Re: LinuxPPC in education?

[Jeff Knox <jknox@ethergate.com>]

Hey,

	To say the least, I have alot of expierence with LinuxPPC. My school
only would give me a macintosh to run Linux on. I thought I would give
it a try. This was over a year ago, and wasnt as easy to install as it
now is. It took me many reinstalls, and 30+ hours of work. It has gotten
alot easier, we installed LinuxPPC to run our intranet server a month or
so ago. Took an hour to install(because we were downloading all packages
off a ftp site, as it installed). It is identically, except for hardware
wise. The softare runs the same, same directory structure, software is
in the same place, etc. Its just different when you are dealing with
hardware. Macs also get nice bogomips rattings, the powermac we have it
on now is getting 398 bogomips. About software, all source code should
compile on LinuxPPC. Except for one condition, it has some assembly in
it. This is not likely to happen, not alot of software is written in
assembly. You cannot however run binaries compiled on intel machines. It
means you have to get the source and compile alot of the software your
self, it doesnt do you any good to download precompiled binaries,
because they are most likely for intel. Sheepshaver is porting to linux.
Sheepshaver is somewhat a virtual mac, if you have a macintosh system
cd, it can boot up to macos. I have ran sheepshaver under BeOS, its
great, runs at almost full speed because it doesnt have to emulate the
processor. Check it out at sheepshaver.com.



>Douglas Loss wrote:
> 
> I had a thought-provoking conversation this afternoon with the head (and
> only) "tech" at my local school district.  I had been evangelizing him about
> Linux for a few months, and evidently the general press coverage was getting
> through too.  He said he was ready to give it a try.  The next words out of
> his mouth were that it would have to run all the software they already run,
> title by title (not functional equivalents).  These were Macintosh versions
> of PageMaker, Adobe Illustrator, etc.  I tried to get him to budge on that,
> but he refused.  We talked about ARDI's Executor Mac emulator, but since it
> would only run mc68k binaries, and only if written for older versions of
> MacOS, that didn't seem too useful.  He said he had a machine ready to put
> Linux on.  I knew that the district was a heavily Macintosh shop, but I
> figured that he had come up with a PC somewhere.
> 
> I was wrong.  What he wanted to do was put Linux on one of his Macs.  They
> are all PowerPC based machines.  I pointed him to the just-announced (really,
>  about 2 hours earlier) LinuxPPC Lite, which has a footprint of only 75 MB
> and can work with BootX (evidently a Mac equivalent of lilo) to make a
> dual-boot-capable Mac.  And LinuxPPC Lite can be booted from a Zip disk, I
> think, making it even more appealing as a "toe in the water" introduction to
> Linux.  I think we'll try that in a few weeks.
> 
> Here's the thoughts this incident provoked.  Many schools have an investment
> in Macs which they are loathe to give up.  Part of the appeal of Linux is its
>  lowering of the cost of equiping a school with useful computers.  I think
> that if we could further demonstrate that Linux will allow disparate types of
>  computers to run the same programs (not binaries, but you know what I mean)
> we could have an even greater appeal.
> 
> Do any of you have any experience with LinuxPPC?  How close is it to the
> various x86 distros?  What do programmers have to look out for to ensure
> their programs will compile and run on both the x86 and PPC Linuces?  I think
>  we need to stay aware of how whatever we do will work on the various non-x86
>  versions of Linux.  I'm hoping that someday Corel Netwinders may end up in
> some of the school labs.
> 
> As soon as I send this I'm going to look into what a used Mac will cost.  I
> don't particularly care for them, but we'll have to have some sort of
> test-bed.  Besides, I'm having increasing difficulty finding home educational
>  software for my 6-yr. old son that will run via Executor (and so far I
> haven't found any that will run on WINE, although I haven't tried recently).
>  A dual-boot Mac would fill the bill.
> 
> --
> Doug Loss            An idealist is one who, on noticing that
> dloss@csrlink.net    roses smell better than cabbage, concludes
> (717) 326-3987       that they will also make better soup.
>                         H. L. Mencken

-- 
Jeff Knox

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/President of Elite Technologies                          /
/Beta Testing and Public Relations Coordinator for ReactOS/
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