“Apple’s new rackmount server is just another Unix box — with big implications for the Linux community. Four million new Unix users a year, that’s the MacOS X promise and it’s a market full of friends with whom we should be working.” Read the article at LinuxWorld.
Why you Should Take a Mac User to Lunch
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Eugenia Loli
Ex-programmer, ex-editor in chief at OSNews.com, now a visual artist/filmmaker.
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That should stop all flame wars between Macs and Unix once and for all !!!
Unite all unix and “based on unix” people for the final battle against the allmighty evil empire !!!
Yeah, but this “unite all unix” is going on forever, and it never happens. Big companies tried to unite in the past, OSF/1 was one of these efforts, and everyone wanted to make unix the way they wanted. Result: Unix is still forked, after 20 years now. And it will never be united IMO. It is natural for companies to have their own versions, or re-create every now and then as “better unix”. Check the unix timeline for more.
Anyone try one of these? I’m wondering if it has the little goodies I like, such as PHP, mySQL, email services, etc. Also, how is configuration handled? Web interface? What about some sort of backup?
Inquiring minds want to know.
PHP and mySQL are both working. Email services? You can use whichever ones you want, I guess. Sendmail, mail, qMail for the brain damaged
Configuration is handled via a set of preference panels if you want a gui. If not, you can do things the CLI way and save some time. There are backup programs (Retrospective jumps immediately to mind) or you can use rdist.
Peace,
‘Rithm
Free Agent and OS Enthusiast
*nix is both united and and not at the same time. that is, if I learn how to do something on OS X, doing the same on a linux box entails doing approximately the same thing– at least on the app. level. the same apps and scripts get traded between all the popular unixen. I have about 2,000 BSD apps ported for darwin. guess what? the same 2,000 apps appear in most linux distributions. soon enough, we could see linux binaries for Darwin and vice versa. the differences, at least on the app. level (not the kernel) between Darwin and linux are small…so it makes ‘porting’ your skill set from one OS to another easy. They all seem the same to me, with only minor differences.
if you read O’Reilly’s Essential System Administration, you’ll find almost all of it works across the unixen…they all are based on the same basic principles and design. to that extent, they are already united…though ‘forked’.
Thanks for the info! I have several Linux boxen here for internal web/printing/filesharing purposes but I’ve been spoiled by the easy (and quick) front-end administration of a FreeGate box. Since FreeGate is no more, I’ve been looking for something a little beefier.
Plus it would make one heck of a toy to play around with…
this is completely reversed. the mac users are the guys with all the $$$$, they should be taking us to lunch! 🙂
haha, agreed.
Actually, we spent it on graphics tablets for Inkwell, a second computer for Rendezvous, Mac OS X 10.5, errr, 10.2, a bluetooth cell phone, and a DV camera for iMovie and Final Cut Pro.
You guys haven’t paid for an OS for, what, ten or twenty years?[1] You treat. And we expect better than Taco Bell!
[1] Joke… loosen up. 🙂
Who wouldn’t want to take one of us to lunch? Don’t you know we Mac users are smart and good looking?? 🙂
hey speak for yourself– I am neither smart nor good-looking. In fact I have a huge tumor growing out of my head that looks like engelbert humperdink…and the brain of a cockroach. i don’t even walk on two feet, I prefer to clamber along like a gorilla, slobbering all over the place. and you don’t even want to know how I’m typing this…lunch date? I think not. grrrr (slobber) grrrr.
Can’t we all just get along?
<<snip>>
“Can’t we all just get along?”
no sir, we cannot. If you had RTFM for this site, you would have found this: http://www.osnews.com/rules.htm
the rulebook explicitly states that this forum’s primary intent and indeed its entire raison d’etre if you will is “to encourage flame-wars, trolling, and general nastiness.” The rulebook goes on to state that “FUD is also encouraged.”
In fact, the manual states, “How else could ‘do business’ with this site if not to pit one group of OS loyalists against another? It makes good business sense. How else could you get a group of highly educated and highly skilled individuals [note to advertisers: good demographic] to prattle on about the most ephemeral new releases?”
