Re: [MacPerl] linux

[Mike Schienle <mgs@ivsoftware.com>]

At 4:57 PM -0800 11/20/99, Nicholas G. Thornton wrote:
>I've been looking through my archive of emails from the list and 
>came accross somethig which's caught my attention again, Linux on a 
>Mac box. I was wondering if someone could give me a general idea of 
>which acts as a real os, which as an application running under 
>MacOS, problems with each; or where I could find the answers?

Linux on a Mac box typically refers to either LinuxPPC or MkLinux. 
Both of these run in place of MacOS, so they are acting as a real OS. 
The good news is that you get the stability and speed of a Linux 
system. The downside is that you do not have access to MacOS or its 
applications. You can probably access data on a Mac partition, but 
the applications would just be binary files.

There is no Linux that runs as an application alongside MacOS, but I 
suspect you are referring to Tenon's MachTen. MachTen is a BSD 4.4 
UNIX on a Mach 2.5 kernel that runs alongside MacOS as an 
application. Those components ought to sound familiar since they are 
also in MacOS X Server. MachTen offers the best and worst of both 
worlds.

In the best view, you get access to MacOS applications and UNIX 
applications simultaneously. You get access to all of the UNIX 
networking commands and functions such as telnet, rlogin, ftp, rsh, 
httpd, ftpd, NFS servers and clients, X servers and clients, etc. You 
get the full suite of GNU compilers for C/C++, Ada, Fortran. Perl is 
available, of course. You can vi your Mac text files, or BBEdit your 
UNIX text files. You can use tar for your Mac files and Retrospect 
for your UNIX files. It uses your Mac's modem, network and printer as 
its own without having to deal with drivers for them.

The downside is stability. If the MacOS craps out, so does MachTen. 
MachTen relies on MacOS for VM, so that is another point to consider 
for speed and stability. In normal usage it's very rare for me to 
have a problem I can attribute to MachTen. It's one of the most 
stable apps I have.


Mike Schienle                                 Interactive Visuals, Inc.
mgs@ivsoftware.com                  Remote Sensing and Image Processing
http://www.ivsoftware.com/         Analysis and Application Development

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