I entered the world of Apple hardware about 3 months ago now, with a second-hand iBook2. It was a 500mHz, 256mb, ATI Rage 128 model, with a standard CD-Rom drive. I spent the first few days trying to tweak Mac OS X to my liking, then a few further weeks installing and learning to use the applications I thought I’d need. Chimera, BBEdit, the developer tools, even the Fink X server so I could use Gaim.
But OS X just wasn’t stacking up for me. For my uses, Mac OS X isn’t all it claimed to be.I’d read the hype about OS X, indeed it would have been pretty hard to miss. I was led to believe that great swathes of Windows users (and a few Linux users) were biting the bullet and changing to OS X because of it’s performance, usability and stability. Maybe this situation is a little exaggerated given the nature of the pro-Apple press, which will pounce upon any morsel and claim that the Mac revolution had finally arrived (albeit maybe 15 years too late). But eventually, using OS X was, for me, a bit of an anti-climax.
The graphics card that was incorporated in my iBook wasn’t up to running the new QuartzExtreme features, so I had to make do with standard 2D rendering. I experienced small amounts of graphical lag right from the start with OS X.
Scrolling a Finder window with more than 10 or so icons in it would produce skipping and visible refreshing, something I thought died with Windows 3.1. I certainly wouldn’t have expected such poor performance from from a 256mb system, when my Amiga 500 managed such tasks and performed better, at least in terms of responsiveness, than this in 1991. Maybe this could be rectified. Maybe the configuration panel hides an option to increase rendering performance; but I shouldn’t have to find it, such simple system performance issues should not exist. OS X on Apple hardware should just work well out of the box.
In addition, the 1024×768 maximum resolution of my iBook simply didn’t seem enough for OS X. Maybe technology has evolved so much recently without my noticing that 1024×768 is now the working minimum, but consider the cavernous expanses of desktop you get in Windows 9x at that resolution. My mother uses Windows 95 at 640×480 resolution, and is quite happy with it. I can’t see how Apple can justify the cramped feeling of OS X on such a high-resolution display.
I laboured with it for the first months of my iBook use, telling myself; “This is just the way Macs are, you’ll get used to it” and “You’ve just got to think differently”, but waiting for my computer to catch up to me just isn’t the way to be productive. In an age where Moore’s Law proves itself every 6 months or so, I should never have to wait for tasks to finish when using simple desktop productivity applications. Simple little things can kill your computing morale; I don’t want to watch an icon bouncing up and down while an application starts; I want those extra cycles put to use to make said application start faster in the first place. Even simple applications like the terminal were taking around ten seconds to load; unacceptable when all I wanted to do is issue one command (and yes, opening the terminal, waiting, then issuing that command is still faster than using the Finder).
Don’t get me wrong, I do like some aspects of OS X. This article isn’t a flame. I think the enforcing of the Apple HIG on application vendors generates truly stellar usability levels, and represents the way forward to functional, ‘just works’ computing. I think out of the box, OS X is the prettiest OS out there, and while they may impact on performance, you can’t deny that large, clear icons and well-worded dialogues and menus help out novice users more than any ‘tool-tips’ or help files. However I feel that Apple have concentrated on getting OS X running nicely on their top-end hardware and ignoring those of us who can’t afford or just don’t want to upgrade to something a faster. I’m sure the same accusation was raised by 386 owners when Microsoft released Windows 95, but my iBook is just 18 months old, and certainly not ready for the scrap-heap yet.
I think the OS X concept is great, and given a few more version revisions and a truckload of optimisations and I’m sure they’ll be on to a real winner (and if the occasional x86 port rumours are true, I know for sure who will win the ‘desktop battle’ for Joe Sixpack, and it certainly won’t be Microsoft).
For now, and more importantly, for me as a power-user, OS X just isn’t good enough for doing the things I need to do.
The Alternatives
I think maybe I should clarify here that I’m not an Apple user for the software. I don’t use Photoshop or Dreamweaver, and I don’t heavily use a digital camera or video camera. I’m not one of the media types that traditionally made up the Macintosh market. I’m a web developer of the ‘new school’; CSS, the W3C validators and a good terminal Vim session are my friends. I like to do everything by hand, and I’m most comfortable using Linux as it’s what I run for my clients on their web servers. I’ve been using Linux on the desktop on and off since Redhat 5.2, and I’ve now been Microsoft free since 2001. My other laptop is currently a Dell Inspiron 2560 which has run Redhat 7.3, 8.0 and now 9 ever since I bought it. To be honest, I only really wanted to play with Apples for the hardware. Apple hardware is, in my opinion, the best manufactured and designed hardware bar-none. Macs are sexy, cool and hell, they last for years.
