Stability of Mac-on-Linux?

[Joshua Juran]

On Oct 3, 2006, at 2:46 PM, Calum Benson wrote:

> On 3 Oct 2006, at 13:30, Wolfgang Keller wrote:
>
>> this might be heresy to ask, but...

I like to think of the open source community as being especially  
candid about such questions,

>> How stable is Mac-on-Linux in everyday use?

since every user is a potential developer (or other team member).

> Well, my own personal experience, having used it for several hours a
> week for the past couple of years on my Powerbook G4 with Ubuntu (and
> previously Mandriva), is that I'm pretty sure it's never crashed.
> It's a bit of a pain having to recompile it every time you upgrade
> your kernel, especially when the build breaks, but that's life on the
> bleeding edge I guess.

I have a clamshell iBook dual-booting Debian and OS 9, with mol as  
well.  Broken builds don't affect me because I rely on the Debian  
packages.

I haven't had a problem with general stability, though sometimes  
waking from sleep will hang the mol box.  Most of my issues with mol  
are related to configuration or device support, or with using Linux  
in general.

Topping the list of mol-related items stopping me from using it full- 
time on that machine are
(a) time zone / clock issues,
(b) the need to manually configure audio on each boot of OS 9,
(c) suboptimal mouse acceleration, and
(d) incorrect function key mappings, although this is also an issue  
with Linux userspace generally.

I'm a fairly experienced Mac developer with some skill at writing  
system patches, and I'd like to contribute to the preservation of  
traditional Mac OS.  My first priority here is making Mac OS 9  
(booted natively) deal with global time in the system clock.

Josh