MANSFIELD, Mass., Apr 17, 2000 /PRNewswire via COMTEX/ -- Motorola (NYSE: MOT) today announced the next phase in its strategy to capitalize on the rapidly emerging software communications market by unveiling plans to expand its product line through DSL and Linux-based solutions that will support broadband communications and other platforms. The move comes as PC prices continue to fall and users demand more speed, portability and compatibility with operating systems including Windows(R) and Linux.

Note: This guide is obsolete. Please see Guide: Creating a Stable Linux Kernel version (using rsync) instead. Being able to make your own kernel can be a powerful tool. It enables you to have control over what you need to have in your kernel and what you dont, like pcmcia, i have no use for that on my imac, or my debian box for that matter. Also shows a bit of Linux's power enabling you to do anything your heart desires with it. Building your own usable kernel is no exception, and its not all that hard.

Part 2 of Linuxworld's special article on PowerPC Linux is now out. This part talks about the install procedure. In general, it seems like a well researched article, and possibly more informative then the first part. It's something to take a look at, if your installing for the first time, or if you want a general reference article on PowerPC Linux (to show your boss, etc.)

ComputerWorld has an article on Macworld SF, which deals with how PowerPC Linux is making a bigger splash at the show, at least in the server deptarment. They also mention the PowerPC Linux class which is going to be the first class at MacWorld SF. Apple nor Mac OS isn't a name that comes to mind when you think of servers, even though they do have some lowend server solutions. Thanks to PenguinPPC for the link.

Linux Cheatsheet, probably one of the more popular quick references covering the Linux platform, has moved.

The new site is here, and the official mirror is here.

If you want more mirrors, do a Google search for '"Linux Cheatsheet"'.

As Macworld concludes, there are several reports on how the week went. This Wired article claims that there was little interest in the LinuxPPC booth. Then again, they did not get their free CDs until yesterday. More on this over at LinuxPPC.com. Yellowdog Linux's exhibet, according to this press release, was quite popular. If you made it to Macworld SF, feel free to comment below.

Kai Staats from the YellowDog Announce List:

Jeremias Sauceda, a software engineer for Terra Soft Solutions, has enabled a PowerPC Linux kernel with support for dual-processor Apple G4s and 1GB RAM. This is the first time these two features have been combined into one kernel for these systems.

The experimental kernel is available here.

Linuxworld has a fairly good introduction to Linux on PowerMacs. It talks about the various distros, why you might want PowerPC Linux, and applications that run on it. Some minor things I want to remind you, is that SheepShaver is similar to MOL, it gives you full PowerPC preformance without slow emulation, almost every Mac modem is compatible, except for the Geoport Telecom adapter found on some 4400/6400 models (and some PowerBook ones), and that they don't backup the desktop market share statement.

Slashdot has an interview with Jason Haas of LinuxPPC. The interview contains Slashdot reader selected questions dealing with optimization of LinuxPPC, ATX mobos, accessability, why you should buy a PowerPC and some other questions about his accident.

Note:
This is the first quick start guide I'm doing, so just a few things to note. Unlike HOWTOs, which are detailed directions on how to get something to work, the quick start guides are intended to starting points for users interested in doing development and contributing to the iMac Linux effort. Users are encouraged to contribute as much as they can to help make Linux on the iMac even better for all.

Sources tell me that The PowerPC implementation of Gerard Beekman's Linux From Scratch is very usable now, and is included in the current pre-release of the next document, available Here

The next official version will probably be out by the end of this week, and will be the first official version to include PowerPC implementation.

Warning- some packages, particularly gcc and glibc, can take a long time to compile.

Some additional notes of one user's experience can be viewed Here

Freedesktop.org, a project sponsered by RedHat has created a group to design and implement lowlevel desktop standards, that will allow for stronger degrees of compatiblity between different desktop enviroments. This including things like xdnd, the Window Manager Spec, Corba, and others.

Neil Jolly has updated his site covering X for PPC Linux.

• Added support for Xpmac
• FAQ for X on the PPC
• XFree86 4 How To
• Added Information relating to Yaboot
• Updated the kernel arguments table
• Updated lots of links, and added new ones
• New graphics

Macworld has a report about Linuxworld last week. SuSE, while the only PowerPC vendor at the show, showed off their installer, featuring a nice graphical installer, partitioner, Mac-on-Linux and more.

Macweek has an interesting article about the opinions of various members of the Mac and Linux community about the Mac OS and Linux platforms. If you read past the first paragraph, this is an extermely interesting article on the opinions of Linux and Mac community members on the futures of both platforms. Also take a look at the comments, they provide some further insight into this article.

Just to let ya know: X.org has released X11R6.5.1. It's available for download at their site. So if anyone has some spare time and likes to build binaries ;)....

Lowend Mac has a good introduction to PowerPC Linux. It talks about the different PowerPC Linux distros, and the progress made on the PowerPC. "The LinuxPPC phenomenon is something I have been following for about a year, and I am amazed at the progress it has made."

DealMac notes that the Logitech Wheel USB Mouse, with two buttons is currently avalible at Staples for $20. This mouse is supported under PowerPC Linux, so if you are looking for a cheap multibutton mouse for Linux, now is the time to get it.

Ask MacSlash has an question dealing with porting Linux apps to Mac OS X. There is some interesting discussion on cross platform issues, including PowerPC Linux binary compatibility.

Future Technologies is working on developmenting an exciting new "from sratch" PowerPC and Intel distro, inspired by the ideas of Mac OS X. It will include Linux 2.4, ReiserFS, "FTKDE" XFree86 4.01 and will be RedHat compatible FHS. A beta is planned for October. Another interesting feature of this distro, is there will be a version designed specfically for others wishing to create there own versions. Take a look at their website and their press release.

Stefan Kluth just posted on debian-ppc: I would like to share how I got debian 2.2 rev0 on a Mac G4. It was, more or less, as in the installation manual. The Mac has a DVD RAM drive. Very Cool. This message doesn't appear to have made it to the Debian list archives yet, so I am posting it in full below.

This gleaned from the LinuxPPC digest:

Date: Sun, 20 Aug 2000 17:40:13 +0000
From: Guillaume Laures
Subject: Watching dvds on LinuxPPC, it's possible !

Hi,

I've somewhat managed to get a dvd movie played on my G4, but I guarantee that for now this kind of exercise is not for the faint of the heart !

If you want to try my binaries, go to I also put the source code and instructions about how to build it.

Have fun !!!

- --

GoM

Here's a little demo comparing ripping MP3's under MacOS versus LinuxPPC. (Ripping is when you convert CD audio tracks and store them on you hard disk. In my example, the final format is MP3). See a desktop snapshot of each OS, and a list of software used. Read More at ResExcellence... Add your comments below.

The Open Group has released an version of Motif 2.1 under a new license that permits free (commerical or free) development and use of Motif under all free OS's including PowerPC Linux. This is great news for those commerical PowerPC Linux companies wanting to port their Motif apps to the PowerPC.

A couple days ago I had:

rsync -avz linuxcare.com.au::linux-pmac-stable /usr/src/linux

and by looking at /usr/src/linux/Makefile it said:

VERSION=2 PATCHLEVEL=2 SUBLEVEL=15 EXTRAVERSION=pre20

Today, I did another rsync and found that:

EXTRAVERSION=

nothing. Does that mean that all the pmac pre patches have been applied to the official 2.2.15 source? Is this the Linux kernel all PowerMac users have been waiting for? I haven't seen this announced anywhere and I'm surprised that the Makefile doesn't indicate that it is the original source plus all the pmac stuff. Any official word?

LinuxPPC.com has updated the rpmfind database on ftp.linuxppc.com, according to the LinuxPPC.com newspage. According to the site, the new database includes packages from 1996 to three days ago.

FreeBSD has started a mailing list devoted to PowerPC FreeBSD development. Thanks to MacNN.com for the link.

Quesa is a high level 3D graphics library, released as Open Source under the LGPL, which offers binary and source level compatibility with Apple's QuickDraw[tm] 3D API. Quesa does not contain any Apple source code, and was developed without access to Apple's QD3D implementation.

Quesa currently supports Mac OS 8/9, Mac OS X, Linux, and Windows - a port to Be is in progress. Find out more here

The PowerForce G3 cards, awarded the honor of "Editor's Choice" by Macworld magazine, can be used to upgrade the 7300, 7500, 7600, 8500, 8600, 9500, and 9600 models from Apple as well as Power Computing clones and the S900 and J700 from Umax. New prices for the PowerForce G3 cards are US $299 for the 400/200/1MB model and $489 for the 500/250/1MB version. Find out more here

Network Fusion has posted part 1 of their series of "Don't think "Lintel"" articles. This one focuses on Linux for the PowerPC, and includes information and a variety of distros, from Debian to SuSE for the PowerPC.