So, what were my options? It seems the PPC users options are certainly limited. I could downgrade to OS9, but that would mean learning a whole new system (again), and the OS9 architecture seems the be flawed and, well, decaying. Of course, I’d heard about PPC Linux, but never anything more that the occasional Slashdot announcement for a distro release, and that never seemed to happen particularly regularly anyway. I’ve used Redhat for most of my working life, I was comfortable with it, and so that was the basic blueprint I used when looking for a Linux PPC solution. I knew Debian PPC was available, but I’ve used Debian on x86 in the past and I don’t like the idea of having to download and configure everything I wanted from scratch, least of all actually set it up into a usable state. I had a look at SuSE, but their PPC offerings haven’t been updated since 7.3, and I wanted to be a little more current than that (From my use of Redhat on x86, I knew I had to have Gnome 2.0)!
. How happy I was when I found Yellow Dog Linux 3.0.
Yellow Dog is, essentially, a port of Redhat 9 to PPC. It uses the excellent Redhat installer ‘anaconda’, keeps the same Bluecurve-esque theme (‘Wonderland’), and streamlined GNOME 2.2 desktop. I gazed at the screenshots, read the marketroid spiel, and within 5 minutes I had gFTP downloading the 3.0 ISO images from my local mirror. Once received (about 4 hours later over my DSL) I burned the images and inserted the first disc into my iBook.
The Installation
I waited for the screen to light up, heard the familiar, reassuring Apple ‘BONG’, then watched in dismay as OS X booted normally. I had forgotten to hold down the ‘C’ key as the machine booted up. (did I mention I’d only been using my iBook three months? 😉
A quick reboot, and now I watched as the installer started. I don’t really have any comments about the installer (which is, of course, good thing), apart from that it worked really well. If you’ve used any of the recent Redhat releases you’ll be right at home. Partitioning was a snap (I just selected the automatic option, I decided not to keep any OS X partitions), and I selected the custom package option. I elected to install GNOME over the default KDE (nothing personal, I’m just familiar with GNOME having never really used KDE), which wasn’t the default setting, and I added a few extra packages I know I’d need. The overall install size with these options was around 2GB.
One thing I did notice is that I was being asked a few possibly redundant questions. The installer asks you for your mouse type, video card and monitor type. Because of Apple’s standardised hardware, surely a lot of this should be avoided by simply selecting the type of machine at boot; if I could have just told the installer I have an iBook, surely it should then know what hardware I have. Maybe this wouldn’t work so well for those people with a custom PPC system, but for the majority who have Apple hardware which remains pretty much unchanged from manufacture, this feature would make things nice and easy.
Using Yellow Dog
The first boot was pretty painless. The CUPS daemon took a long time to start on the first boot, I guess as it figured out I don’t actually have a printer. This hasn’t been an issue on subsequent reboots, I think it fixed itself. The firstboot application ran fine, and I set some system options and tested my sound card.
I logged on and a very familiar GNOME desktop appeared, almost identical to Redhat’s apart from the default panel position. Yellow Dog puts the panel at the top of the screen, presumably to make previous Mac OS users feel at home. This was soon remedied 😉
The first things I tested was the suspend mechanism, which was one of the things that impressed me most about OS X. I closed the lid, and to my surprise the little breathing LED that I was familiar with worked first time. I opened the lid, and after half a second, my desktop appeared again, perfectly. I was impressed. Very impressed. I started the GNOME battery monitor applet, and it displayed the status pretty accurately (I’d ran the whole installation process on batteries, so I was down to about 30%).
Now, the real test, the extended keyboard functionality. I tried the brightness and volume controls, which also worked flawlessly, as did the F12/eject button. The F10 and F11 keys take on the role of the middle and right mouse buttons respectively, a fairly cumbersome solution, and I can see it causing problems for the mouse-dependant. I don’t really see a much more elegant work-around for this problem, and well done Yellow Dog for including this feature as a fall back for those without external mice. Another nice feature that users of the iBook’s track-pad may appreciate is the pad-tap functionality. Using the option-F1 and option-F2 keys you can set the tap functionality, from a mouse click to drag mode etc. While Linux was never designed to work with single mouse button systems, Yellow Dog have done well to make X usable.
By this point I was pretty much speechless. I’ve had various problems with laptops and Linux in the past, and I didn’t expect everything to work so well out of the box. If anything I was a little upset I wouldn’t be able to get my hands dirty under the hood to make it all work again 🙂
As far as the applications go, I suggest you go and read any review of Redhat 9. OpenOffice.org is there, in all its glory (I’m using it to type this), and Yellow Dog seem to have decreased the start time a respectable amount. OO.org Writer takes around 6 seconds to load on this machine, OO.org Calc just a little longer. Mozilla 1.2.1 is included with anti-aliased fonts by default, and Evolution is getting more and more mature each time I use it. Apart form these, all the usual suspects are here, emacs, The Gimp, gphoto2 and suchlike, along with a few themes and backgrounds.
