Re: [MLUG] Mac moving to Intel

[Dave Lloyd <EMAIL:PROTECTED>]

On Tue, 7 Jun 2005, Jonathan King wrote:

> Actually, the biggest problem with running any future version of Mac
> OS X on other hardware is that Apple will make zero effort to support
> to make it work, and some features of current Wintel hardware are
> useless or worse to  OS X.  So, for one thing, Mac OS X currently (and
> in the future) uses OpenFirmware and has no concept of a PC-like BIOS.

It will be interesting to see if there is a software compatability layer
for BIOS<->OpenFirmware.  I think that there must be because today it
will run on whitebox intel per the announcement.  The developers kit
includes a 3.2 GHz pentium, so it must run on whitebox today.  For the
common end user, though, I agree.  The issue will be support.

>  You can similarly expect it not to have any clue about non-PCI slots,
> and any I/O that isn't USB or Firewire.  It won't support any but a
> handful of graphics cards, and it will probably be just as fussy about
> RAM as the current Macs.  I further expect that Apple, not being bound
> by backwards compatibility at the hardwared level, will embrace other
> new features not commonly seen on current Wintel boxes.

You can write your own kernel drivers.  In fact, this might be a nice
way for Apple to get some free, albeit probably unsupported, drivers for
some bits of hardware.  FreeBSD has a Linux compatability layer, IIRC,
so it makes sense that someone could write a shim layer that existing
linux kernel drivers could plug into.

> I don't think there will be any way to prevent somebody from running
> OS X on a non-Mac if they spend enough effort, but I think a lot of
> the reason for MS never having a chance with their security against
> piracy is just that MS just can't simultaneously support all of the
> random hardware it does and provide the backwards compatibility it
> does without making some basic trade-offs.

Seems that if you want to run OSX on a desktop you have two choices:
buy supported stuff from Apple (or a supported config elsewhere--Apple
will have to do this) or go it on your own on a unsupported whitebox.
Seems like the unsupported route is no worse than Linux on the desktop
is today plus you have the adavantage of something that will run MS
office easily.

--dlloyd
_______________________________________________
members mailing list
EMAIL:PROTECTED
http://mlug.missouri.edu/mailman/listinfo/members