LinuxPlanet has an article on XFce. XFce is roughtly based on CDE, but is much more lightweight and free. It now uses GTK for it's native toolkit. This desktop is worth while to check out if you 233 Mhz iMac is feeling a bit to sluggish or you want something like the commerical CDE.

CNN.com/Network Fusion has an article on Linux for the PowerPC. They give a brief overview of the distros, from Debian to Rock Linux. It also compares the distros, and gives their strengths and weaknesses.

Ani Joshi has created an accelerated driver for Mach64 cards under XFree86 4.0. It is still extermely experimental so you may not want to install it yet. It featuires many improvements over Xpmac and XFree86 XF68_FBDev 3.0 server, including a ten fold improvement at rectangle drawing (meaning much faster window drawing) and native truetype font support.

Takashi Oe has a rudimentary port of Monolithic PowerPC Linux to PDM Nubus PowerMacs (the 6100,7100, and other x1xx Nubus PowerMacs). He also has posted a hacked version of BootX, and a "mini-ramdisk" image so you can test it without having a copy of (Mk)Linux installed. PDM Nubus PowerMac users may soon be able to use standard Linux distros, and the standard kernel, with this development.

After several weeks of development, a preview of the merged LinuxPPC.org and PenguinPPC.org is now up. It includes artwork and designwork by John Grantham, website designer of Loki and LinuxPPC.com. Content for the new site is being developed by Jeramy Smith (author of PenguinPPC.org) and Hollis Blanchard (from LinuxPPC, Inc.). This site is shaping up nicely; it will be great when it opens.

This week's Debian Weekly News is out. In the news this week is Richard Braakman is going to be gone for a week or two, security fixes, plans are posted to end the next test cycle, Joey Hess is stepping up as the new leader of the boot-floppies team, in effort to redesign the install system and make it more modular.

The Deb Freshmeat Respository (DFMR) is a home for debian packages that can't seem to find themselves part of the offical debian distrobution, due to a lack of an offical maintainer or a conflict of licensing (like linking to a lesser free library with the GPL and not giving explict permission). After falling off maintance after the past few years, and the growing interest in packages that can't quite make it into Debian, many want to restore DFMR.

Hollis has created a mirror of the PowerPC Linux 2.4 for Nubus Kernel. This should greatly speed up access to this software, compared to the orginal ftp.ppc.linux.or.jp site.

XFree86 4.01 was released today. People with ATI Rage 128 and Rage 128 Pro cards should upgrade to this version. XFree86 4 has much faster video then XFree86 3.3.x and many new or improved features.

There are no PowerPC Linux binaries yet, when they are avalible, they will be announced on iMacLinux Files.

Is your iMac too fast for you? Want to run Linux on your SE/30? Jag's Shareware House has created a Debian for the SE/30 Howto. And yes, the SE/30 does run X slowly, assuming you have the diskspace to install it, in all of two colors -- black and white.

Mac-arena the Bored Zo has updated his popular (mirror). It is one of the better quick guides to shell commands, and an good review for all.

This week's Road Warrior column discusses the possiblities for an old Nubus-based Powerbook, which is currently incompatible with Mac OS X and Linux. Apple no longer makes sub-notebook Powerbooks, so buying a new Powerbook is not an option. Hopefully in the next year, Monolithic Linux will be able to support the Powerbook 1400, so he can have access to a small lightweight notebook and the speed benifits of Linux.

Metrowerks is looking for Beta testers for CodeWarrior (a popular IDE for Macintosh and other platforms) for Linux on the PowerPC. To qualify as a beta tester you must be knowledgable in Linux, Codewarrior, and be able to download large files from the Internet. Interested people should contact Ron Liechty. The complete press release is included below.

Ben H., with assistance from ATI has fixed the PowerBook Core '99 video problem that made direct booting using yaboot impossible (without using Mac OS to flash the video chip). These patches are now in the Bitkeeper kernel tree. Thanks to PenguinPPC and the developers in #mklinux for pointing this out.

After several weeks of development, the new LinuxPPC.org site is now offically open. It is designed to combine the best of PenguinPPC, LinuxPPC.org and Linux.Macnews.de, and provide a wealth of user and developer resources.

Tenon Systems, well known for their Mac OS WebServer, is going to create a seamless X11 Server for Mac OS X. It will feature a Window Manager similar to Aqua, and apps running on it will appear on the dock. This will make it possible for a variety of UNIX applications, including high resolution modeling apps, and many popular Linux applications (like the GIMP).

A beta will ship at the same time as the beta of Mac OS X, a final version will ship shortly after the release of Mac OS X.

Steve Jobs' is expected to announce this morning, several new products, and services to the Apple line. ZDNet will have both a Live Streaming (in Quicktime 4 for Mac users) and Delayed Version (in RealAudio G2 for watching in Linux). The keynote will start in about 15 minutes.

AppleTalk has been Apple's traditional networking protocol. According to this article, Apple (on Mac OS X) and Microsoft (on NT) plan to phase out traditional AppleTalk and AppleTalk over IP. The reasons for this are to support more standardized, faster protocols then the old slow AppleTalk protocol. Linux users can connect to AppleTalk over IP machines, via. Netatalk.

MacNN.com, has created a new Linux on Macintosh forum to discuss PowerPC Linux, Darwin, *BSD and other unixes avalible for the PowerMac.

LinuxJournal has posted an article on installing an using Linux on a PowerBook computer, by Richard C.S. Kinne. In general he says it has been a postive experience, "...is not far behind and has experienced similar growth in the last few years...".

MkLinux now supports the Performa and PowerMacs 52xx/62xx/63xx, the largest gap of machines previously unsupported by MkLinux and Monolithic Linux. The news can be found here. The kernel for booting these machines can be found here.

PenguinPPC Developer Page contains the news of several new developments in PPC Linux. They include news about the hfsplus filesystem in Linux, Kaffe CVS on the PPC, new RS6k machine support under development, XFS filesystem support and more.

Mulberry is a nice and full-featured e-mail client for MacOS and Windows. Currently, alpha test releases for Linux/i386, Linux/PPC and Solaris are underway. This client shows great promise. If you're interested in participating in testing and showing a major software manufacturer that LinuxPPC is a viable platform, you might want to participate in making Mulberry rule. Head on over to mulberry's home and become an alpha tester.

Now all you bleeding edge types have probably been hacking around with version 2.4 of the kernel for months, but it's almost ready for prime-time use, according to a report on freshmeat.

The DukeofUrl has reviewed SuSE 6.4 PowerPC. The reviewer's experience was mostly negative, caused by the high hardware demands of YaST 2, mistakes in the manual and poor PowerPC support. His G3/300 with 128 megs of RAM was extermely slow installing with YaST 2, his Starmax 3000 603e/160 with 32 megs of RAM completely refused to install.

David Gatwood, the MkLinux Developer will be the guest on Monday's World Without Borders Chat. It is scheduled for Monday, August 7 at 10 PM EST, and Tuesday, August 8 at 2 AM UTC.

Toby McNulty has created a PowerPC Kernel Archives site. This site automatically generates a precompiled PowerMac kernel binary, for everytime the source tree changes -- for linux-pmac-stable/unstable/benh and bk-stable/unstable. This site also can send you emails when you favorite kernel tree is updated.

Maccentral notes that Nitrozac and Snaggy of After2k will be at Linuxworld next week taking autographs. As long time Macintosh users and Linux fans, they are looking for both of them to meet at there signature signing and poster give away on on Wednesday Aug. 16, from 10 am until noon.

I checked up on how the port has been going. Its been aparently way to long since I had done this and I recieved an email back saying that the port of TurboLinux to the PowerPC architecture has been cancelled. Here is the email I recieved.

I have edited the ol' kernel guide just a few minutes ago. You can find it on the new Guide's and HowTo's Department on the top left bar. There are now two guides, one for using rsync, and sources from kernel.org. And again, as always, find any typos or think I am missing anything. please let me know =)

Thanks!

CNet Computers has an review of the iMac DV Snow. CNet gave it a 9 out of ten, for it's stylish looks, serious preformance and it's nice keyboard and mouse. The review concludes -- "... the iMac is a first-rate personal computer..."

Maccentral notes that SuSE Linux will be showing off it's PowerPC Linux solutions at Linuxworld starting tommorow. They will be demostrating many of their tools on a PowerMacintosh G4.

LinuxPPC, Inc. says they are changing things for the better, when it comes to customer support and reliablity. With the return of Jason Haas, they will be able to step up their support and continue improving it. A MacCentral article can be found here, here is the offical press release.