The GTK2 font smoothing looks excellent on the iBook’s LCD panel, set to the ‘sub-pixel’ rendering method. Overall system performance seems pretty snappy, and certainly more responsive than using OS X.
Keeping my system up to date has been a snap, because unlike Redhat, Yellow Dog uses apt-get for RPM out of the box (and why Redhat haven’t followed suit yet is a mystery), and updating is as simple as ‘apt-get update && apt-get upgrade’.
There are still some holes in the bundled applications. MP3 support isn’t here, as in Redhat, and there is the conspicuous lack of a video player. MPlayer with a nice GTK front-end (the current MPlayer GUI suffers from an annoying bug where the GUI appears underneath the GNOME panel, making some buttons inaccessible) would be a good start, or maybe something from the excellent VideoLan project. I downloaded RealPlayer, which worked fine out of the box (I experienced no /dev/dsp permission problems that seem to persist with standard Redhat installations). While all of the above can be fairly easily obtained and installed, it’s a protracted process, and including these applications by default would be a great plus; maybe a Debian-esque ‘non-free’ repository which could be scanned during installation for extra packages which don’t necessarily meet the licensing restrictions of the standard CDs. I think Gentoo Linux got this system exactly right; those applications which requ!
ire click-through agreements or binary-oply releases could be downloaded then installed using an RPM spec file. One of my pet-peeves is installing applications that don’t get listed in my RPM database.
Hardware support looks good. My external USB HP CD-writer was auto-detected, and worked fine with the new Nautilus CD burning capability. I also have a USB MS Sidewinder joy-pad, which worked fine once I ran /sbin/modprobe joydev as root. I don’t have any FireWire devices to test the support, but there is mention of FireWire in /proc/bus/pci, so I can only assume the Yellow Dog kernel comes with compiled-in support. Some sort of XFree voodoo meant that when I plugged in my USB mouse, it was working instantly (with wheel support) without me having to touch my XF86Config.
The Conclusion.
I love my Linux iBook. It really is the perfect computing platform. The marriage of such excellent hardware and a Linux distro customised to take advantage of it all make the iBook a joy to use with YellowDog. Using it for day-to-day tasks brings back a joy that I thought died with the Amiga. Everything just works. If you’re someone who needs to use their computer to work, and can’t tolerate software failure or hardware incompatibilities, this Yellow Dog Linux on Apple hardware fits the bill very well indeed.
So do I regret ditching OS X? Not really. I have some issues; it’s much harder to find PPC RPMs on the net that x86 rpms (It should be noted that the excellent Freshrpms repository provides PPC packages). I’m a little more limited in my use of other operating systems within Linux; I can’t get VMware, for example, but that’s really a problem with the choice of hardware platform that operating system.
About the Author
Jon Atkinson is currently taking a year out from a Computer Science degree at University of Wales, Aberystwyth, and in his spare time likes tinkering with old hardware, boozing a little too much and spending excessive amounts of money on his better half. His (largely) juvenile website can be found here.
i just have a few precations about running linux, 1) is that gimp is not as good as Adobe Photoshop, I will probably run gimp soon on my G4 anyways, but Gimp doesn’t handle layers as good as Photoshop. 2) is that I run Final Cut, imovie, and Premiere, Film Gimp won’t do it for me. Linux has a long way to go before it can beat OS X or Windows, until it does I will stick with Apple and MS, and use the terminal in OS X for unix apps.
Firstly, CRT iMacs’ do not have those buttons. Any manipulation to the monitor has to be done by software. If they did, I would have just quickly changed the settings and not even bothered to post.
“Why I couldn’t give a high-flyin’ f__k why you ditched Mac OS X for Linux.” Coming to an internet near you.
I’ll be honest… I’d love to have a PPC machine to play with as a 2nd desktop. But the only way that’ll happen is if Hyperion or Amiga V4 drop their prices considerably (Don’t give me the usual story about limited supply and 1st run’s being expensive. If they really want to get customers, they’ll have to drop their prices. It’s that simple).
If you want to run Linux, it seems that x86 is the best way to go!
As an example, I just purchased a new machine (and am dying for it to arrive). For just over the amount it would cost me to get a 1 CPU, 1Ghz mac, I’ve purchased a 3Ghz P4 machine w/an 800Mhz FSB, 1 gig of 400mhz ram, 2 80Gb serial ATA drives (in a raid 0 config), and a ATI 9600 vid. card.
This thing will run circles around any mac currently available, and again, I did this for less than $200.00 over the price of that 1Ghz, 1 CPU mac!
