[Novalug] What to put on a G4 Laptop?

Mark Smith mark@winksmith.com
Thu Feb 26 22:53:26 EST 2009


On Thu, Feb 26, 2009 at 09:49:30PM -0500, Bonnie Dalzell wrote:
> On Fri, 27 Feb 2009, Mark Smith wrote:
> 
> MS >On Thu, Feb 26, 2009 at 09:43:17AM -0500, Nick Danger wrote:
> MS >> Now, what do I put on it? I could go with OS X but I was hoping for 
> MS >> something a little more Linux-y :-)  Suggestions?
> MS >
> MS >why not just load OSX on it?  it comes with software that mainly
> MS >works right: pdf, movies, flash, dvd player, etc.
> MS >
> MS >that aside, yellowdog seems to be the choice for apple hardware.
> 
> Since OSX has unixy roots I have found that a lot of my favorite command 
> line open source programs also are availablerun on our MAC.

yeah, OSX is basically just a unix box with a tightly coupled and
optimized windowing system.  think of a unix system where a team
of programmers optimized X11 to mate with custom hardware and you're
just about there.  don't like a windowing system, go directly to a
bash prompt instead of the windowing system, just type <CMD>+S
during bootup.

bash, apt, vi, mutt, openoffice, firefox and all your friends live
there.  you just have to open a terminal to get to them.  for extra
credit just write some script to access the windowing system.  it
even runs regular joe X11 applications.

on the other hand, i find it unfortunate that they've reinvented
so much of the familiar infrastructure.  for instance, there's no
initd process.  they use something called launchd which essentially
does the same thing.  initd has some quirks, but so does launchd.
but if you don't use initd directly this shouldn't really affect
you too much.

i think i'll be in danger of getting in trouble by luggites if it
i talk any longer about it so i'll quit now.

-- 
Mark Smith
mark@winksmith.com
mark@tux.org



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