This Linuxworld San Jose promises to be different from other years. Technologies from the kernel to desktop enviroments to many other things will be demostrated. You can listen live at Dr. Dobb's Technetcast or read about it in MacCentral.

Lots more exciting news about Eazel and Linuxworld San Jose can be found in SFGate and MacObserver.

Is Apple testing Mac OS X on the Compaq Alpha platform interally? Mac OS Rumors has recieved word that it may be. Interesting move, but is Apple ready to move off of the PowerPC? Or is this article just pure speculation?

MacAddict has done a chat with the people behind FreeBSD. Most of the article deals with Darwin and the FreeBSD relationship, and how they effect each other. Strangely enough, this article fails to mention that FreeBSD PowerPC that is starting to get underway.

Some of LinuxPPC, Inc.'s employees are "going to jail" to help in a neuromuscular disease fund-raiser, in an effort to raise funds for the research of the disease that killed Joel Klecker, the PowerPC Linux Debian developer who did most of his work behind the scenes. They will be held hostage, until they get bailed out. Below is the press release if you are interested.

According to this VNU.net article, 2600 has lost the DeCSS. However, this ruling does not cover LiViD or it's decoding CSS for playback cacpities, it only specifically covers DeCSS's code that allows for a DVD to be save to a hard drive. Hopefully this is a step in the right direction for a PowerPC Linux free DVD video player, for iMac DV's and other models with DVD drives.eWeek also has an article covering this.

Dan O'Rourke writes: "Perhaps you've heard, but Apple is giving a $700 trade-in discount if you give them an old 5300 or Powerbook 190 and purchase a Pismo 400mhz." There is stories on this at PowerBookZone and Slashdot. At least Apple admits that the PowerBook 5300 was awful, and are making up for it.

Mac OS X is due out in two weeks, according to MacCentral and MacFixit. It will be offically announced at AppleExpo France. Certainly something to try out, if you have a free partition, as yaboot already supports Mac OS X, with it's boot menu.

According to this XL8 Your Macintosh user contributed article, users having problems compiling software, who have overclocked there PowerMacs, should consider lowering the clock speed down. It highlights the point that many forget -- software can be affected by unreliable hardware, even in Linux -- and that gcc is one of the most intensive software apps to test hardware with.

The Linux/PPC Fact-o-Matic, a user maintained database of information on Linux/PPC has moved to lppcfom.sourceforge.net.

The planned Apple protest at Apple France Expo, has been called off, after Apple agreed to work with the protestors. Apple has agreed to try to work with them, and resolve there problems.

This protest was designed to symbolize Apple's recent actions, including it's tatics against fan websites, poor internationalization, and generally pushing away previous customers. (continues...)

PenguinPPC has a howto on setting up bootp to "netboot" a New-World (such as an iMac) PowerMac.

NetBSD developers have started a port to the Motorola MPC8xx series of embedded PowerPC devices, sponsered by Real-Time Systems. PowerPC Linux already supports these chips. These chips are used in a variety of embedded devices, such as in the telecommunications industry.

Lots of Mac OS X coverage today, around the web. According to this ZDNet article, Mac OS X requires 128 MB of RAM, ATI Video, G3 or G4 and a gig of HD, here are comments by Slashdot. Macweek has additional coverage, along with Boston Globe. Still more coverage in MacSurfer.

The PowerPC Linux port to Nubus PowerMacs, now has a webpage at http://nubus-pmac.sourceforge.net/. Check it out, as it has useful information on running PowerPC Linux on Nubus Macs. Also, on this page is a note that this project is looking for hardware (loans or gifts) to test and develop using.

Business 2.0 has an article about Apple's new Mac OS X, getting a free ride off up Open Source and Linux hype. It also takes a look at Eric Raymond's opinion on the new Mac OS X, and what it means to the OSS community.

Is it possible to run Mac OS X on anything less then a G3, much less a 68040+FPU Mac? This page seems to think it's possible with some work. According to the article, there are many glitches apparent, but it boots. While I find this all hard to believe, it's still an interesting read.

The Linux-PMac Kernel tree has moved off of linuxcare.com.au to ppc.samba.org (which is in California, USA), due to bandwidth expenses. Just replace that domain with the other one in your scripts, as the path of the ftp server and the rsync commands are the same. For example rsync -avz linuxcare.com.au::linux-pmac-stable /usr/src/linux becomes rsync -avz ppc.samba.org::linux-pmac-stable with the change.

NewerTech has a paper called "Mac OS X... What You Should Really Know And Why There Is No Need To Worry Today". It addresses the issues of Mac OS X compatible machines. It also recommends for a user wanting UNIX or Linux on the PowerPC to look at a PowerPC Linux distro. Bottom line is that older PowerMac owners have not to fear Mac OS X, as Classic Mac OS and Linux will be supported on these pieces of hardware for years. Link from Xlr8YourMac.

The Darkstar is another new PowerPC Linux distro, announced this week. It is a small distro, using stable, tested tools. The purpose of the distro is to be as similar from platform to platform, and to be able to be built completely from source code. The press release is below.

If you wanted to define the far ends of the computer usability spectrum, you could do a lot worse than planting Mac OS at one end and Unix at the other. For the whole of its existence, the Macintosh operating system has been a prime example of consistency and graceful design. And for the whole of its existence, the Unix operating system has been, um, not.

Ok. I think we're getting to the point where there are no major known bugs. That means that as of the final 2.4.0-test9 I will no longer accept any patches that don't have a critical problem (as defined by Teds list) associated with them.

So when you send me a patch, either bug Ted to mark the issue as "critical" first, or pay me money. It's that easy.

Linus

Motorola's New MPC7410 Microprocessor Delivers on the Promise of High Performance Smart Networks Networking Infrastructure Applications to Benefit From Computational Performance and High Bandwidth

AUSTIN, Texas, Sep 26, 2000 /PRNewswire via COMTEX/ -- Delivering new levels of performance, Motorola (NYSE: MOT) today introduced the second of its fourth- generation (G4) PowerPC(TM) microprocessors, the MPC7410 with AltiVec(TM) technology. Designed for high-performance, high-bandwidth applications, the MPC7410 offers unrivaled PowerPC performance and provides a compelling solution for host processor requirements in next generation networking equipment. Motorola's G4 family of PowerPC microprocessors with AltiVec technology are ideal for network control and storage, telecommunications, high-end embedded, scientific and computing applications.

According to this article, Zero Knowledge plans to port it's 'Freedom' browser to Linux. This browser is designed for anonymous browsing, and has many security features such as crypto and secure cookies. This browser also comes with source code, so to provide full disclosure for those concerned about security. It also means it probably can also be ported to the PowerPC.

RedHat Software introduced today, RedHat Linux 7.0. RedHat is a popular x86 Linux distro, it's source pages are also used to help build many popular PowerPC Linux distros, like LinuxPPC and Yellow Dog Linux. Feature wise, it's a minor release compared to 5.0 to 6.0, the biggest change is it's standardization on gcc (and no longer egcs). Also new in this release are updated and new GNOME packages, security updates, and general updates. It still includes KDE 1.1.2, as KDE 2.0 isn't final, yet.

A major contributor to the powerpc linux community, penguinppc have set up two new rooms on irc.openprojects.org

#mklinux and #ppclinux.

This is in response to folks outside the US not being able to access efnet and for the ones such as myself that seem to have problems with efnet as it is getting connected to there servers.

Whatever the reasons, I personally feel it will benifit all of us in our goals to be connected with others for help, development, or whatever your forte is.

Several people have commented on the Mac OS X beta. Resexcellence has Jack Shedd's excellent Mac OS X Survior guide. It explains many of the problems you may face installing and using this new OS. Another problem others are having is with Mac OS X's installer renders Linux unbootable. This is caused by Mac OS X moving the Linux partition, so it can put it's own booter early on the disk, and zapping OF settings to it's own. Below I've posted Ethan Benson's letter to debian-powerpc, which should be of great help to those running Mac OS X.

Apple Announces Keynote Speakers for Upcoming QuickTime Live! Conference

Keynote speakers for the second-annual QuickTime(TM) Live! conference on October 9 - 12 at the Beverly Hilton Hotel in Beverly Hills, California include:

• Philip Schiller, Apple's vice president of Worldwide Product Marketing
  When: Tuesday, Oct. 10 from 10:30 a.m. to 12 p.m.
• Frank Casanova, Apple's director of QuickTime Product Marketing; award- winning filmmaker and director David Lynch, and widely acclaimed digital animation special effects creator David Dozoretz
  When: Wednesday, Oct. 11 from 9 a.m. to 10 a.m.
• Annie Valva, director of technology at Boston's public television station WGBH-TV
  When: Thursday, Oct. 12 from 9 a.m. to 10 a.m.