Mac diehards may love their machines (and I’ll admit to being a closet mac fan), but there’s just no way that you can justify this kind of pricing difference. I’m not trying to brag my machine up (There’s more to it then the above for that matter), but rather to illustrate that day by day Macs are falling farther and farther behind. Real power users want a machine that can keep up with them, and while a PPC does do more with each cycle than its x86 counterpart, there’s no denying that Macs are getting chewed up more and more by the power of todays PCs.
One of my primary purposes for this new machine is to do video editing and content creation (in addition to the drool/cool factor). Until recently, video editing was Macintosh, but now look at the marketplace. You can do just as much on a PC for a whole lot less money these days, and usually you can do it a whole lot faster with an x86 machine.
Why someone would buy Mac hardware just to run Linux on is beyond me. x86 is where it’s at.
Now if someone gave me one to play with… 8)=
See those little buttons on the front of your monitor…. TRY THEM!!!! they fix your screen when it shifts!!!!
i do think that the problems mentioned with a shifted image on the display concerned laptop screens, which have no such buttons since they are addressed directly. if they are addressed incorrectly the only way to fix it is with a corrected driver.
Oh, and one more thing. XP isn’t fast, or responsive. Or even that stable. I’ve got it running on a lightly overclocked Celeron 500MHz (@562MHz) system with a heap of RAM and a 32Mb video card. Screen redraws are slow, glitchy, mouse responsiveness varies and apps crash all the time. Not only does Luna take a fair bit of tweaking to calm down, but all the folder actions and stupid wizards and stuff slow down your progress far more than they aid.
Yes Luna is slow, you can use the classic interface, that’s more responsive. WinXP is stable, just don’t overclock.
Run a virus checker and get rid of all the spyware (spybot search and destroy), turn of indexing and get rid of Norton 2003 it’s utter crap.
My only experience with Os X was that I launched a terminal on an eMac in the computer shop – it was there that the OS lost all it’s magic for me. Somehow, when I used it then, for the first time, it was like I woke up from a dream… strange… but it definitely looks great.
However, both our computers at home have Windows 2000, and the first one sometimes reboots spontaneously, the other one often freezes when round-corner or alpha-transparant windows are on the screen.
Now I am typing this on SuSE 8.2, on a P350, and I can only say it works really great, or well, other than that my digital camera is not supported as far as I know. So there, you might need to use Os X.
From the review I wish we got a better idea how much memory and what version of MacOSX he was using. MacOSX 10.0.5, 10.1.5 and 10.2.6 are all different. 10.1.5 makes MacOSX useable and the current version of Jag is great.
I have a coworker that uses MacOSX Jag on a PowerBook G3 with 384MB of RAM. Its slow but he is pleased with how fast it runs in addition to the top heavy GUI.
it’s funny how certain people will choose an OS that “squeezes every cycle from the computer” and end up using text editors and irc. When asked “what about apps that really put those cpu cycles to good use such as Photoshop, Office or video apps?” the response is “well I can always use an emulator” Of course the app always runs better natively but I guess some people would rather have the fastest irc clients than high performance apps and games.
Don’t like the bouncing icons? System Preferences > Dock > Uncheck “Animate opening applications”
Now, was that so hard? The bouncing icon will now be replaced by a pulsating arrow to indicate the application is loading.
Am I the onlyone to laugh at the irony of this?
yes you are the only one laughing at the irony of this.
Its actually very intuitive.
i agree OS X is slow for older (esp. consumer)machines, i use it on an imac and it is slightly painful. My 17″ PBook is another story. This thing is fast. It is sexy. Its only for people that have money trees though.
i also believe the performance issue will absolutely disappear in a few months.
I will look into mandrake or YDL for my imac, but the problem is that i will lose that awesome mac network integration. Built in rendevous and web sharing make my house go round. We will see.
People that compare XP to OS X need to be reminded that XP is really just Windows 2000.1, which is really NT 5.1, and NT came out a looooong time ago. XP is just a cartoon GUI, direct x improvements for gamers, and some other inconsequential features that no one even remembers. My roommate runs 2000 and i run XP- other than my wannabe GUI, i cant tell the difference.
I’ve just installed YDL 3.0 on an old clamshell “toilet-seat” indigo iBook. I’m a complete and utter Linux newbie, not having paid attention to my one class in Unix back when I got my CompSci degree (the prof spent most of the class on the new and exotic thing called the World Wide Web anyway). Mostly I’m trying out Linux to see if it’s usable enough for someone without a degree, your average Joe Sixpack as they say.
The installer was pretty painless, other than a small hiccup on accepting the automatic partitioning option. But already I can see that Linux isn’t ready for the general user, not while there’s anything that absolutely must be done through the command line. So far it looks like I’ll have to enable battery management and trackpad tapping via the terminal. I’ve worked a help desk, and this is just not something most people are prepared to handle.
