Linux on a Mac

I have a MacBookPro 13in Oct 10 edition and I have been having issues with trying to put Ubuntu on an external hard drive to boot on my Mac. If there is anyone who would know much about the subject, I would love to talk.

 

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interesting
back in the days of ppc, only yellowdog would install

try here for help

 

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You can put a couple different versions on the mac now, I got most of it figured out looks like I might have to start over though, clear everything for just Mac again, partition my drive for three equal partitions and then install linux then windows 7 because after doing my linux install my windows started having boot issues. Trial and Error.

 

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fuck
that sound nice

/envious

if you are still around, give me a rough outline on the procedure you followed

 

The real question is, why the hell did you get a mac?

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That's a good point, probably brushed aluminum? But yea the truth is I like iMac alot and will probably get one later in life, it's just very quiet and I'm sensitive to noise. However Dell and others have All-in-ones that are very very fast too and cheaper so idk

 

Am I the only person that thinks this is an insane request?

Mac is Unix. What you probably mean is you want KDE or Gnome as your X for Mac. If you want KDE, there's been successful porting attempts, if you want Gtk for some reason...you're out of luck.

Large sections of GNU licensed software has been ported to Mac aside from the inherently accepted content by way of it being basely Unix.

If you have a Mac, you don't need nor will you benefit from Linux unless you're:
1. Running non-ported content which has no native equivalent commonly (Not likely).
2. Need extensive access to GNU tool chains. Even as I type that, I think almost all of the critical portions are ported; g++ gcc, gdb, valgrind.

If you want Linux on your Mac because you like flipping a cube around as your desktop, you don't need a $1100 computer -- you need a job.

 

since time is valuable commodity......use x11

/smirk

 

GTK (the toolkit) or GNOME (the desktop environment)? I've got software installed through MacPorts that uses GTK with no problems.

It's not just a matter of what software is available, but also in what form it is available. In my (and I think a lot of people's) opinion, one of the best things about the free Unices like Linux and the *BSDs are their package management systems, which handle dependency resolution and updating for essentially the whole system. I got accustomed to this and now loathe the idea of installing applications with Windows-style wizard installers (or manually compiling tarballs for that matter) and letting everything slowly go out of date on a system I'd like to keep healthy and up to date.

There are a few Linux/BSD-style package management systems available intended to supply many Unix tools that aren't included in OS X, but as far as I'm aware they aren't as good as the ones available for Linux and the BSDs. Gentoo Prefix would be a dream if it worked, but it was near unusable (far too many packages just wouldn't compile) when I tried it just a few months ago. MacPorts is a good enough source-based system and the one I'm currently using, though it isn't as configurable as Gentoo's Portage, relies on an old version of gcc to compile packages, and something always seems to be broken. From what I've heard, Fink is generally less up to date than MacPorts, and Homebrew is a better idea if you only need the occasional package rather than a more complete ecosystem of them, so I haven't experimented with either to date.

 

I should have said GDM. Most Gtk software compiles fine. I was trying to hi-light how KDE itself is available for X on Mac, whereas GDM is not. Both Qt and Gtk work obviously, although Qt tends to be prettier

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I'm on Scientific Linux which uses gcc4.4, needed it to port with RHEL version available. Gentoo shows 4.5 available -- http://packages.gentoo.org/package/sys-devel/gcc . Which IMO was a significant improvement in terms of effective warnings, not sure about bench-marking or underlying asm. The only things I noticed were: struct off-sets allowed for Null objects as an input parameter, which was nice when you want to pre-define memory spaces. And it was more const initialization aware.

I would guess Gentoo has a hard time keeping reliable packages due to its unique release schedule, namely -- every day

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I remember using RHEL when yum was in infancy (or maybe wasn't being used?). Every time I wanted to install even the most trivial software would cause dependency hell, and eventually I would say "You know what, I don't need that software anyways."

Yum and Apt changed the Linux world.

 

When I said "old version" of GCC, I meant that OS X 10.6, which until recently was the most recent version of OS X, is still using GCC 4.2.

By the way, the highest version of gcc considered fully stable in Gentoo is 4.4.5. GCC 4.5.2 is ~ keyworded, which means it is still considered 'testing' but generally good enough for day to day use (I've got a Gentoo system using GCC 4.5.2 as the system compiler with no problems). GCC 4.6 is also available, though it's hard masked. One of the nice things about Gentoo is that you can choose how 'bleeding edge' you want your system to be at the level of individual packages (eg. you can opt to have a stable core system but the latest version of Firefox), unlike most other distros which only let you set the level for the entire system.

Not really, actually. Many distros (Fedora, Arch, presumably also Ubuntu) make updates available daily. Gentoo's package manager has the occasional hiccough, but that's more due to the added complexity of the ports system meaning there are additional stages (like compiling) where things can go wrong that don't exist under other distros. Generally things go quite smoothly, though.