  All keynotes will take place in the Beverly Hilton Hotel. Philip Schiller's keynote will be streamed live at the QuickTime Live Site. To watch the keynote, viewers need the QuickTime 4 player, which is available as a free download at Apple Quicktime.

Apple stock was down as much as 40% in after-hours trading following an announcement that quarterly revenues and profits will be lower than expected.

Full story here

MacSlash has yet another interview with Jason Haas from LinuxPPC, Inc. Nothing too exciting to read, but it might be worth a look, especially if you are new to PowerPC Linux.

It appears that execpc, the LinuxPPC, Inc. webhosting and dns company is having some problems with the www.linuxppc.com and linuxppc.com domain. It is currently unable to resolve, however, strangly enough, www.linuxppc.org points to LinuxPPC, inc so you can still access the site. linuxppc.org points to PenguinPPC/LinuxPPC.org, so you can still get to that site. When this mess is all straightened out, and linuxppc.com should point to LinuxPPC, Inc., and www.linuxppc.org, linuxppc.org should point to PenguinPPC. Phew, talk about confusing.

Linus' Unstable Kernel (the one on kernel.org) does not build on the PowerPC or Sparc currently. You should instead, get the kernel from Linux-PMac or use a different version (like 2.4.0test9 or 2.2.17). Why this has happened is explained over at PenguinPPC.

If you have an OpenSource Project, that needs services like FTP, CVS, web hosting, etc., this LinuxWorld article can help you out. It compares Asynchrony.com,Cosource.com Free Software Bazaar, OAsis, SourceForge and SourceXchange.

From LinuxPPC Inc's website: MacOSRadio.net will have a feature on LinuxPPC during their show tonight at 7:00 PM EST.

Unfortunately, it will be in QuickTime Streaming format -- so you can't listen to it if you're using Linux. (Perhaps under Mac-on-Linux?)

WAUKEHSA, Wisconsin, October 7, 2000 - LinuxPPC Inc., the recognized leading developer of Linux for PowerPC computers, announced today that they have licensed Hard Disk Toolkit*PE partitioning tool from FWB Software, LLC.

Hard Disk Toolkit*PE will be shipped with every order for LinuxPPC 2000 that is placed on LinuxPPC's web site. Hard Disk Toolkit*PE will also be included in LinuxPPC's next major release, which is due out later this month. Read more here

Apple announced yesterday that Mitch Mandich, who is in charge of the company's worldwide sales, would step down from his position to step down from his post at the end of December to spend more time with his family. Read about it here

Date: Mon, 9 Oct 2000 15:28:57 -0700 (PDT)
From: Linus Torvalds [email protected]
To: Kernel Mailing List [email protected]
Subject: test10-pre1

Largely VM balancing and OOM things (get rid of the VM livelock that existed in test9), and USB fixes.

And a number of random driver fixes (SMP locking on network drivers, what not).

Linus

There have been many major improvements since the last version. Since the release of Tech Preview 4, we've cleaned up a huge number of bugs, made a lot of performance enhancements, we've debugged many issues related to communications, and done a great deal of work on the user interface.

Opera for Linux is available on the Intel x-86 and Power PC platforms. Find out more here

The recently released public beta version of Mac OS X opens a new OS era to users of current Macs, according to Apple Director of Mac OS Product Marketing Ken Bereskin. In an exclusive interview with ZDNet News, Bereskin said the new age will feature tighter integration between current Mac hardware and software than ever before.

According to this press release, "Workstation Pro 6.1 includes new developer release versions of TurboLinux for Sun Microsystem's SPARC processors and for PPC processors." Interestingly about two months ago, TurboLinux said that all PowerPC work had stopped. Feel free to post below, if you know what's going on with TurboLinux.

Linux-Pmac can't seem to stay on the same server. Due to bandwidth restrictions, the main server linux-pmac has moved to penguinppc.org. The tree names are still the same as on ppc.samba.org. Cort's Bitkeeper Tree rsync appears to be down right now, hopefully it will be up shortly. Listed below are the trees that are now on PenguinPPC.

The folks at AbriaSoft were kind enough to send me a copy of AbriaSoft SQL Lite and AbriaSoft SQL Standard for review. this product is a bundled bunch of RPM's of:

• Apache-1.3.12
• MySQL-3.22.32
• Perl-5.00503 (Lite) or Perl-5.6 (Standard)
• Perl DBI
• Mod PHP-3.0.16 (Lite) or Mod PHP 3 & 4 (Standard)

For PPC folks like ourselves, the "light" version doesn't support PPC, so I went ahead and installed the Standard version on a clean install of YellowDog Linux CS1.2.

Years ago, Microsoft wanted Windows to become the "one OS everywhere" platform. Seven years later, that is farther from the truth, as Windows only supports limited hardware, compared to Linux. Jeramy Smith takes a look at how Linux has replaced Microsoft as the "one OS everywhere".

LinuxPPC, Inc. is working on an update of LinuxPPC, codename Halloween. This release has many updates, such as KDE 2, XFree86 4.0, and a graphical yaboot (and possibly others) bootstrap configuration program. A preview version of it can be found here, but note that it is experimental, it may not work, etc.

ZDNet looks at the various Mac OS competitiors for the PowerMac platform. Interviewed are SuSE and Be at the Systems 2000 conference. Not surprising, Be plans to discontinue PowerMac support shortly, and has no plans to port to new PowerMacs, and SuSE plans to expand its' PowerPC operations. Calmon from Be predicted "Although I like the counterculture of the Mac world, Apple will have to switch to the Intel platform in order to survive."

LinuxPPC Halloween beta features an installer that can upgrade over a previous RPM-based PowerPC installation (such as YDL, SuSE or an old version of LinuxPPC). The installer works by quering the existing installation's package list, and installing the proper LinuxPPC Halloween versions. This does not work reliably with Debian or glibc 1.99 systems (like LinuxPPC R4 of MkLinux DR3). You can read more about it in this Press Release.

According to this interview of Mandrake people, ppc support is in the works.
Very sweet news isn't it?

ps: oooh, and you'll have to learn french;)

Work on porting OpenOffice to PowerPC Linux continues. It's clear that it needs more work before it will work on the PowerPC, you can get the current status by reading the porting-dev mailing list.

Slashdot takes a look at the distro updates for the PowerPC. It's a short article, but some of the comments are an interesting read.

Stephan Somogyi at ZDNet takes a look at Mac OS X and Linux, and how Mac OS X's Open Source part (Darwin) is half baked. It points out many of Darwin's drivers are incomplete, and it currently makes a weak foundation by itself and with Mac OS X ontop.

Kevin Hendricks, with lots of help by Jason Stewart, Rich Johnson, Scott Hutinger, Sander Vesik, and many many other contributers has gotten OpenOffice Build 609-FU to work on the PowerPC. Currently the writer, draw, equation, and chart work to some degree, but spreadsheets part does not yet work. He plans on creating binaries sometime this week.

OpenBSD 2.8 has been released, with support for most new world PowerMacs, including the iMac, G3, G4, and G4 Cube. More on OpenBSD can be found here, along with a changelist here.

A new version of NetBSD is out, adding support for PowerMac G4 Cubes, major memory and disk access improvements, security updates and more. More about NetBSD 1.5 can be found here.

Paul Barry gives some first impressions Mac OS X from the point of view of a longtime LinuxPPC and Mac OS user in this article. After explaining the basics, he looks into the various UNIX utilities, and if it's a keeper. Except for the price -- he says it's a keeper -- at least until his beta version expires.

VA Linux Systems received a letter from Apple Computer, Inc. complaining about some of the themes shown on the Themes.org website. They have removed the apple-like themes from the website, those being Aqua, AquaX, eMac and eMac-GTK. There was no letter we could read about what Apple had said but there are some comments on the matter from *.themes.org viewers. See more here

http://grc.com/r&d;/nomoredos.htm G.E.N.E.S.I.S. - Gibson's ENcryption-Enhanced Spoofing Immunity System - A Simple TCP/IP Implementation Enhancement to Eliminate Denial of Service (DoS) Vulnerability

OpenOffice 609-FU port beta for PPC Linux
-----------------------------------------
Announcing the first beta release of the port of OpenOffice
(formerly Star Office) to PPC Linux.

PenguinPPC takes a funny look at the best and worst new releases (and non-releases) of 2000. The non-existant MkLinux R1 gets first place, LinuxPPC Q3 gets 2nd for the "Older-is-better" RedHat 6.2 bases, and Yellowdog comes in third for "putting this dog asleep". They also have several serious ones, such as for hfsplusutils, OpenOffice, and Xautoconfig4.