For the non-average, fairly savvy user, performance and OS choice are going to be largely subjective…what works for you, works. More power to you. But for me, Yakir sums up my first impressions of Linux nicely, somewhere around post # 87: “OS X just _works_ for me. I feel like _I_ have to work for Linux.”
What an ignorant review. Nuy an old machine, with not enough memory and expect it to run like the latest and greatest. What a shock that it didn’t. I wouldn’t dream of using a Mac or XP wihtout 512MB of memory. Actually my Mac has 2 gig (jsut because) and my PC had 1 gig. But 512 is really the minimum these days for optimal use.
Read the article again. He spends at least half of it bashing OS X running on substandard hardware. I don’t where you get the idea that he is not trashing OS X.
I had an iBook 500 once. They are really slow for some reason. The iBook 600 and up are fine machines, but the system bus on the 500 model really keeps it down. It’s kind of a running joke at our MUG how slow the iBook 500 is.
So yeah, I can totally understand running YDL rather than OSX. YDL is actually really cool, it’s a heck of a lot of fun to play with.
I’m running OSX on a tiBook 667, and the speed is great. You really do need newer hardware to enjoy OSX.
Ok, one thing this author definitely got right is that you couldn’t have a better brand of laptop for Linux or any alternate OS really. There’s a lot of chipset guesswork and what-not when you’re trying to get Linux or any non standard OS on a laptop. With Apple’s laptops a lot of the guesswork is tossed out the window. You know what the hardware’s gonna be and there’s typically gonna be a driver for it. The only exceptions tend to be with what just came out and that’s easily solved within the next release.
See those little buttons on the front of your monitor…. TRY THEM!!!! they fix your screen when it shifts!!!!
Did you read the article? It’s an iBook the guy was reviewing. There are no such buttons on an iBook.
If there are, someone tell me where to find them so I’ll know, just in case.
Or you could sit there and cry all day, its up to you.
Your mature, thoughtful response impresses me.
I’ve never seen such nonsense. The whole point of the review is that the reviewer was surprised at how well YDL runs on that iBook. What is it that is preventing you people from seeing and understanding this simple fact???
“Opinion 1: OS X 10.2.6 is a beast of an OS and will bring any current G3 to it’s knees. ”
I have a 600MHz (768MB) G3 iMac running 10.2.6. It’s not “snappy” and I have to wait almost a full second to get a folder in the dock open. But it is entirely usable. In fact, I use it all day every-day. I don’t use classic and I haven’t booted into 9 for months. Jaguar is the OS I have been pining for since 1989 when Pink was announced. I love it, even on my old G3 iMac.
I had a iMac DV+ 450MHz with 512MB of ram and OS X was COMPLETELY unusable to me until I actually READ the OS X install instructions and FOLLOWED THEM. I checked and saw that my machines Firmware was not the version needed for OS X to be installed. To make a long story short after installing the firmware and reformatting the drive. I performed a clean install and application launches increased so drastically it seemed like a new computer.
Example:
Before firmware update IE took almost a minute to launch…perhaps more. I’d sit and watch the icon bounce repeatedly until the window graced me with it’s presence.
After the update it launced in 2-3 seconds….on old hardware. The difference is that large. I spent months blaming the hardware and the OS for something I failed to do. People who are saying OS X is unusable on such 400-500MHZ G3’s must be having the same problem….do yourself a favor and RTFM. You’ll be surprised what you learn.
Just installed tri-boot (YDL3.0, OSX10.2.6 and OS9.1) setup on my Powerbook 400mz G3 laptop. OSX runs very well on my system because I maxed out the RAM to 1GB, all the difference in the world. RAM for OSX is the key, not mhz, G3 or G4 or QuartzExtreme. I can boot into any of the three within 3 minutes. I never even seen Linux running before my YDL install, yet was up and running in under an hour (2.5GB install), not a single issue (except learning Linux). Video config, sound card recognize, brightness/volume control, ethernet/DSL setup,sleep mode and battery monitor, net clock sync, latest MOL, apt-get, all automatically setup first try. Runs faster than OSX, but still love OSX. Best of all possible worlds.
p.s. booting from firewire not supported.
Let me know if you have problems with Linux or a Linux question. We might be able to help.
Ok, so this basicly was one big bash OS X fest. Point taken. But A:
Run X11 instead of OSX’s finder. I find Jaguar to be the best OS running on my –333–Mhz iMac with its ANCIENT 6MB Rage Card.
Also, yes, Mac OSX is rather slow on older hardware, but what did you expect?? I don’t run Windows XP on my 2 year Old celeron box, so why would you expect stellar performance from a consumer laptop introduced 1.5 years ago? Especially considering OS X has been a public OS for like what, 3 years? I think the leaps made forward by OSX in 3 YEARS to be stellar!! I can’t play UT2003 in YDL, but I can in X!
You can also just boot right into the terminal. But any “power user” should know that, eh?
