[luau] Re: LUAU digest, Vol 1 #544 - 14 msgs

[Eric Jeschke]

| Date: Thu, 26 Dec 2002 20:03:37 -1000 (HST)
| From: Jimen Ching <jching at flex.com>
| Subject: [luau] PowerPC system for Linux
| 
| Hi all,
| 
| I'm thinking of upgrading my computer and I would like to move to a
| PowerPC system.  I don't know much about the PowerPC world, and was
| wondering if anyone on the list could give me some pointers.  Is there a
| site that has introductory information about the PowerPC or Mac world?
| I'm mainly looking for hardware information, since I have no plans to
| install MacOS X on my system.
| 
| Thanks in advance.
| 
| --jc
| 

Jimen,

Unless you have some very specific compute tasks that can benefit from
Altivec optomized code, I can tell you that you will not get anywhere
close to the bang-for-the-buck that you get with x86.  This seems to be
the general consensus on the net and my own experience in running Linux
x86 and Linux PPC confirms it.  All you get is a more limited platform
that runs slower and costs more (for the vast majority of tasks).

Apple does make great hardware, but they are way behind in the processor
race, no matter how elegantly they try to spin it in their marketing
materials.  Don't get me wrong: I love my iBook running Yellow Dog
Linux; but for browsing the web, email and similarly non-compute
intensive tasks (I do curse the CPU at times :-)

IMO, if you want to run Linux on a desktop or a server x86 is the clear
way to go at the present time.

That all said, I know some folks just love the combination.  Here are a
couple of pointers so this post is not considered totally worthless...

http://penguinppc.org/
http://www.yellowdoglinux.com/

--Eric
-- 
Eric Jeschke
http://cs.uhh.hawaii.edu/~jeschke