“Red Hat representative Gillian Farquhar announced last week that the company plans to add support for Apple’s new Intel Macs to its popular distribution. Fedora and several other commonly used Linux distributions support the PowerPC architecture used by Apple in the past, and Red Hat wants to ensure that its software will continue to run on new Apple hardware in the future. The current impediment is the Extensible Firmware Interface, a relatively new BIOS replacement designed by Intel that is not yet commonly used or widely supported,” Ryan Paul reports for Ars Technica.
More info in the full article here.
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Better question is: Since the Mac is UNIX, will I need to load RedHat in a Virtual Machine (or Dual Boot or run WINE-like APIs) or will I just be able to launch Red Hat apps natively?
I think they meant for users to completely replace OS X and run Linux on their iMacs. There are PPC versions of Linux that run on PPC Macs, so why not this.
Another way to run Linux apps is via X-Windows. If you have another spare box lying around, don’t install Windows, install Linux and access all of its apps from your Mac via X-Windows.
Whhahahaha….
Whahahaha…
Why?
Since I can run BSD unix with a single mouse click, why would I care about installing Linux?
You want other OS’s than OSX to be an option on Macs because some companies – including my own – make software that can only be run on Solaris, Windows, and Linux. As a sales engineer, I need to demo our software, and the ability to to that at native speed on my Mac laptop would be brilliant.
If someone just says, “Well, why don’t you convince your company to make a Mac version?” my response would be, “We make enterprise networking software, for use in datacenters by large Fortune 500 companies and telcos. None of those datacenters have OS X running inside or approved for use as a platform, ergo, Solaris, Windows, and Linux are the options for development.”
If the EFI is the only issue, wouldn’t they have to do the exact same thing when other manufacturers start using EFI instead of BIOS, anyway? If so, would this not simply end up being the same distro?
Why would I pay premium prices for a Mac and run something other than MacOSX
Another way to run Linux apps is via X-Windows. If you have another spare box lying around, don’t install Windows, install Linux and access all of its apps from your Mac via X-Windows.
Actually, the way to run linux apps is by using Fink or DarwinPort. No need to install Linux. What’s more, if the Linux apps is platform independent the only thing you need to do is to run
gmake && gmake install
and then run the application. If it requires X11 for graphical output, just launch X11 before and you are set. Who needs Linux installed?