The Mental Militia Forums

Special Interest => Open Source Tech Gulch => Topic started by: Occupant No-name on January 08, 2006, 11:33:51 am

Title: G-5 & the Mac OS
Post by: Occupant No-name on January 08, 2006, 11:33:51 am

I was thinking of getting one.

Rather than have a new PC and installing XP and Mepis Linux the G-5 is an option. The only criticism of the G5 I could find on the Internet was that it overheats easily and it doesn't take floppies. I can work around these issues though.

The other thing is how about learning the Mac OS? I took a course at the local cc to learn linux, and Windows  I learned in HS and by using it. Is the Mac OS easy to learn or does it require a course?

I know apps and programs are limited, but this will be for my personal use as a word processor, information appliance, and for data storage so all the bells & whistles and etc are not an issue for me.

Title: Re: G-5 & the Mac OS
Post by: Bill St. Clair on January 08, 2006, 02:34:16 pm

If you're used to Windows, the Mac shouldn't be hard to learn. Only drawback from a Windows perspective is that it's a little harder to do things without the mouse. And it's BSD Unix underneath, so your Linux training will help should you decide to use the command line. Don't know why you'd need a G5, though. Unless you're doing extensive video or Photoshopping lots of images, a G4 machine should have plenty of horsepower for your needs. The Mac doesn't come with much in the way of word processing, but OpenOffice (also packaged as NeoOffice) works fine.

Title: Re: G-5 & the Mac OS
Post by: ZooT_aLLures on January 11, 2006, 12:15:22 am

If it's BSD underneath there should be NO shortage of sourcecode to build into almost any package anyone could want.....binaries might be a different story though.
BSD has a pretty complete set of "ports" too so most of the "popular" packages very well could already be ported over(from linux?), and binaries available........

Yeah I think Mac did themselves a world of good when they switched from their proprietary OS to unix......

Title: Re: G-5 & the Mac OS
Post by: linuxfan on January 18, 2006, 05:03:03 pm

I refer to OSX as Unix for Dummies, as in the For Dummies series of books, or to mean an easy transition to Unix. One thing you'll want to do so you can get bash, etc, is install fink, available from apple's website, so that way you can install the entire FreeBSD ports collection. or alternatively, most linux distros still support PPC and Macs