According to this article, Mac OS X could ship as soon as next week at Macworld San Fransico. A GM beta of Mac OS X was suppostly sent out last week.

Resexcellence's Michael Coyle interviewed the president of LinuxPPC, Jeff Carr, at Macworld Expo SF. They had a short discussion on LinuxPPC, Mac OS and the future of operating systems on PowerMacs. You can listen to it here, or read more about it.

LinuxPPC this morning has released a Press Release, stating offically that they will be going non-profit (they previously announced this at Macworld SF unoffically). The press release discusses the pros and cons, such as non-profit can not use venture / investment capital, and that non-profits are more democratically ran. Linux Weekly News Front Page has more on the non-profit.

Jeff has some further updates to the ReiserFS port, these can be found here. ReiserFS is a journal based file system offering enhancements over standard ext2. ReiserFS is one of several journal based file systems for Linux.

Linux 2.4.1 was released Wednesday. You can find out more about this release here. side note: for those of you with old sparc32 boxes, this seems to fix the esp scsi problem all the 2.4.0-test kernels had and prevented use on sun4c machines.

Joe Barr catches up with Linus Torvalds after the kernel and Expo commotion and gets his thoughts on the kernel, passing the baton, trade shows, Microsoft FUD, and his heroes. Find out what Linus will do for a free beer.

Slashdot yesterday posted an article that has recieved much controversy in the PowerPC Linux community, about Linus not accepting certain PowerPC Linux kernel sync patches. Some of the comments in this article are interesting, so if you read past the inital article and some of the flames, you many learn something (or have something postive to contribute).

PenguinPPC.org has been redesigned with a refreshing new look, that looks very nice in Netscape 4.7 and lynx, and looks even better in Konqueror and Mozilla.

Peter Bergner has posted to linuxppc-announce a bootlog to a POWER3 server booting Linux in 64-bit mode. Previously, PowerPC Linux only supported these machines in 32-bit mode. The message is included below.

A german company called Bplan has announced that its ATX based PowerPC motherboards are near release. You can find the english version of the release here.

A Few More Details by AArthur: This this page, claims that prototypes of the Pegasos PowerPC POP board are now being used for internal testing, and that public versions may be avaliable in early May 2001. They feature a 350 MHz G3 to dual processor G4 systems, AGP, Firewire, USB, IDE, PS/2, and more, these would be really nice systems to run PowerPC Linux on.

NetBSD/macppc (the NetBSD for PCI PowerMacs) now has a version of linux_compat that works with some PowerPC Linux programs such as Netscape Communicator 4.73. Java 1.18 has Minimal support with linux_compat, many things are broken. More can be found from here .

Harris Interactive released the results of a new survey of more than 140 thousand Internet users showing the Mac users are still the most loyal to the Apple brand, compared to any other type of computer. 53% of all Macintosh users purchase new Apple computers, to replace their existing system.

If you have a PowerMac with a 604e processor, and though your only option was to use PowerPC Linux to get a modern OS, think again. Ryan Rempel has hacked together a replacement Mac OS X Kernel (using the Darwin source code) that supports the 604 processor. Now only if they would add 603 support. ;) You can find out more about this here.

Apple's latest OF Updates will cause problems with booting Linux 2.2, and older versions of Linux 2.4, that lack a patch that gives Linux support for the new OF version, according to PenguinPPC. As if disappearing memory, wasn't a big enough problem already. ;)

The folks over at TechTV's screensavers have this lame competition that nobody entered so they decided to enter their staff. After the various comments made, we think that Martin Sargent should go for the makeover, because he doesn't appear to want to win :) Looks like they are logging votes by source ip only, so click here to vote for him. :)

Two nights ago, Debian/PowerPC's autobuilder updated libstdc++-libc6.2-2.so.3, that do to a gcc bug caused several programs to break with __throw unresolved. Dan Jacobowitz has posted some more info on this.

The following Business Week article discusses how the unix nature of OS X may leave Mac users more susceptible to crack attacks, and also voices concern over Apple's slow response to CERT advisories.

The past week's poll dealt with kernel panics. The vast majority of users voted that they rarely or never have kernel panics. Do you stay away from unstable kernels (like 2.4.x), or is it because 2.4 is fairly stable on their machine, or do you simply avoid using audio and HFS support (which is fairly unstable with 2.4)? Post your comments below.

According to this article over at cnet's news.com, IBM are aiming to use their extensive research and development resources to push ahead of motorola, with the goal of breaking the 1GHz and 2GHz barriers, later this year and later in 2002, respectively.

The Open Source Initiative has given the ok to both IBM's Common Public License and ApplePublic Source License.

There's no official announcement as of now, but XFree86 4.1.0 is up on the FTP Site. I'm compiling it right now, so I'll post an update when it finishes. Hopefully I can finally have accelerated video (and XRender) on my iMac Rev. B!!

The Nubus-Pmac project has posted a patch against Linux 2.4.5-pre5 (ie. the bk tree). They have updated the LinuxPPC 2000 Q4 kernels and ramdisk combos, and support for YDL 2.0. At this point almost all Nubus PowerMacs are supported (in limited amounts) -- Apple Power Macintosh 6100, 7100, 8100 and compatibles, Apple PowerBook 1400, 2300, 5300 and the Apple Performa 5200, 6200, 6300.

This week's poll is about Netscape Communicator -- Use It or Lose It?. Netscape has not been updated for PowerPC Linux since version 4.7.3 -- about a year and a quarter ago. Numerous security problems exist in that version with no fix or update in sight for them on the PowerPC. Do you stick with Netscape for web browsering or email, or have you moved to along other browsers? Either post your opinion below, or vote in our poll.

CNET organised a 5 round OS Deathmatch between Linux and MacOS9. True believers from each camp will defend their favourite OS in points like installation, interface, applications, hardware compatibility and internet support.

So who will leave the ring as winner? Check it out for yourself:

http://home.cnet.com/software/0-429669-7-1890183.html?tag=st.sw.3709-7-1890189.subdir.3709-7-1890183

XFree86.org has released version 4.1.0. It can be downloaded as binary or as source code via cvs at www.xfree86.org. A complete change history can be found on that site as well.
The new version might be especially interesting for MacOSX users, the update is highly recommended. In the same context the X11 for MacOSX has now officially been named XDarwin.

Today is the 50th birthday of the UNIVAC I (UNIversal Automatic Computer), the first commercial computer. It was quite a beast: 16,000 lbs, 5000 vacuum tubes measuring 9 inches by 2 inches, and an amazing 1000 instructions executed per second! The first UNIVAC was sold to the US Census bureau where it revolutionized data storage from them. No longer did they have to use punch cards, UNIVAC supported storage on metal tape! The US Census bureau still maintains a plaque commemorating the computer. It reads "Bureau of the Census dedicated the world's first electronic general purpose data processing computer, UNIVAC I, on June 14, 1951. Eckert-Mauchly Computer Corporation" (source: slashdot.org, read more about it on wired.com)

Not sure how we missed this, but Christian Bauer put a note on SheepShaver website on 03-31-01, announcing that SheepShaver will become Opensource in the future, and parts of it's code will be merged into Mac 68k Emulator Basilisk II (and assumingly Mac-on-Linux too). This news is not that surpising, as BeOS for the PowerPC is basically dead, and PowerPC Linux already has the free, opensource Mac-on-Linux runtime enviroment.

Stephan Somogyi has a ZDNet Commentary on the various flavors of Unix-like operating systems you can get for Macs -- Linux, BSD and A/UX. While this article has minor technical flaws, it's always great to see mainstream technical publications to be covering PowerPC Linux.

DevelopOnline is giving away a TiVo recorder, if you register on their site for free. If you don't mind voiding your warranty, you can install PowerPC Linux on the TiVo. You can enter here.

It has been quiet for some time around the graphics board creator VillageTronic. Some of you may remember that they used to produce popular graphic boards for the Mac based on the 3dfx chips.

After the fall of 3dfx, VillageTronic is now back with a new partner, Trident, and a whole new set of products.

Besides the traditional support of the Mac platform (ClassicOS&MacOSX;), they now want to offer solutions for Windows and Linux too.

Details at http://www.villagetronic.com

Marc Chapman, technical writer at IBM, Corp. has released a 50 page technical FAQ for new Linux users migrating from Windows to Linux. While a lot of tips do indeed only apply to people on Wintel machines, there still remain a lot of Q&A; that can be useful to any Linux users, be it on a x86 or PPC platforms.

You can download the PDF file at:
http://www-106.ibm.com/developerworks/linux/library/l-faq/?t=gr

ResExcellence has posted a beginners tutorial on compiling the 2D drawing program QCad under PPC/Linux. The tutorial also covers the installation of tmake (required to build QCad).

