[dundee] Linux on the desktop

[Martin Habets]

 --- Jonathan Riddell <jr at jriddell.org> wrote: > On Sun, Jan 11, 2004 at 12:45:50PM +0000, Martin
Habets wrote:
> > I must agree that the Apple hardware is the best commercial hardware I have worked
> > with. 
> 
> You must not have worked with the fine Sun ELC, a decade old and still
> better screen resolution than any PC I use.  Such a shame that sparcs
> these days seem to be just really expensive PCs.

Sory, no. I'd prefer anything like a sparc Ultra 20 over most PCs, but not
those blade things.

> > On a professional level it has the 64 bit processor that can run big- or
> > little-endian, providing a good interface to existing (old) commercial hardware.
> > For private use it has very fancy I/O interfaces.
> 
> What have you used 64-bitness in apples for?  As far as I know Mac OS
> X is only 32-bit.

Yes, Mac OS X is 32 bit. But I was running Linux on them (and on the sparcs btw.),
so I had 64 bit compilers!
In my case the old hardware has 68000 based processors, which are no longer manufactured.
PowerPCs are an obvious replacement, which can be anything from a 604 to a 750FX or a G5.
Whatever CPU ends up on the commercial hardware, a Mac is the best platform to experiment
with and develop such software. And with Linux OS on a Mac we can even emulate the hardware
to use it as a testing bed.

For cheap commercial hardware solutions have a look at POP (http://penguinppc.org/dev/pop).

Martin


________________________________________________________________________
Yahoo! Messenger - Communicate instantly..."Ping" 
your friends today! Download Messenger Now 
http://uk.messenger.yahoo.com/download/index.html