Re: best OS for using gnustep on tiBook?

[Lars Sonchocky-Helldorf]

>> Which do you guys recommend?  Any links to how-tos on this kind of 
setup
>> greatly appreciated...
>
>I've no practical experience of  Linux on power-pc, but from what I've
>read, I'd try first Yellow Dog Linux, to have something running.
>
>I'm not sure you'd even have  all the needed drivers for Darwin to run
>(or  at least to  boot) on  a power-pc  Macintosh...  However,  if the
>driver situation of Darwin evolved  favorably (both on power-pc and on
>intel&amd),  this  would  be  a  nice system  integrating  Darwin  and
>GNUstep.

Well, since Darwin makes up the (open source) foundation (NOT to be 
confused with the foundation of Cocoa or GNUstep) of Mac OS X there will 
hardly be any driver problems with Darwin on a PowerBook. Remember, Darwin 
is mainly Mac OS X minus the GUI and some other fancy stuff. However, I 
would not recommend it as the base for GNUstep yet if you want to have a 
well tested system. Although the GNUstep base appears to work on Darwin if 
used with the GNU ObjC runtime, IMHO nobody has tried to compile or use 
the GNUstep GUI on Darwin yet. 

I would go for some sort of Linux/PPC (Yellow Dog, SuSE) for using 
GNUstep. One issue in this type of setup is the difficulty of data 
exchange between Linux and Mac OS X. Linux does not support HFS+ (main 
file system of Mac OS X) and there are no Kernel Extensions for Mac OS X 
that support some sort of a Linux filesystem (wether it be ext2, 3 or some 
journaling type). The only solution so far seems to be to use HFS (this is 
the old Mac filesystem, it limits you to filenames no longer than 32 
characters) or, for the brave of heart, even some sort of Windows 
filesystem, which should be supported properly by both Linux and Mac OS X.

>
>
>
>By the way, I've go a question about the TiBook.  I've been hesitating
>for 8 months about buying a top-notch TiBook configuration for MacOSX,
>but the $6000 price  tag, vs the $2500 at most it  would cost to build
>an  "equivalent" PC  laptop  with GNUstep/Linux  or  FreeBSD makes  me
>wonder  if it  really is  worth the  cost.  What  do you  think? (Even
>discounting  the expected culture  shock for  someone coming  from the
>NeXT GUI). 

The quality of workmanship of a PowerBook is classes better than of an al 
cheapo PC Laptop. You get far more battery life on a PowerBook. You get 
integrated WLAN (no antennas to break of), you get bootable firewire, 
which is good if you have external 2,5 inch poket drives. Firewire comes 
also in the 6 pin flavor, which means that you don't have to carry 
powersupplies for your external gadgets. For the other connectors (look at 
http://www.apple.com/powerbook/specs.html) I don't have a comparison to PC 
hardware since it differs to much from PC laptop to PC laptop. As a rule 
of thumb I would say if you go featurewise for an equaly equipped brand PC 
laptop, you'll pay about the same ammount of money.

And you'll get Jagwire ;-) for free and not those - broken by design - 
Windows variants.

>
>Alternatively, what are the  performance of other TiBooks like? (other
>than the top-notch, full-loaded, fastest configuration).

greetings, Lars