On the Website http://perso.wanadoo.fr/levenez/unix/ you can look at a UNIX family tree in various formats. The various members of the UNIX family as well as their arrangements are represented. Starting with the first UNIX " UNICS " in 1969 up to today's successors, among them FreeBSD, NetBSD, Linux, Solaris, MkLinux, and naturally MacOS X, it is interesting to see, how the ancestors are related to MacOS X: MacOS X has, according to the family tree, items of Mach 3, FreeBSD 3.1, NetBSD 1.3, 4.4BSD Lite 2, Open Step and so on. Linux on the other side developed from Minix in 1991 and nowadays Linux and OS X are relatively far related.

Joshua Drake, current author of the Linux Networking HOWTO, Linux PPP HOWTO, and Linux Consultants HOWTO discusses his idea of the top 10 questions and answers for new Linux users.

Loki, a company which ports popular PC games to Linux, has filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection. This doesn't mean yet that they are going to disappear, but it's a very bad sign.
Loki also had ported some of the games to Linux/PPC. If they are to be out of business, it will be a big loss for the Linux gamer community.

Be, makers of BeOS, the alternative to PowerPC Linux and Mac OS closed it's doors today, and sold all it's assests to Palm. BeOS ran on PCI PowerMacs with a 601, 603 or 604 processor, and was later ported to the Intel Pentium processor. BeOS was famous for it's multimedia capcities, including preemtive multitasking, protected memory, and speed.

Ani Joshi is working on implementing PowerPC Linux support for the NVidia GeForce 2. He has gotten a native (ie. not offb) console driver for the NVidia GeForce 2 card to work at 640x480, and XFree86 4.1.0 to work at all depths and resolutions unaccelerated.

New Mac on Linux (version 0.6) is out, the site has been revamped and there are lots of useful instructions on it. New version includes autoloading of the Mac OS ROM, more supported Mac OS versions (9.1 & 9.2), improved startup script and man pages. Enjoy!

For the developers out there, DevX recently merged their own base of source code examples with the 27'000 entries of the SourceBank search engine.

Whenever you need some piece of code for your projects or are clueless about how to do something, this is a valuable place to check out.

Indexed are code snippets for C/C++, Java, Perl, PHP, ASP and others.

People are typically creatures of habit, who have a hard time with change, so they like to stay the same, and constant. But some of us really like to play with Window Managers. This week's poll is about how often do you change your Window Manager.

FreeBSD 5.0 has been delayed until Nov. '02 in order to provide more time to get the PowerPC (among other ports) up to sync, better SMP support and other reasons. Slashdot also has an article.

Jeramy Smith sent in some Linux World Expo pictures, for you to look at while PenguinPPC.org is down:

• Kevyn Shortell (former YDL employee, [email protected])
• Daniel Jacobowitz (Drow) in the middle, at the Debian booth.
• Mark Hatle, MkLinux/PPC Linux Developer Release point man.
• The infamous Gary "glibc 1.99" Thomas. (pic 1, pic 2)

penguinppc.org seems to be back online. However rsync and ftp are still down. According to their web site: Rsync and FTP services will be down until we find donors who can form new round robins for those. First and foremost we are looking for rsync mirrors to join our rsync.penguinppc.org round robin. If you like the resources this site offers and feel compelled to join the effort, email [email protected]

Apple® announced today that they are cancelling the Paris Apple Expo in wake of the terrorist attacks on the US last week. You can read the official announcement here.

Earlier this morning Slashdot.org reported about this article from The Register. The article refers to a 64bit G5 processor that Motorola has finished developing. While it is likely that Motorola is working on a next generation processor, we think the timing and specfications are possibly inaccurate.We have contacted both Apple and Motorola and will post the official word as soon as we receive it. Until then, we recommend that you treat the G5 in the same class of rumor as the LCD based iMacs.

MaximumLinux.org recently posted a review of Mac-On-Linux on a PowerBook Ti running YDL.

Today IBM launched Regatta, a powerful UNIX server based on the Power4 (PowerPC) processor. This powerful system capable of running 64bit Linux applications goes head to head against Sun's Sun Fire 15k. The Regatta (or p690) is priced about half the price of the sun offering and of course is available with Linux. The p690 is scalable up to 32 processors and is capable of running 16 UNIX (AIX) or Linux partitions using LPAR support. You can read the press release here.

At 1pm EST today, IBM has planned a webcast so that we can all learn about Regatta, the fastest UNIX server IBM has ever built. The event will feature information and demonstrations of the Regatta's performance. You'll need either Real Player or Windows Media Player to view the webcast, and you will also require Macromedia Flash. To sign up for the webcast, click here.

Earlier this morning, TechTV's TechLive were discussing IBM's new server. You can listen to TechLive over the Internet or watch it (if your cable or satellite provider carries it). TechTV often repeat features, so keep an eye out for it later this afternoon and during TechTV News tonight. The feature included an interview with one of IBM's VPs regarding the new server platform.

The pseries 690 Model 681 starts at a modest US$450,000 for an 8-way, 8GB RAM and 2 18GB disks. According to IBM's sample US pricing, the mid-range units start at just over $1m and the high end units start at just over $2m. You can find out all about the product from IBM's pseries 690 product page. The units are scalable up to 32 processors, feature 16 internal drive bays, five media bays, and 20 64 bit PCI slots. The standard configuration uses 1.1GHz Power4 processors with 1x8-way MCM. The high performance computing models use 1.3GHz Power4 HPC microprocessors (2x4-way MCM). Two integrated Ultra3 SCSI controllers and serial ports. AIX 5L with unlimited user license is available or 64 bit Linux distributions through selected third parties. The system is expandable up to 256GB of RAM, up to 160 adapters and 96 internal drive bays. The system is capable of handling up to 4.6TB of storage space.

As you may already have noticed, after iMacLinux.net, iBookLinux.net has also changed design, to fit into the overall design of TuxPPC.

Feel free to click around the new site and bare with us if there are still a few small glitches. You will notice some new content, such as overall Linux information, up-to-date iBook hardware information, a nice iBook History page and above all a complete iBook Linux Install Guide.

Most of you will most probably miss the Question and Answer (Q&A;) section. Don't bother, it will be replaced shortly by our all new forums.

In the meantime, you can still access the old site at http://www.ibooklinux.net/php/ibooklinux.php3 and the Q&A; at http://www.ibooklinux.net/php/ibooklinux_faq.php3

We are pleased to announce that we are now officially mirroring the Linux Documentation Project locally. We are updating daily, and you can access the local mirror by going to http://ldp.tuxppc.org. The LDP contains lots of useful guides and howtos that are mostly generic to Linux (including Linux on the PPC).

Transitive Technologies Ltd. is demonstrating their Dynamite "CPU morphing" software this week at the Microprocessor Forum in San Jose, CA. The technology enables code written for one type of CPU to run on another type of CPU without being recompiled.

On the demonstration, Linux binaries compiled for PPC have been executed on a 1.4 Ghz AMD CPU at the equivalent speed of a 1.2GHz PowerPC.

The question whether a program has been compiled for a specific CPU may have no relevance anymore in foreseeable future...

There is an article on slashdot.org today about an interview which Shawn King of The Mac Show Live, did with Apple co-founder and knowledge-omnivore Steve (The Woz) Wozniak. Shawn graciously agreed to post the interview, formerly Quicktime only but now as an MP3 file -- so now most anyone can listen. This is an interview worth listening to: Woz talks about his lifelong motivations, his years with Apple (up to the present), OS X, the Newton, and what the future holds for him. He also talks about building TV jammers and the only prank he got caught for in high school, one which might not fly so well right now.

IBM announced the 750FX PowerPC processor on the 10/17/2001 at the Microprocessor Forum in San Jose. The Processor will run between 700MHz and 1GHz, and will have a 512KB on-die L2 cache. Have a look at the PDF of the This is great news the iBook & iMac range of equipment.

There is a good article on maccentral which helps to explain the purpose of this new product from IBM.

Apple promised a revolutionary new device to be revealed to the public today. Rumours went into a lot of directions, from a PDA, over printers to all kinds of music devices and even a scooter...

A few days ago, at LinuxWorld there was an article on the Windows versus Unix debate.

The most interesting new feature in yaboot 1.3.5 is ext3 filesystem support. Besides, several improvements have been done to XFS and ReiserFS support.

Also available is now an excellent and detailed Yaboot HowTo by Chris Tillman.

PCWorld New Zealand has compared Windows XP to MacOSX and Linux with KDE2 GUI. Test points were Installation, Look and Feel, Usability, Features and Software support. Linux is doing pretty well, according to PCWorld author Juha Saarinen.

