On Sat, 06 Sep 2003 15:54:40 -0400 Alan Kim <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
> > Just read the news about the Japan/China/Korea alliance to promote > increased development and use of non-Windows OS such as Linux. > Are any Supermac listers tinkering with Linux ? > Is this a lanuage that can function productively on our machines ? > I've been interested in learning the language if for nothing else just > to see another OS run on the S900. > > Thanks for any feedback. > > Alan hey Alan, I've been running Linux on my s900 exclusively for over a year. It is *much* nicer than classic MacOS in terms of the performance you can get out of the underlying hardware. This machine with it's dual 604e's still serves as a daily driver for web/email/graphics use, as well as being a file and print server for the home network vi netatalk (an Open Source implementation of Appletalk). As a note to an earlier thread, I can share my old Imagewriter II as well as an Epson inkjet with the network, with Ghostscript and CUPS accepting Postscript jobs from the other Macs on the network via netatalk and driving the printers. I believe that ghostscript supports color for the imagewriter, but am unable to test that as I did not spring for the $12 color ribbon, when the inkjet produces excellent color output. Linux has a whole different mindset than MacOS or Windows. You can more fully utilize the machine at the expense of having to learn. You have the choice of customizing your environment to suit your personal preferences - but you lose the cookie cutter standardization that many people's experience with computers relies on. A major distro such as YDL abstracts much of this into familiar metaphors and hides it under your choice of graphical interfaces - resulting in a box very similar to a MacOS or Windows machine - for the cost of a download. Linux will also coexist happily with MacOS on the same machine if you have a spare drive or partition. You can then dual boot via a MacOS extension. You can also run MacOS as a Linux process with Mac-On-Linux, which is very similar to classic in OSX. NetBSD also has a port that runs fine on our machines, although it doesn't support smp. This is probably a 'cleaner' form of *nix to learn on, but doesn't have the hardware support that Linux does. At one time or another, this s900 has run MacOS 7.5.5-9.2.2, BeOS R4.5, Debian Linux, LinuxPPC, Yellow Dog Linux, Gentoo Linux, and NetBSD. tom -- SuperMacs is sponsored by <http://lowendmac.com/> and... Small Dog Electronics http://www.smalldog.com | Refurbished Drives | Service & Replacement Parts [EMAIL PROTECTED] | & CDRWs on Sale! | Support Low End Mac <http://lowendmac.com/lists/support.html> SuperMacs list info: <http://lowendmac.com/supermacs/list.shtml> --> AOL users, remove "mailto:"; Send list messages to: <mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED]> To unsubscribe, email: <mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED]> For digest mode, email: <mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED]> Subscription questions: <mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED]> Archive: <http://www.mail-archive.com/supermacs%40mail.maclaunch.com/> --------------------------------------------------------------- >The Think Different Store http://www.ThinkDifferentStore.com ---------------------------------------------------------------