Mac OS X and/or YDL 3 are a dream to use on a dual-processor mac especially. My Dual 867 G4 has no lag time in jaguar. If you have supported hardware, OSX is a dream for those who don’t want to support Microsoft, yet still want an abundance of commercial software.
User gets underpowered computer. User notices latest OS runs the computer slower than it should. User ditches OS for the one he’s already familiar with, which runs a bit faster.
But mostly, he likes it because he’s familiar with his old OS since the first problem could be rectified with current hardware.
Can’t comment too much on the hype, since all software has hype. But it’s difficult for me to see what expectations someone would have to be disappointed at OS X’s hype. What’s the point of reference, Linux’ KDE-wants-to-be-Windows GUI or another GUI that’s non-standard?
Hi.
I read your comment about YDL3, although you did not mention MDK 9.1 PPC.
I wonder if u can help me. No distro I installed on my iBook G3 500 made my modem up to work. Now, There is MDK 9.1 (my best pet for i386) and YDL (I did hate the former version, but I’ll give a try for this new version). I mean, I’ll keep them both on my iBook G3.
Did u have any troubles with modem ? Is there any special change I need to perform ? Why it was not automatically installed by my former tries ? It worked fine with OS X (I really hated it, as it was as slow as I was not expecting it to be), but did not worked with any Linux.
I hope u can help me, for I really love my iBook, but I am waiting for a functional Linux on it. I am not thinking on OS X. When anyone have any guide line, email me at [email protected].
Tks.
8)
After reading the article. I feel the conclusion is pretty bias on his own machine. As the Quartz Extreme technology is for 2D rendering, as like in Quartz technology in 10.1 or earlier. Quartz technology is something Apple partner with Adobe which they call it the Acrobat PDF on the fly technology – Quartz for short.
Open GL is the actual 3D rendering engine, so make that miss leading statement. Plus Apple already announce that the Quartz Extreme will only enable on 16MB above machine. Below that, you can only enjoy Quartz. Operating System to cope with advance technology is a must. Like some old Wintel machine that hardly can run XP, would they run XP? no they will run Windows 98 for the most.
The Dock refreshment is come to the same challange that he mention above. It’s just because the iBook grahics memory is not enough to render real-time effects. Nothing to do with your system RAM. Even my Prismo PowerBook with 512MB still have that problem, because the ATI is running on a 8MB chip only.
1024 x 768 resolution? That’s strange question to ask, it does depends on your grahics card to produce enough pixels details! DUH@!!! Better card better resolution.
You can tweek the OS so it doesn’t bounce during launch if you’re good enough! Not much to complain, decor sick! I just love it don’t you all agree when it bounce!~ Everyone is so ENvy with the look of it. Maybe it’s just not yoru cup of TEA buddy. : )
I work on SunParc before, my god launching Netscape take ages! plus it doesn’t show any thing progression while the apps is launching, I click a few times, and end up allot of Netscape launches! To quote “to save all those animated cycle for faster processing” I think a little more progressive animation will tell what’s going on better.
If computer industry was to concern about people that can’t afford new computers. The industry will die, no hardware advancement will created. You can do word processing even with a iMac 233MHz, why G4? Because there are others who want faster machine than others.
> 1024 x 768 resolution? That’s strange question to ask, it does depends on your grahics card to produce enough pixels details! DUH@!!! Better card better resolution.
WHAT are you talking about? The iBook doesn’t support more than 1024×768, it is an LCD capable of this resolution only and not above it.
Except the original pre-2001 ibook, all the rest of the ibooks use softmodem and Linux doesn’t support it, AFAIK.
You sound like an elitist nerd mr. “New school – I’m not one of those graphic guys… I do everything by hand…” Give me a break.
So do you like, hand code byte information to generate your own bitmaps?
Keep your pants on, OS X will get better….
Here it is:
http://www.geocrawler.com/archives/3/2/2002/4/0/8448049/
All iBooks that are late 2001 and later, that come with 15 GB of hdd and above, don’t have support under Linux for their modem, because they use softmodem. The previous iBook models work.
im eally glad to see people venturing out from the mac os on apple hardwae. i run a triple boot on my 600mhz ibook. darwin 6.0.2, os x 10.2.6, and slackintosh 8.1. slackintosh is a unofficial port of slackware to mac hardware. (http://slackintosh.exploits.org) im a slack zealot because i 1) hate rpm and 2) dont like the overhead of readhat/suse/etc. i like custom linux installs, which slack is great for. i also happen to be a long term mac user, so i keep os x around as my primary os. but for all my cs homework, a quick reboot and im in linux with all the functionaliy too boot. cd burner, wireless, sound, power management… plus, as his review states, x windows looks great on an apple lcd. the only thing i have to say to his imression of os x is GET MORE RAM! i bought my book with 384 megs, and upgraded to 640, what a difference it makes in os x. ya can get a 512 sick shipped to your door for less than $100 nowadays, so why not.
