Opening up the Apple
- Article 14 of 16
- LinuxUser & Developer, July 2006
With Apple’s conversion to Intel chips well under way, the possibility of running standard Linux distributions on Macs is proving enticing. Rob Buckley investigates to see whether Linux on Mactel is as easy as it sounds
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Linux is everywhere. From embedded chips to PDAs to mainframes, Linux and Linux distributions can run on almost anything. Of course, most users tend to run Linux on a server or on a PC – and by PC, most people tend to mean x86-based personal computers. That used to mean anything that was also capable of running Windows, but with Apple now firmly on the Intel bandwagon, Macs could be running standard Linux distributions as well. So what’s stopping them?
Mac and Linux users tend to run neck-and-neck in competitions to find people who love their computers the most. For Linux users, there’s the power and the principles of open source and the Linux kernel. For Mac users, there’s the ease of use of the OS X operating system and the quality of Apple’s hardware. Combining Linux and Apple hardware should give almost all the best elements of both worlds.
Running Linux on Apple hardware is not a new idea. For most of the Mac’s history, it used Motorola’s ‘68k’ range of processors, before switching to IBM and Motorola’s PowerPC processors in the early 90s. There are ports of Debian Linux and other distributions that run on bothh 68k and PowerPC processors. Among the first distributions for the PowerPC Mac was Yellow Dog Linux from Terrasoft. To this date, it remains the only distribution that Apple endorses for installation on its XServe server line.
While these distributions were recognisably Linux, they suffered from a number of problems. The first was the familiar problem of drivers. Apple’s closed hardware spec and unwillingness to support other operating system developers has meant that developers have had to work out for themselves the necessary hardware outputs and controls for Macs. With far more resources being committed to the Linux on x86 processors and far fewer Linux developers with access to Macs, this meant progress was far slower in developing the necessary drivers. Indeed, even today, support for Mac wireless networking is virtually non-existent in PowerPC Linuxes, although some success has finally been achieved in developing drivers for the Broadcom chipsets used. Perhaps the only thing in favour of the PowerPC Macs at this point is the far smaller potential number of hardware configurations that Macs offer, compared with x86-based PCs from the numerous hardware manufacturers around the world.
The second problem is the relatively unoptimised state of the gcc compilers on PowerPC. While both Apple and IBM committed considerable resources to improving the state of gcc, the code it produces is still slower than the code produced for x86 chips.
Lastly, binaries compiled for x86 Linux distributions won’t run on PowerPC Linux, making it harder to ship commercial software. And although most source code for Linux apps will compile on PowerPC, disparities between gcc on x86 and PowerPC would result in software not running because of problems with libraries or bugs in gcc.
The result has been that Linux on PowerPC is very much an orphaned child left behind the rest of the Linux mainstream.
The announcement last July that Apple was going to migrate all its PC product lines to Intel chips was clearly an exciting prospect for Linux users as well as Mac users. Finally, there would be the chance to run standard Linux distributions such as Red Hat, Gentoo and SuSE on Macs.
Of course, the devil is always in the details and when Apple released its first Intel-powered desktop computer in January, it soon became clear that getting Linux to run a Mactel wasn’t just going to be a matter of repartitioning the hard drive and booting off a Linux installer CD.
The first problem was the lack of BIOS in the new iMac Dual Cores as they were called. For years, Intel has been plugging EFI (Extensible Firmware Interface) as a more advanced alternative to the standard PC BIOS. Few hardware vendors had really taken the bait, with Gateway being the only big recruit to EFI’s cause. The problem that EFI faced was lack of operating system support. PC manufacturers weren’t going to use a non-standard BIOS if operating systems weren’t going to take advantage of any of the features. With the only Windows OS capable of using EFI being 64-bit Windows, that meant no OSes at all, as far as most vendors were concerned.
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