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Linux and the iMac

Swad

By Swad

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Our friends over at the “Mactel-Linux Project” (well, ok, we don’t actually know them – but with the commonalities in our name, how can we not love them?!) have revealed their success with booting linux on one of the new iMacs. From their wiki:

 

Using elilo and a modified Linux kernel, we can boot from a USB hard disk on the 17" iMac Core Duo. We are using the hacked vesafb driver to inherit the bootloader's framebuffer. Gentoo runs and can compile the Linux kernel.

 

They also have an FAQ and HOWTO on their site, so check out their progress and see what you think!

 

EDIT: Haha - I actually did know the guy who runs that site and didn't know it!

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Metrogirl

That's great - gives a ray of hope for getting Vista to run.

 

Don't you think it's ironic that we've spent six months getting OSX to run on non-Apple hardware, and suddenly we're interested in getting a non-Apple OS working on the genuine platform? I think that says a lot about us - we're more keen on stretching the boundaries and doing the seemingly impossible than we are in piracy. Long live ingenuity and freedom of thought! And well done to those guys.

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Tek_No

Great news indeed :)

 

As I was interested in what video results they were getting I was surprised to read that they have VESA on the 17" screens but a corrupted picture on the 20" screens...

 

Well, maybe if our Linux "collegues" get involved we'll have a bigger chance of getting a working framebuffer and driver for both ATI (Radeon 9000 etc...) and nVidia chipsets in the (near) future...

 

Don't really know if porting that Linux video driver to Mac Os X then would cause too much trouble...

 

Just a thought :thumbsup_anim:

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cyrana

Yes, I had heard about this a couple of days ago from a friend...but I'm not surprised. A few hackers are much more nimble than a large corporation like Microsoft (since all this code is also out there). I'm sure we'll see an upcoming Vista build that boots on the new Macs though.

 

The people on this site are the type (on average) that want to do stuff that is a bit 'different' or hard to do, so getting Windows or Linux installed is along similar lines to getting OS X on non-Apple-branded machines I guess. :thumbsup_anim:

 

Linux to OS X driver porting is no mundane task. The architectures are quite different. Plus, the whole X11 driver architecture is open on Linux (in terms of code...I know the manufacturers don't always give out specs though) but the video stuff for OS X is not. We can always hope...

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NatMusak

Well this is nice to hear. I had tried booting the pc x86 version of Ubuntu on a 17" iMac a week ago and it wouldn't even recognize the disc. Also, speaking of Vista, I read an article on IGN about Halo 2 being ported to Vista soon. I don't know if they meant it will be playable on the Vista beta out now or when Vistait gets out of beta. Most likely though, Micro$oft just wants attention ;)

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