No, this time it's not a speed comparison. Jon Stokes has made an architectural comparison of both processor types. It gives an insight look on how the P4 and the G4 actually work and process data and instructions. The articles are not that easy to read for novice CPU people like me, but you certainly want to see for yourself. Read Part I and Part II.

The title may be a bit deceiving, actually we are not confronted to a game, but to an interesting editorial about the most popular Linux distributions.

British Linux users have begun to tell the wider world what they think about Microsoft's Windows XP. Their weapon: the spray can.

But go look for yourself. Fun, fun...

There has been a lot of talk about the ext3 filesystem, a promising replacement for the ext2 filesystem most people use in Linux nowadays. But what is it exactly, what's special about it and how does it work?

Find the answer here...

This may be of some interest to folks. Michael Meissner of RedHat has come up with a PowerPC simulator. This work has been folded into the Gnu gdb debugger.

LinuxFocus is a online Linux magazine run by volunteers. We mirror it as part of our Linux Documentation Project mirror. LinuxFocus is available in English, Dutch, French, German, Russian, Spanish and Turkish. With Arabic, Korean and Portuguese versions in the works. You can find LinuxFocus here. This months issue features Gimp: using mask layers, a guided tour of Linux in Unix Basics, Nessus security tool and many other great articles and tips.

The latest release of OpenOffice.org (build OO641B) for PPC Linux is now available! OpenOffice.org is based on the same source tree (with a few minor differences) as the upcoming StarOffice 6.0. It basically supplies an almost drop in replacement for Microsoft Office (and is getting better with every release).

The Bochs IA-32 Emulator Project unveiled a new version of the popular Bochs x86 PC emulator to the public today, improving on the stability and ground breaking improvements of Bochs 1.2.

Bochs 1.3 includes many major enhancements including a powerful menu-based configuration system and networking support for Linux and Windows NT/2000.

Debian Planet asks in it's current poll, what port of Debian do you use besides i386 regularly.

So far it appears that Sparc and PowerPC are neck and neck... if you use Debian PowerPC, get an account there, vote, and let the world know that the Debian PowerPC is your preferred platform for Linux.

Windowmaker which is a core component of GnuStep has released version 0.80. You can find the changelog here.

9am PST, San Francisco:

The keynote to the 2002 MacWorld Expo in SF has started right now.

We will cover the event live. A new iMac, new PowerMacs and some more surprises are expected.

Stay tuned...

For easyness, I'll post the happenings as they occur as comments to this topic, so click onto "more" and make sure to reload the page now and again...

The Apple site has been updated for the new products. Check on the pictures now :)

The folks over at Slashdot had someone at Macworld this year. You can find the photos they took here, and the article on slashdot here. If you want to jump right to the iMac photos click here, here and here.

Several firms downgraded Apple because they thought internet rumors of the flat panel imacs hurt current Apple sales as people would wait for the new machines. And once again, the power of internet rumors is vastly overrated. The sheets are in and Apple has profited as expected.

This article on slashdot yesterday mentioned a project to create a CompactFlash/IDE interface for the old Apple II series. The card is ProDOS 8 compatible and supports up to 64Mb. Their site now works again, so you can read about the project here. They need at least 10 orders to be able to produce and sell the boards, so if you want one, check out the site.

The 4.2.0 release of the XFree X Window System is officially available. Source code can be downloaded from the XFree FTP server or from any of the mirrors. Binaries or packages for PPC Linux are not available yet.

Full release notes can be found here and you may check the XFree website for more...

PenguinPPC has an article about new Open Source motherboards, called POP (PowerPC Open Platform), supporting PowerPC chipsets.

The boards seem to support most standard stuff such as AGP, PCI, IDE, but looking at the current price ($3,900), they are still beta stage... But who knows, maybe we can build cheap ATX PPC machines at low cost soon.

IBM's PowerPC Open Platform as a standard for making PowerPC-based mainboards has been around for a while, but not until recently, a company started marketing them. And: it has official PowerPC Linux kernel support!

I've never been to a Linux Expo before, and things are just ramping up here, but from what I can see the face of Linux has changed. I wandered the showfloor for a bit today as crews were setting up the displays, and the floor is definitely dominated by the "Big Guys", with Compaq, HP, IBM Intel, and Sun all putting together mammoth booths...(click more to continue)

Haven't really been to fully explore the show, but did take a couple of quick walkarounds and spotted some PPC stuff:

• WindowMaker has both an iMac and Ice iBook at their display.
• Hanson Office is showing a Mac OS/X version of their office suite. I asked the guy whether they planned to support Linux PPC, and he said "no, we only support Linux" - go figure.
• Had a quick talk with a fellow at Montavista, where they were showing a set-top box using a PowerPC processor.
• Also had a quick talk with the LTSP guys, asking them about PPC support. They have put the planning in place to support other arches, but lack the hardware. If I get the time, or if someone want's a nice little project, it shouldn't be too tough to port the stuff over and netboot a diskless iMac or Powerbook.

That's it for now, see you all later.

FVWM is an extremely powerful ICCCM-compliant multiple virtual desktop window manager for the X Window system.FVWM is intended to have a small memory footprint and a rich feature set, be extremely customizable and extendable. Full changelogs can be found within.

According to PenguinPPC, "Users of older Mac clones, PReP machines, and IBM equipment will be happy to hear that their PS2 mouse ports will work as automagically as USB and ADB mice in the future. This will make it easier for the distributors to support PS2 mice as the configuration is all done by the kernel. Mind you, this is in 2.5 so future does not mean next week. You will be able to go crazy on an old machine and use an ABD mouse, a PS2 mouse, and a USB mouse hooked up via a PCI card all at the same time without doing any configuration at all.".

Similiar to hotkeys or ikeyd, PBButtons 0.2 is a daemon to make the special hot keys such as volume or brightness up/down or the CD eject key on iBooks and PowerBooks usable.

A nifty feature this tool has over the other 2 I mentioned is the ability to display a small window with the current settings while using the keys, just like MacOS or MacOSX does.

The ikeyd daemon, which allows you to use the hotkeys of your iBook or PowerBook has been updated to version 0.5.7, fixing some bugs related to the Eject key. Full changelogs since version 0.5.5 can be found within.

Work on PBButtons seems to be pretty active, they have yet again released a new version of the useful tool. This release supports internationalization (i18n) with GNU gettext and an setup script was added which checks if necessary devices and directories exist and if normal users have the permission to use them. This release also fixes some problems with GCC optimizations and don't eat up all the CPU time anymore.

Today slashdot revealed apple.slashdot.org, looks like they are planning on posting regular Apple related news and articles.

Embedded Planet has chosen TimeSys Corporation as the exclusive provider of embedded Linux operating systems for its PowerPC-based single board computers. Embedded Planet is a provider of integrated platforms and services for rapid development and cost effective production of embedded and networking devices. TimeSys offers system architects a full set of Linux-based solutions for developing robust, cost-effective embedded systems. More info...

Salt Lake City, UT -- emWare, Inc. announced availability of its DeviceGate-E Embedded Gateway for the PowerPC platform. This latest addition to emWare's DeviceGate family of products is a very small, low-cost, and extremely flexible embedded gateway that offers OEMs (original equipment manufacturers) a production-level product for adding remote management capabilities to electronic devices. More info...

AbiWord is a free word processing program similar to Microsoft® Word. It is suitable for typing papers, letters, reports, memos, and so forth.

If you are looking for a full featured free word processor, give it a try. PPC .deb packages as well as sources are available. Full changelogs for the latest version can be found here.

The mixer code was completely reworked to solve some problems with iBook2 and TiBook sound hardware. Further was the program adopted to the latest PPC kernel changes: Since kernel version 2.4.18-rc2-benh PBButtons no longer needs a kernel patch for full funcionality. Get it here.

By Ani Joshi:

Below you will find test binaries for nVidia PowerPC Linux support. If the files are not present in the directory, please try again later as it may take some time for them to propogate throughout the mirrors.

Read on...

In this release the project was divided into a server (pbbuttonsd) and a client (gtkpbbuttons). A generic interface for clients was implemented so that third person client development would be possible.

A new release of the popular IM client gAIM which supports multiple protocols, including AIM, MSN, ICQ and Yahoo, is available.

From the changelogs: Oscar got a lot of great additions. It can do Screen Name formatting, it can save and store your buddy list on the server, it can do typing notifications in Direct Connections, and yes, it can receive IM Images! Sending images will be added in the next release. MSN and Yahoo! can do typing notification too.

An updates set of the Linux Man Pages (version 1.48) is available. Man pages belonging to programs are usually distributed together with those programs. Therefore, the Linux man-pages distribution mainly contains the pages for system calls and library routines, special devices, and file formats. However, it also contains documentation for a number of programs, in cases where the authors or maintainers of the program do not distribute man pages themselves.