What most here don’t seem to realise: the laptop was released after the introduction of OSX. Thus a user can demand for the OS to run fast and without problems. It does not. Thus it is a fuckup by apple. It’s not even like the average x86 hardware where OS and hardware vendors are entirely different, no this is a company which released a computer with a dedicated OS. That running like crap is not acceptable.
If people (myself included) are writing that their Macs with half the author’s MHz runs OS X respectably, maybe it’s a problem with the person’s expectations.
Yes, an iBook 500 can run OS X, but it’s gonna be slower than a newer iBook or a Powerbook. For awhile the CompUSA where I live kept an iBook 800 and a 12″ Powerbook 867 next to each other. I sometimes tested them against each other, by opening a window in each, then dragging an open folder, then launching a few programs.
Of course, the 867 G4 was noticably faster. It would launch Terminal in half the bounces of the iBook. But that should be expected, partly because of the processor and partly because of the included RAM (256 on the 12″ PB, 128 on the iBook). I was disappointed in the stock performance of the iBook, but I knew 512 MB would make a big difference if I bought it.
That Apple sells G3s that don’t run OS X as well as G4s doesn’t make Apple garbage, it makes them a computer company trying to market more inexpensive/less able versions of their hardware for consumers, and more expensive, better pro systems. If you can afford a Dual 1.42 Power Mac, or a 17″ Powerbook, all the better. But if you still want a Mac and can only afford an iBook, iMac or eMac, load up on RAM and you’ll have a good machine that will satisfy you more than a 3 GHz P4 running Windows XP.
The whole point of the review is that the reviewer was surprised at how well YDL runs on that iBook. What is it that is preventing you people from seeing and understanding this simple fact???
(a) the first part of the (2-part) headline
(b) the first page of the (3-page) review
A significant part of the article is, in fact, criticism of OS X. Quite a few people consider much of it unfounded criticism (myself included). They have every right to take the author to task for it.
I am not a true Mac-person, but I have operated several, and still own a vintage LCIII -my kids like it.
Converted to Linux approx 3 years ago, currently own no system running M$.
However with the amount of dorémi he plunked down for the hdw – I would’ve gone with something intel/amd-based and popped a RH9 or whatever does it for you. since I have successfully installed various distros : storm, corel, xandros, suse, …etc. on PCs ranging from P75-P1.x Ghz, {CPQ,IBM, Dell) with minimal tweaking and solid performance and reliability… why bother with the Mac Hdw (coming from his point of view).
Performance would’ve been better, he would get his full Linux-Experience, and $ in his pockets.
– Also I doubt that anything runs “much” faster on a Mac than it’s own native OS – the nature of closed source OS/Hdw.
OS_X may be a little heavy – but it’s there for more industrial use, you want faster – downgrade to MAC_OS …
I liked reading about YDL – it’s a curiosity for me – but for the reasons the author quotes … I have reservations on that.
Ciao,
LB.
Newswatcher -MT (free)
Thoth
Hogwasher
There are others, these are the best. I like all of them better than Forte on Windows.
I was hoping for a useful article but after reading the specs of the machine you put it on I knew the article was meaningless to me and perhaps all except those want to put a modern hardware hungry os on a machine incapable of being configured with enough resources for it.
OS X likes huge amounts of RAM. I have 2 G3 machines one with 320MB the other with 640MB and the 640MB machine is amazingly faster than the 320MB one even though they are the same model machine (B&W G3) with only minor other differences.
To me you might as well have said OS X is bad because it won’t run on my timex sinclair.
Sure OS X is on the piggish side but that doesn’t mean it is without merit on an appropriate piece of hardware. Of course I’m of the stripe that believes it’s worth it to pay a premium for stuff that works great and is a joy to use if there is nothing else that fits the bill. If YDL fits your bill then great but you don’t need a Mac for linux — I can come out faster a cheaper on other hardware.
I’m a windows network admin and we pay a premium for it and for quality hardware and I much more enjoy OS X for personal use. I’m not bashing windows here. There are things I like about it and things I hate about it. NTFS has great features and Group Policies are very nice for instance. I’m also an OpenVMS administrator and I happen to love it too.
OS X is a joy to use and to administer in many respects but not on a piece of hardware like what you put it on. OS X has a lot of growing up to do and is missing some things I’d like to see but that doesn’t mean it’s bad. I think your review was slanted by your hardware choice.
This is essentially a review of Yellow Dog Linux. I don’t think the author uses his computer to prove to himself that OS X is powerful and that enough tweaking will make it run fast.
