the big 
three all run now.

You can't directly run Windows on a mac since MS has never offered this 
as an option but there are a couple of techniques to get windows 
software working.

The first is the best supported and is running a virtual pc in software 
on your machine.  This is directed supported by MS since they now own 
the virtual PC software and sell it with XP for the easy option.  A 
better option for most people (since most people have more windows 
licences than they could every want to use) is to use an open source 
virtual machine such as Bochs or Qemu.  They are both the dogs danglies 
and I use them when I am playing with my toy OS.  For my purposes they 
offer exactly the same as virtual pc (which I downloaded and tried to 
see if my software booted on it, no I don't have a copy now this Mac 
has been ubuntu-osx-ubuntu-osx now for the last few months)  I have no 
idea how well XP runs on either of them since I haven't tried but I 
presume it runs like a PC about a 5th of Mhz rating of the machine you 
are on, not that this is a particually accurate way of looking at 
relative performance.

A new way of running software designed for windows on PPC machines 
combines the virtualisation offered by qemu and bochs, and the api 
replacement wine to create darwine.  The first stage is to port winelib 
to darwin to make it possible to recompile well behaving windows apps 
and run them on OSX the next is to combine qemu/bochs and wine so it 
runs like wine under linux.  This is great news for people who need one 
or two windows apps to move over to either linux or osx and use 
software written for windows on a mac.

Written on a mac and emailed using Apple Mail and apples port of 
postfix under OSX, ner ner ner ner neeerrrrr.

I recently switched to OSX as my desktop (it won't crash, stays cutting 
edge while remaining stable (I can't bring myself to having a stable 
linux desktop, it's my fault not linux's), and the colours look as 
expected when I am doing web design) but I still use Linux everyday 
using vnc (for when I am playing with gschem, can't get it to work 
under fink, and others) and using ssh (for everything terminal apart 
from quickie namelook ups and vim sessions on the mac) but it stops me 
having to check web stuff on Jennies XP machine every ten mins as it's 
easier to predict how it'll look on a lesser system when using OSX 
which manages to keep colour correct between updates something that X 
always fucks up.

sparkes (shit I'm a Mac using web designer, perhaps I should get my 
yellow tinted glasses repaired so you can all take the piss properly 
(in fact that's not a bad Idea, these glasses are a little wonky))