There are now separate packages for client and server. The client is now able to play beeps during volume adjustment and gives low battery warnings, if triggered from the server. Get the new sources here.

PBButtons 0.4.2a fixes two bugs that appear when the program or the parent process, if started as daemon, exited. First it was returned an errorcode although there was no error (bad for scripting) and the second caused in worst case a segfault. Both programs, the client and the server had this problems.

RPM packages of PBButtons are available now too.

TimeSys Corporation today announced that it is broadening its support for PowerPC and MIPS architecture based processors with the release of two new board support packages (BSPs). One is for Force Computer's PowerCore-6750 VME board, based on the Motorola PowerPC 750 processor; the other supports Matsushita's Komatsu VR4122 Embedded Board, based on the NEC VR4122 processor which utilizes a MIPS processor core. More info...

OReilly NetWork: "Tired of putting up with Microsoft Word's bloated file size and price, but still need to deal with documents in Word format? Then you should take a serious look at AbiWord. This open source word processor is able to read and write most documents in Word's *.doc file format. (AbiWord does this by incorporating the wv library into its code.)"

This release dims the display and put the machine into sleep mode at the end if idle. It reads battery info now from /proc/pmu for compatibility issues. Further it includes several user wishes like separate enabling/disabling of single popup windows and the delayed eject key. It now sends error messages to SYSLOG if running as daemon.

Sounds like PBButtons is soon going to be the ideal daemon to finally bring us some nifty MacOS features Linux on PPC has been lacking so far.

Sunnyvale, CA -- MontaVista Software Inc. today announced that MontaVista Linux will support IBM's new 440GP PowerPC microprocessor , which has been developed for use in communications, networking, gaming, printers, storage and Internet appliances. IBM announced this new processor family last week at the Embedded Systems Conference in San Francisco. It is the first true Book E compliant integrated processor within the PowerPC family that will be available to customers.

As announced by Apple before the event, no new revolutionary hard or software was announced at the MacWorld Expo in Tokyo yesterday. However, it didn't go without any news either. Apple announced an enhanced version of the iPod with a 10Gb harddrive for $499, a new 23" Cinema Display and above all support for BlueTooth in future Mac products. They also announced a $49 USB-Bluetooth adapter. It looks like we can soon enable Bluetooth options in the PPC kernel...

A rather sad announcement was that Apple has seen itself forced to raise the price for the new G4 iMacs by $100 due to severe price changes with manufacturers, notably for RAM and the special glass used in the iMac G4 display.

A new release of AbiWord has been available for a few days now. AbiWord is an Open Source word processor which can open and save MS Word files and has a familiar user interface. Next to that, it is very fast and thus a great alternative to heavy office packages such as OpenOffice or KOffice. This new release closed a lot of bugs, completed RTF import/export, added new image handling facilities and has made AbiWord significantly faster.

OpenOffice is the Open Source project through which Sun Microsystems is releasing the technology for the popular StarOffice productivity suite. 641d is the final release before OpenOffice 1.0. It is stable and, by-and-large, bug-free... You can find release notes here. PPC binaries are not available yet.

Java2 1.3.1-02b-FCS for i386, PowerPC and Sparc is now available. Currently the SDK and the Runtime Environment are available as .tar.bz2 files and as Debian packages. This version includes the Java Plug-In for Netscape 4.x, Mozilla (>= 0.9.6) and browsers based on Mozilla code (for instance Galeon). It can be downloaded from one of these mirrors.

The latest release of OpenOffice.org (build 641d) for PPC Linux is now available in binary form. It should work fine on YellowDogLinux 2.0, 2.1, and 2.2, SuSE 7.3, MandrakeSoft 8.1, 8.2 Beta and Debian PPC. You can find the official announcement and download links here.

This release fixes a bug that disabled delta updates, some minor or platform-specific bugs for Solaris and OS X, and adds a few new minor features. You can find the change log here.

rsync is a powerful tool to keep files in local or remote directories in sync and was originally written by Paul Mackerras.

With this release of PBButtons you are now able to change the trackpad mode on the fly or put the machine to sleep on demand. Changing the display brightness and the volume level work in the well-established way. All functions are widely configurable through the new config file. Last but not least the power management functions were improved and some bugs were fixed.

AbiWord 0.99.5 is available. Changelogs for this release can be found here.

AbiWord is a free word processing program similar to Microsoft Word. It is suitable for typing papers, letters, reports, memos, and so forth.

For those surprised by the sudden appearance of new PPC distributions, more releases are on their way. Not all of them are completely new to the PPC platform. RockLinux are working on a new release which should support more PPC machines. Previous releases had been ported to IBM RS6000 machines.

TA-Linux are also working on a PPC release of their distribution. TA-Linux for once will aim at OldWorld Apple machines and not at the latest and greatest.

Finally, PLD Linux, a Polish distribution have also started porting their baby to PPC machines. It looks like we'll see some surprises over the next few months :)

Drobbins (CEO of Gentoo Technologies Inc.) created "official" gentooppc-dev and gentooppc-user mailinglists today on gentoo.org. He decided it would be best for Gentoo PPC to start merging gradually into x86.

You can subscribe to the new mailinglists on http://lists.gentoo.org/cgi-bin/listinfo

In this release a new configuration client was added. It could change some pbbuttonsd and system options during runtime, for eg. temporarily disabling sleep while compiling. Furthermore some bugs in battery functions and a bad habit in backlight control were fixed. Get it here.

For the Dutch readers out there, Jeroen Diederen has started editing what he claims to be the first Dutch site exclusively dedicated to Linux on Macs. His small but growing site, Linux op je Mac, offers News, Tips and a user Forum, all in Dutch. So, if you read Dutch, make sure to stop by.

Apple today released new machines, a new Titanium PowerBook and an educational version of the iMac called eMac.

The new Titanium comes with either a 667 or 800 Mhz G4, 1MB L3 cache, up to 1Ghz RAM, 15.2" display with 1280*854 resolution, 32MB ATI Mobility Radeon 7500, DVI video out, up to 60GB hard drive at 5400 rpm, a combo DVD/CDRW drive and 5hour battery capacity. It is available starting at $2,349.

The eMac is a variation of the old CRT iMacs. It has a 700Mhz G4, 128 or 512MB RAM, a 17" flat CRT display, a Geforce2 MX with 32 MB VRAM, a combo DVD/CDRW drive and starts at $1,249. The eMac is available to the educational market only. Update: It looks like there's a $999 CDROM model available too. Also, the prices seem to vary slightly from State to State.

More info on Apple.com

In this release PowerPrefs got some new options to configure. Configuration can now be saved. PBButtonsd got a new option which makes it possible to switch only the screen off instead of going into sleep mode. PBButtonsd also checks if the machine supports sleep. GTKPBButtons got a small bugfix. the new release can be downloaded here.

A LinuxDevices.com "Device Profile" takes a look at hippo's Internet Phone, which uses Embedded Linux as its internal software platform. The hippo Internet Phone's embedded computer is based a 48MHz Motorola MPC850/823 PowerPC system-on-chip processor with 16MB of DRAM, running an Embedded Linux operating system that was derived from MontaVista Software's Hard Hat Linux. Read on...

The 1U (1.75-inch) Xserve comes with your choice of one or two 1GHz PowerPC G4 processors running at speeds of up to 15 gigaflops, 2MB of dedicated L3 cache memory per processor with up to 4GB/s throughput, two full-length 64-bit, 66MHz PCI slots for up to 533MB/s throughput, and up to 2GB of DDR SRAM. Plus four drive bays holding up to 480GB of internal disk space using hot-plug Apple Drive Modules, FireWire, USB, dual Gigabit Ethernet, and the complete suite of robust, standards-based network services in Mac OS X Server.

Whether and how well it runs Linux is not known yet. More info on the Xserve can be found on Apple's site.

Xeasyconf is a utility to help generate a (reasonably) sane configuration for XF86Config (Xfree86 4.x only) on PPC boxen and made it's debut mere moments ago. Your mileage may vary with it, but hopefully it will prove to be a usefull tool. Get more info and download it here

LINDON, Utah, PARAISO, Brazil, NUREMBERG, Germany, and BRISBANE, Calif. - May 30, 2002 - Linux Industry leaders Caldera International, Inc. (Nasdaq: CALD), Conectiva S.A., SuSE Linux AG, and Turbolinux, Inc., today announced the organization of UnitedLinux, a new initiative that will streamline Linux development and certification around a global, uniform distribution of Linux designed for business.

You can read the press release here. According to SuSE sources, there will also be UnitedLinux support for IBM pSeries PPC Servers.