What Linux for Mac? - Page 2

[quote]Actually, AppleNut, that's entirely false. With the exception of clockspeed switching, which, to be honest, I never use, Linux supports all power features, like sleep, configurable HD spindown,screen dimming/blanking etc. It also supports media bay hot swapping, etc etc.<hr></blockquote>

that's great to hear. I honestly have not tried a PPC Linux in a couple of years and that was not the case back then.

How's battery life compared to the Mac OS? Because Mac OS does some under the hood stuff. ie: OS 9 and OS X I have the same power saving settings on yet I get a lot more life out of OS 9 for some reason.

[quote]
Also, BootX, Quik and YaBoot bootloaders obviously all make really low system calls. Quik is basically an OF script, and I imagine so is Yaboot.<hr></blockquote>

correct me if I'm wrong but the beige g3s and other pre UMA G3 motherboards did not have openfirmware, correct?

Because from what I understand openfirmware is a lot more "open" then what Apple was previously using. That could be a reason that last year there were reports that Be was testing BeOS 5.5/6 on PowerMac G4 systems

[quote]that's great to hear. I honestly have not tried a PPC Linux in a couple of years and that was not the case back then.<hr></blockquote>
LOL! Yeah, a lot has happened in the last 2 years or so since I first screwed around in Linux. It's a lot more polished these days. Still a ways to go, but getting closer...
[quote]
How's battery life compared to the Mac OS? Because Mac OS does some under the hood stuff. ie: OS 9 and OS X I have the same power saving settings on yet I get a lot more life out of OS 9 for some reason.
<hr></blockquote>
AFA sleep goes, excellent. To be honest though, I usually plug my PB in. But on the whole, I'd say it's pretty close to par with OS9. Mind you, I don't have many power settings tweaked in 9, anyway, as I like a snappy system. I usually have APM tuner cranked to max, etc.

One nifty thing I discovered last week is that if the battery gets to like 3%, the system beeps and goes to sleep, like in Mac OS.
[quote]
correct me if I'm wrong but the beige g3s and other pre UMA G3 motherboards did not have openfirmware, correct?

Because from what I understand openfirmware is a lot more "open" then what Apple was previously using. That could be a reason that last year there were reports that Be was testing BeOS 5.5/6 on PowerMac G4 systems<hr></blockquote>

All macs since I think the 604 have OF, I believe. Just some have broken or lame OF. Like on the 7200, there's openFW, but no screen/keyboard support, so you have to use serial ports.

On my PBG3, getting into OF is a real hit/miss thing... If I pray to the jinx gods, CMD-OPT-O-F works about 1 in 3 times.

[ 02-20-2002: Message edited by: stimuli ]</p>

HFS (NOT HFS+!) works swell. You can add a line to /etc/fstab to mount it somewhere on boot. My small crossover partition is 'REMUS' (My main Mac Partition is 'ROMULUS'), and mounts at /mnt/REMUS/ when the system starts up.

The only catches I've got are 1) I have to be root to remove/move stuff to REMUS and 2) transferring huge files can cause crashes.

I mainly keep mp3s on REMUS so I don't have duplicates on ext2 and hfs+, thus wasting disk space.

[ 02-20-2002: Message edited by: stimuli ]</p>

You can mount HFS+, and read it (if compiled into the kernel), but not write to it.

But yeah, linux does HFS.

[quote]Originally posted by stimuli:
<strong>

All macs since I think the 604 have OF, I believe. Just some have broken or lame OF. Like on the 7200, there's openFW, but no screen/keyboard support, so you have to use serial ports.

On my PBG3, getting into OF is a real hit/miss thing... If I pray to the jinx gods, CMD-OPT-O-F works about 1 in 3 times.

[ 02-20-2002: Message edited by: stimuli ]</strong><hr></blockquote>


great to hear about the sleep.

so my 9500 should have open firmware?

guess I'll go give it a shot. learn something new everyday

yeah, but it sounds like the 9500 OF is wacky too:

[quote]
output-device/ATY,mach64
May need to disconnect the internal cdrom drive to boot from any device<hr></blockquote>

<a href="http://www.netbsd.org/Ports/macppc/models.html#9500" target="_blank">http://www.netbsd.org/Ports/macppc/models.html#9500</a>