Macs and Linux

[mjg59]

Firstly: If you want to buy a computer to run Linux on, don't buy a Mac.
Secondly: If you have a Mac and want to run Linux on it, the easiest approach is going to be to run it under virtualisation. Virtualbox is free, and worth every bit of what you're paying.
Thirdly: If you're going to boot Linux on bare-metal Apple hardware, boot it via BIOS emulation.
Fourthly: If you're going to boot Linux on bare-metal Apple hardware via EFI, and it doesn't work, write a patch. Apple's firmware has a number of quirks that I'm aware of and we're working through them, but anyone filing bugs against Apple hardware on EFI right now is likely to be ignored for a significant period of time until there's an expectation that it'll actually work. Maybe in six months or so.

Comments

[http://users.livejournal.com/joshua_/]

FWIW, my solution for running Linux on my MacBook is to run it in VMWare, which I found also to be worth every bit of what I was paying; I got it for $50 with a student discount, and have enjoyed excellent stability, and a wonderfully responsive support staff that was knowledgeable enough to conjure up udev rules to crank up virtualized hard drive timeouts, since I carry my laptop around with my everywhere. (I figured that if I was running non-Free software, I might as well go all the way and get a virtualization package that has support with it...)

[(Anonymous)]

While "Virtualbox is free, and worth every bit of what you're paying" sounds like damning with faint praise, my personal experience (dunno about mjg's) is that it's actually a damn good tool and, for now at least, benefits from paid developers doing all the boring bugfix work, so dodges the CADT-model woes of open source.

[reddragdiva]

VirtualBox is a moderately good tool in many ways, but fails horribly compared to VMware if you want to do anything halfway hardware fancy, e.g. connect your BlackBerry to a Windows instance in it.

Does VB pass the OpenBSD test yet? It certainly didn't used to. Nor did they intend to make it do so until a paying customer demanded it. Not such a good move for adding payingcustomers, given it's fine under VMware. VB's notorious and chronic crappiness is why I have personally disrecommended spending lots of money on it over VMware in the past.

[(Anonymous)]

In fairness though, no-one cares about OpenBSD.

[reddragdiva]

*cough* well yes ;-p However, it is constructed with remarkalbe attention to detail. So as an acid test it is superlative.