I agree very much greg…just like the man said, you shouldn’t have to tweak a system out of the box, you should yuse what works best for you regardless of adjustment. I’ve seen alot of people on threads talking about which distro a newbie (like myself) should get…and the best replies Ive seen are just the same…whichever one works best to begin with. How else are you supposed to learn what you’re doing?
I remember him writing why he bought the mac: He says its good hardware, and it lasts years…
A 500 mHz machine and that ATI card are below par for OS X. Such is life.
I’ve got a 15-inch flat panel OS X iMac (800 mHz) sitting on my desk next to a 1200 MHz P4 running Gentoo Linux with a 19-inch Viewsonic monitor. I don’t care enough to actually run real speed tests to compare the two machines, but — subjectively — one’s as responsive as the other. Visually, the iMac wins hands down. The Linux box has KDE 3.1.2, which has made real strides, but it can’t touch the quality and legibility of the iMac.
I don’t own an Ibook, but I have played with a couple of display models. I would agree, they are not the fastest machines around running OSX. If you are a power user, then perhaps you should have explored something besides the lowest end model available. These machines are aimed mainly at non power users who want to do basic functions, email, web surfing, etc. on a budget. Also, 256MB of ram is probably borderline for running OSX, especially on a moderately powered machine, and a laptop at that. I would imagine a machine of this type would perform much better running Linux, or even OS9.
As to another post here stating that 10.2.6 is a beast of an OS that will bring any G3 to it’s knees, I beg to differ. I am running it quite nicely on a 400Mhz Imac DV at my home, and on a 10 year old PowerComputing PowerCenter with a G3/400 upgrade card in it at work. It is not blazingly fast, but is certainly stable and very adequate for normal usage on either machine. Neither one is “on it’s knees”.
I do have plenty of memory in both machines. With prices at their current levels, there isn’t any reason not to have at least 512 MB of ram.
Have you ever thought that a “power user” might not be rich?
I am pretty happy to hear about Yellow Dog as I also hate the slowness of OS 10 on my iBook. This type of performance should not be deemed acceptable. It is also a relief to know I won’t have to pay for upgrades that just make my computer run slower. It’s good to have alternatives as being stuck with microsoft is not much different than being stuck with Apple.
The only drawback to Yellow Dog seems to be the lack of MP3 functionality, I will miss that a lot but I need to get some work done and cant stand OS 10.2 anymore.
Lastly, all those people who defend Apple when they truly suck can kiss my ass ! Apple deliberately crippled the iBook and sold it cash starved loyal customers down the drain.
if you would be a power user you would not use an ibook. if you would be a power user, you would not use a two year old computer with not enough ram to run os x on.
Apple did bite the big one on this. A two year old computer should be able to run OS 10.2.6 without any problems. They could have upgraded the iBooks bus sooner and saved themselves a lot of negative press. Even die hard Mac fans should not defend this type of crap, Don’t advertise computers that can run OS 10 that really can’t (especially in key markets like education). Lastly, increase the amount of minimum ram already.- 128 is just embarrassing .
Head to head competion with linux & Yellow dog is a good thing as it will force Apple to stop releasing products that are half baked and then charging a ton of money for it.
I’m one of those “poor idiots” running old Mac hardware. PPC 6500/250. I just bought a Beige G3 MT. I bought the Beige G3, not by accident, but for very good reasons. 1)Cheap! 2) Old ports, ADB SCSI Serial….3) I’ll be able to upgrade the “Beige-y” to a G4, for around $75 (used G4 Ziff). I don’t get why there is no mention of OS 9. I’ve looked @ the benchmarks, and OS X (even 10.2.3) is a real “dog” compared to Macs running OS 9. My current 6500/250 is about as fast in OS 9 as a G3 400 is in 10. That’s sad. PCs are still running a crappy OS. XP is crap, just as every Microsoft OS has always been.However, Apple is getting spanked (as far as raw speed, and cheap apps IE: GAMES!) by cheap PCs 3ghz for under a grand! Get on the ball, Apple!
I’m surprised I’ve seen nobody yet point out that OS X runs optimally with at least 512MB of RAM. This attempt to enter the “world of Apple” was done on half that. What do you expect if you hobble the OS’s requirements? I know that this unofficial requirement makes OS X a veritable RAM hog and I won’t make any defenses of that, but RAM is cheap so it’s easy and inexpensive to address this issue. If you need OS X to run on an older machine, you need more RAM. At work, I run OS X on an early model G4 at 450Mhz and a boatload of RAM. It runs beautifully.
I can understand that you shuoldnt expect a 300mhz g3 to run OSX well, but we are talking about a machine here that was only one revision old (iirc) when OS X was released.
Not to mention that Jaguar was a huge speed up from 10.0.
So you are saying 1 revision old hardware shouldnt be able to run the latest OS from apple? Bullshit.
Apple is simply irresponsible for releasing ibooks with 128 ram. (which I own, by the way
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