Let the OS Riots begin…
Though Linux is a UNIX clone, with absolutely no original UNIX code…..
(But if GNU/Linux can be considered UNIX, Windows NT too can be called UNIX…)
But anyway, OS X is gaining more and more space in the desktop market, the recent statistics doesn’t show OS X doing too well for servers….
Mistakes:
In contrast, today’s cheapest Dell comes preloaded with Windows XP “Home Edition”; a product that Microsoft lists on its Web site at $199, or about 31 percent of the Dell’s $649 system price.
That’s the retail price. The OEM price varies on how much copies you buy from Microsoft, and could go down below $40.
that’s why you can get a Lindows machine at Wal-Mart for less than the $450 shown here and pay only $2,953 for the base Dell server if you choose to run Linux or BSD on it.
Wow, can that Lindows machine do server tasks? Doubt it, too little RAM for one. A insecure OS for another reason. The Walmart machine is meant for desktop users… poor thing it loads a beta unfinished OS that is hard to use (read the reviews).
Given that the OpenOffice.org people now have the developer release of their suite running under MacOS X
The last time I checked, which is few weeks ago, OpenOffice.org is just in the midst of removing Solaris/Linux kernel API calls and replacing them with Darwin API calls. The UI still runs via XDarwin, and it is faster just loading Linux on the machine and running the PPC build of OOo than to run the development release.
Apple should ship almost 4 million Unix desktops this year, and each one of them represents a new opportunity for open source ideas to take root and for products like OpenOffice.org to find users.
They would probably find their place among anti-MS geeks for the next few years.
Linux, of course, isn’t just a server — that’s a distinction reflecting non-Unix technology — it’s also a powerful desktop solution.
Not that powerful, it seems. For one, Linux has more fragmentation in terms of UI and distribution than Windows and Mac OS – confusing for new users (ie, Which RPM to pick up? Mandrake? Red Hat? SuSE?). Then with OS X 10.2, if everything Apple said was true about the speed, all other commercial desktop OSes would be faster out of the box on newer machines..
Though Linux is a UNIX clone, with absolutely no original UNIX code…..
(But if GNU/Linux can be considered UNIX, Windows NT too can be called UNIX…)
Well BSD hasn’t had a line of Unix code in it since around BSD4.4, if my memory is correct. All of the current *BSD’s are as much Unix clones as Linux though they do have the advantage of a code heritage going back over 20 years in the form of code that was added to Unix at Berkley. such as the TCP/IP stack
I remember somebody asking about why Linux didn’t use the BSD TCP/IP stack, from what i remember it was because at the time Berkley was involved with the court case with AT&T and it was felt that if Berkley lost then all code from BSD could become property of AT&T and just lead to problems for the Linux developers, so they decided to develope their own stack.
i could be completely wrong though 😉
“But anyway, OS X is gaining more and more space in the desktop market, the recent statistics doesn’t show OS X doing too
well for servers…. ”
Isn’t the main market for Mac servers in places where there are
already networks of Mac desktops?
.. when bumping into statements like this:
“The result is a Mac server that costs about the same as a Linux server and, therefore, considerably less than a Windows server. What’s particularly interesting about this is that it contradicts some common wisdom: Intel boxes are cheaper because so many are made, right?”
Why would I bother with someone who implies that the masses of Malwart-gear or the avarage Dell/HP-boxes have the same internals as a SERVER..?! – And btw, how many servers are made..?
“Wow, can that Lindows machine do server tasks? Doubt it, too little RAM for one. A insecure OS for another reason. The Walmart machine is meant for desktop users… poor thing it loads a beta unfinished OS that is hard to use (read the reviews).”
He was talking about how without software liscenses the hardware costs significantly less, not comparing lindows machines to dell machines as servers. He coulda phrased it better.
“”But anyway, OS X is gaining more and more space in the desktop market, the recent statistics doesn’t show OS X doing too
well for servers…. ”
Well, the Xserve is their most cost effective offering in years, for the server space.
“Isn’t the main market for Mac servers in places where there are already networks of Mac desktops?”
