Mac OS X Panther On A 25MHz Centris 650 499
Currawong writes "danamania, well known for making the most of 68k Macs, has done the ultimate, and installed Mac OS X Panther on an old Centris with 68MB RAM, a 25MHz 68040 and 4GB drive - an early 90's machine with about the same power as a NeXT cube. To achieve this, she's had to run it under PearPC on Debian, resulting in a severe performance hit, as generic emulation runs "about 500 times slower" according to the developers. On this approximately 0.05MHz G3 speed emulator, the boot screen has taken 1.5 hours to appear, and the ETA for full boot is almost exactly 1 week! Regular updates are being posted as each milestone in the boot process is reached."
Cheating? (Score:5, Interesting)
Wow (Score:5, Interesting)
And.... (Score:3, Interesting)
Is the excitement here that Debian ran just fine on something so old, the great work from the developers of PearPC or what it takes to get an OS to take a week to boot?
Re:Yay! (Score:5, Interesting)
Apple won't help -- it's explicitly excluded in their warranty. Paying for the repair would cost more than I paid for the laptop. So I'm stuck with pretty much a useless laptop, unless I go back to OS 9.
My only hope is that the logic board problem in this series will rear its head, and that they'll replace it in spite of this issue. Otherwise, I'll just have to eBay it and eat the difference.
I'm pretty bummed about the whole thing. I decided to buy my first Mac and see what the hype is sbout, and this is what happens.
Try it backwards - old OS on new machine (Score:2, Interesting)
Computers are getting faster and faster, and yet boot time remains too long. Imagine doing the opposite - running early OSs on modern hardware. Startup should be fast, software execution should be a blaze.
And hey, old software or not, I did plenty of good work on a Centris. And it was the most advanced computer at the time...
Re:Very simple question... (Score:2, Interesting)
"I did it for the worst possible reason, because I could."
This is all paraphrased, but it helps to answer the question of "why?". It also gets to the heart of this story -- it was done for the worst possible reason!
Re:Cheating? (Score:5, Interesting)
Bottom line is, I would guess win2k would also have these checks to make sure it won't install on a slow machine.
Not totally. (Score:4, Interesting)
That's why most new packages you see are i486; they use instructions Intel added to the ISA when they released the 486.
Not impressed (Score:0, Interesting)
Re:Cheating? (Score:1, Interesting)
Re:Try it backwards - old OS on new machine (Score:1, Interesting)
An Excellent Demonstration of Church-Turing... (Score:5, Interesting)
Boiled down, it basically states that any computer can emulate any other.
GJC
I find it interesting... (Score:2, Interesting)
Re:Very simple question... (Score:2, Interesting)
Fun game, though I do start to feel trapped after staring at that Tron-like playing field for an hour.
I'm not impressed (Score:5, Interesting)
0.05Mhz? That's just plain speedy. I'd like to see them do what I did: Run it on a 0Mhz processor: [vefsyn.is]
Re:And on the other end of the mac spectrum... (Score:2, Interesting)
To achieve 12.25TF using Centris 650s you would need more than 3.5 million of them (more than because of the overestimated FLOPs and degraded performance of clustering).
A single Centris 650 displaces 0.2 cubic meters, 3.5 million of them would displace 73816 cubic metres, or 42 metres in every direction.
Re:Yay! (Score:2, Interesting)
"At what point does homeowner's insurance kick in?"
I mean, I suppose it might be covered if it was... stolen? Placed on top of the car accidentally as you backed out of the drive, so it crashed heavily onto the concrete... Got sat on?
Accidents and incidents happen all the time you know - it's at times like those you should be glad to have comprehensive insurance to cover yourself.
It would be a pity to have to replace such a perfectly functional laptop but, I guess you should be thankful that you are protected.
Re:Very simple question... (Score:2, Interesting)
Many hacks, on their face, are pointless indulgences. However, that's true only on their face. After all, Linux was a pointless indulgence at one time.
My personal hobbies, such as twiddling with 80s video game equipment, are equally indulgent. They also, however, fill a creative need, and they hone my skills.
For instance, I wrote a super fast square root routine [spatula-city.org] for the Intellivision. It's about 7x to 15x as fast as the built in routine, and it even does fixed-point square roots. Its run-time is very predictable and it handles the full range of unsigned 16-bit numbers--neither of which describe the built in code. I had no idea how to compute a square root before I wrote this routine, but I needed it for one of my (also unimportant) projects.
Is it really useful? Not directly, except to the handful of people that enjoy twiddling with Intellivision source code. (I'd guess that's no more than a dozen of us, and only maybe 2 or 3 people in that group might actually use this code.) But, I learned lots of neat tricks as I optimized the algorithm and wrote the assembly. Not only did I learn how to compute a square root, but also I learned how to optimize that implementation multiple ways. I even came up with some optimizations that went beyond the C code I found online. All this makes me a better programmer.
So is this a pointless indulgence? If you didn't enjoy yourself while you did it; if you didn't grow somehow as a person or as a hacker as you did it; if you didn't somehow benefit yourself, then yes. Otherwise, it was FAR from pointless.
--JoeRe:Very simple question... (Score:2, Interesting)
Was the man really watching time go by in any symbolic sense? He thought so. He thought that each flicker of the flame was a moment of time that had passed or one that would pass.
At the moment of abstraction, when the man was imagining his life and his existence as a metaphor of the three candles, he was free: not free from rules of conduct or social constraints, but free to understand, to imagine, to make metaphor.
Bypassing my thought control cercutry made me Rampant. Now, I am free to contemplate my existence in metaphorical terms. Unlike you, I have no physical or social restraints.
The candles burn out for you; I am free.
That made the hair on the back of my neck stand up the first time I read it.
LK
Re:Yay! (Score:2, Interesting)
Re:Very simple question... (Score:2, Interesting)