linux is too expensive

[rutledge.50]

> Date: Tue, 26 Sep 2006 13:39:16 +0900
> From: kansaibear at mac.com
> Subject: linux is too expensive
> To: yellowdog-newbie at lists.terrasoftsolutions.com
> Message-ID: <1308013.1159245556917.JavaMail.kansaibear at mac.com>
> Content-Type: text/plain; charset=ISO-2022-JP
> 
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> 
> Of course there is the whole idea of not paying the ruling class for software... I was a vegetarian when I was in college, now I eat macdonalds cause the drive thru is convenient.
> Guess I am a sellout but will it ever make sense to install linux on a mac?
> Lets see, by the time things catch up with jaguar let alone panther or tiger, jaguar will be a buck, panther 15 bucks, tiger 50 bucks and the the corresponding soft will be give aways....
> 
> Ya know, I am a tinkerer by nature and I really wanted to make this work but I just dont have the time and money for now. I suppose if we had an IT man but, not at this stage. When I explaned this to my buddy who works as system engineer, he simply said 'why do you think we only sell windows and linux networks?' He has a mac on his desktop at home and a powerbook in his brief case....
> sayonara for now, linux
> 
Well, I don't think anyone here will blame you for being frustrated.  Running Linux on anything other than a PC or PC-compatible laptop is not for the faint of heart.  Dynamic linking didn't hit PowerPC Linux until five years after it was the norm on PCs, so there is a huge delay in some low-level areas of non-PC Linux development.

I've tried to run anything that claimed it might run on my Clamshell, and the results have ranged from "don't work a'tall" to "most things work after a few weeks of tinkering".

Having said that, it depends what you want to do with the machine.  If you need to run tcpdump and nmap and want automagically installable Perl modules, OSX isn't what you want.  If you want a desktop environment that can also do LAMP-type testing and development, OSX will do fine.

I can confidently say that the Linux performance is a plus.  OSX can be unproductive on my old machine just due to sluggishness, where I can pretty much travel at the speed of thought in a straight-up *nix.  OpenBSD is very fast on my machine, and Yellowdog is fine.

Anyways good luck, and if you find time and a few gigs of disk space, maybe you'll feel like tinkering again someday.

Now, if you want a real exercise in frustration, try running something other than Solaris on your 32-bit Sparc, or better yet, anything but MacOS 7 on your 68k Macintosh...  Yeah, some of us are sick puppies.

Linc
-- 
You have an ambitious nature and may make a name for yourself.