Hi all,
Some people may remember the above subject line from a month or so
back. At the time, I had just received an iBook and was playing around
with MacOSX. I had not yet installed Linux on the machine and therefore
could not make an accurate comparison.
That has now changed. I have Linux running, with all the power management
and sound stuff working. I haven't played with the modem port, USB or
firewire, mainly because I have no need. I still don't have the Blackbox
WM running but I think thats a problem with the PPC version of the Debian
package. IceWM runs very nicely.
MacOSX Pros :
Amazing simple to set up. Far easier than even windows.
A couple of neat features (like network locations, which doesn't
work 100%).
MacOSX Cons:
Chews up an amazing amount of disk space cw Linux.
Chews up an amazing amount of RAM cw Linux.
The speed difference is the main thng I've noticed that differentiates
Linux and MacOSX on this iBook. Linux is simply far snappier.
I spend most of my time on this machine writing, compiling and debugging
code. As a comparison I did some times on doing a "make check" (compile
the whole thing and run the test suite) on my own project libsndfile.
All timings were done immediately after a reboot, so disk caching would
not be a factor. MacOSX was running on a HPF+ filesystem and Linux on
Ext2. Timings for this machine were as follows (XDarwin is the X window
system for OSX):
Linux : 2min 13sec
MacOSX without XDarwin : 3min 39sec
MacOSX with XDarwin : 4min 03sec
It should also be noted that the above MacOSX compile times are after I
renamed the existing /bin/sh and made a softlink from there to /sw/bin/bash.
Being a library, libsndfile gets compiled with libtool which is acutally
a Bourne shell script. For some reason (which I simply could not be bothered
investigating) the OSX Bourne shell is *REALLY* slow. In fact, using the OSX
Bourne shell, compiling libsndfile takes 13 min 20 secs! I have swapped back
and forth between the softlink to bash and the native Bourne shell a couple
of times. This timing is repeatable.
So it looks like this machine will be running Linux for the majority of
its life, switching to OSX only to test compiling for OSX or play with OSX
only software.
Erik
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+-----------------------------------------------------------+
Erik de Castro Lopo [EMAIL PROTECTED] (Yes it's valid)
+-----------------------------------------------------------+
"Reality is just a crutch for people that can't handle CyberSpace!!"
- Hank Duderstadt
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