Without a doubt, just like the only rational place to deploy W2000 servers is in companies where your boss “needs” win-only apps like Exchange server (ughh-distaste). But if Xserve is a good value, I could see making its way into small ISP’s and SOME enterprise. Obviously it will be a while before it displaces 100 CPU Sparcs….
Though Linux is a UNIX clone, with absolutely no original UNIX code…..
Linux is a Minix clone, Linus used the code from Minix which is an open source clone of Unix. So Linux is something like a 3rd generation hybrid. Linux simpily carries on the ideals of Unix, not necessarily reuse to code.
I’m not sure if this is OT, but someone mentioned openOffice.
I must say, after visiting the openOffice site and checking out their screenshots, that their version for OS X is quite a nasty little thing. (http://whiteboard.openoffice.org/screenshots/images/compare_ms_osx….)
I don’t mean to sound ungrateful, being that it is free and all, but it doesn’t look *anything* like an OS X (or OS 9) program, in fact (no flame wars please) it looks like a Windows app. Where did they get those wicked little widgets and buttons? I’d sooner stick with MS Word before using openOffice. Hell I’d sooner bust out vi…
-spider
that screenshot does look ugly and officex looks much better in terms of gui, but im interested is there a link to that actual word file thats in the sceen shot ,im interested in it?
Well BSD hasn’t had a line of Unix code in it since around BSD4.4, if my memory is correct. All of the current *BSD’s are as much Unix clones as Linux though they do have the advantage of a code heritage going back over 20 years in the form of code that was added to Unix at Berkley. such as the TCP/IP stack
BSD had been gradually being rewritten in a long timespan by its students and professors, as opposed to Linux, which started from scratch. So in other words, BSD has a UNIX history, but Linux doesn’t. BSDLite 4.4 is void of any original UNIX code…. but at least a BSD based system manage to qualify for the UNIX trademark…. Solaris.
Isn’t the main market for Mac servers in places where there are already networks of Mac desktops?
These networks are normally using some sort of maybe BSD or Linux… but anyway, looks like this market is very unsignificant to market statistics.
He was talking about how without software liscenses the hardware costs significantly less, not comparing lindows machines to dell machines as servers. He coulda phrased it better.
And he could have used a better example…. Lindows, though much cheaper, is not free either.
Well, the Xserve is their most cost effective offering in years, for the server space.
From Apple. From other OEMs besides Dell? (Perhaps there is a reason why they aren’t the top in servers).
But if Xserve is a good value, I could see making its way into small ISP’s and SOME enterprise. Obviously it will be a while before it displaces 100 CPU Sparcs….
XServe is going after the midrange market. Now that XServe started shipping, I can’t wait till the end of the year/ next year to see how much market share they have got.
Linux is a Minix clone, Linus used the code from Minix which is an open source clone of Unix. So Linux is something like a 3rd generation hybrid. Linux simpily carries on the ideals of Unix, not necessarily reuse to code.
I know that Linux is a Minix clone. Minix is a clone of what OS? Yeah…. 🙂
I don’t mean to sound ungrateful, being that it is free and all, but it doesn’t look *anything* like an OS X (or OS 9) program, in fact (no flame wars please) it looks like a Windows app. Where did they get those wicked little widgets and buttons? I’d sooner stick with MS Word before using openOffice. Hell I’d sooner bust out vi…
OpenOffice.org uses its own widgets, so it looks the same on Windows as it looks on Linux and Solaris. Bad idea if you ask me. If they follow their same philosophy on UI for the Mac OS X version, don’t expect it to dissapear. If they are willing to make an exception, I know many Linux (GTK+), Solaris (Motif/GTK+) and Windows (Win32) would like that exception to be done on their OS.
You guys haven’t paid for an OS for, what, ten or twenty years?[1] You treat. And we expect better than Taco Bell!
It has been 20 months since I bought a retail pack of any OS…. 20 years ago, I wasn’t born yet.
Sun has said it will take some time to make OpenOffice for OS X look like a Mac interface. I think they said they hope sometime next year.