By Renai LeMay, 9 March 2005 08:40
NEWS Linux creator Linus Torvalds said on Wednesday that he's now running an Apple Macintosh as his main desktop, mainly for work reasons, although partly simply because he's a self-described "technology whore".
Torvalds, who initially created Linux for the Intel x86 platform, revealed to the Linux Kernel Mailing List in February during a discussion on kernel size reduction that his main desktop machine no longer featured an x86 processor. Hence, Torvalds said, a patch specific to the x86 platform that he was submitting to the list for consideration was totally untested.
silicon.com's sister site ZDNet Australia was intrigued by this remark, and sought to question Torvalds on why the man who has single-handedly revolutionised the use of Unix on the x86 platform would move away from it, and where he had moved to.
Torvald's response came quickly and succinctly. "My main machine these days is a dual 2GHz G5 (aka PowerPC 970) - it's physically a regular Apple Mac, although it obviously only runs Linux, so I don't think you can call it a Mac any more ;)" he said.
"As to the why... Part of it is simply that I wanted to try something else, and I felt like there were enough people testing the x86 side that it certainly didn't need me. Part of it is that I personally believe there are two main architectures out there: Power and x86-64 are what I think are the two most relevant ones, and I decided that I had to at least check the other side of it out seriously if I really believed that," said Torvalds.
However the kernel guru stopped any potential accusations of favouritism in their tracks, saying: "And don't read anything really deep into that - Linux supports 20+ architectures, and the fact that I personally think that two of them are more likely to be the most relevant really doesn't mean all that much. It's just a personal quirk of mine."
But it turns out that the man who created a revolutionary operating system which he initially described as "just a hobby, won't be big and professional like GNU", is probably not all that different from any other technology enthusiast.
"Oh, and part of it is that I got the machine for free," said Torvalds, "I'm really a technology whore."
Renai LeMay writes for ZDNet Australia.
Comments
There are 11 comments. Join the discussion
1. anonymous
I thought the PowerMac G5 had nine different fans/cooling zones that required special software to control. Without this Apple software, all the fans turn on at full speed. No?
Is Linus really using Linux on a PowerMac with all the fans blasting?
Or is he testing out OS X?
2. James Katt
The problem of running another OS on a PowerMac G5 is that the OS has to control the numerous heat sensors which control the fans, otherwise the Mac defaults to running all of them at full power - a very loud experience indeed. This makes it more difficult to run a generic Linux on the Mac. I wonder which brand of Linux he is using.
3. anonymous
Yeah right! We all know that he's using MacOS X along with a Linux boot partition. Most likely spending all his time running MacOS X learning how to do UNIX right :-)
4. OS11
Linux on G5's was not working at the beginning. After a short time that issue was solved as Linux kernel developers could understand some specs of the thermal control system looking at the source code of Apple's Darwin operating system, that, as most of you already know, is open-source software.
http://penguinppc.org/ppc64/
5. Chad Williams
No problem at all! Yellow Dog Linux has fan control for the G5. I would guess that he is using this. Yellow Dog is the most popular PowerPC Linux solution.
6. Neal Jackson
And why not? The PowerPC platform has a very interesting future. If Linux fans curiosity is piqued the inexpensive Mac mini (which is silent) but bring your own Display and Keyboard wont suffer the possible power-management noise problems of a tower G5 machine. And the various PowerPC flavours of Linux running side by side with Mac OSX make for an incredibly interesting development machine. One for real tehno-whores
7. Simon Bazley
Linus is right of course about Processor Architecture. Even back in 1997 when I was studying it, it seemed clear to me that there are 2 possible futures in CPU design, large slow parallel type CPU's with lots of very simple arithmitic type things that can to DSP VERY fast (Philips used to make a trasducer based thing that could have 1024 transducers for real time FFT); and very fast, very wide traditional single threaded CPU's, probably based on serial buses.
RISC based PPC chips are a very young versions of the former and x86-64 is an adolesent version of the later.
I think the former has far more future, than the later, but Intel have a vested interest in big fast CPU's.
I'm with Linus, if someone gave me a decent PPC, I'd use it over x86 anyday.
Add to that, that Apple have made their OS Open, I think they need supporting far more than Intel/Microsoft for the moment (although they are far from Perfect).
8. anonymous
I also run GNU/Linux on a PowerPC box--actually, several of them. Not all of them are Apple PowerMacs, either; one of them is a Total Impact briQ. My favorite is the PMac G3 B&W upgraded to 1GHz and 1GB DRAM. The others--PMac 5200's and 5400's--are acting as X Terminals to a LTSP server.
I personally like the PowerPC architecture for its bang-per-watt ratio, thus I like IBM's continued support of it. However, I do *not* like Apple Computer, Inc. for their policies; they're just as bad as Microsoft. If you so much as upgrade your DRAM on a Mac Mini, you will automatically void your warranty. Apple loves to keep their hardware specs secret, which is one major reason why they have only 3% market share (MS, of course, is the other major reason). Open hardware specs are what made the IBM PC architecture so blasted successful.
Were Apple actually an ethical company, they'd have, for example, included OpenOffice.org with OS X instead of the ridiculous AppleWorks. I've used OO.o on Mac OS X; it's quite nice.
PowerPC, yes. Apple Computer, Inc.? No.
9. Ron Nath
As harsh as the last post sounds, I have to agree. I think the PPC is a great architecture but Apple is a rotten company (no pun intended). If they were only about selling hardware, they would have build OSX on top of a Linux kernel instead of Darwin. Their modus operandi is "all take and no give" ala the BSD license of Darwin. What I would really like to see is another vendor of PPC hardware besides Apple and IBM- perhaps Lenovo making PPC based laptops running Linux. Now that would be cool.
10. Richard E. Williams
Leave it to the rich ones to always get the FREE goodies.
11. Joe Whitehead
Now if only both the CPU _and_ the OS supported running apps designed for entirely different OSes at the same time just as if you were running the real OSes on a native CPU. Hardware emulation is the next big thing in CPU design I bet. Not just making a fast and simple CPU emulate a CPU but actually having hardware to do the translation in real time (like dynamic recompililation does for software emulators). The OSes are already being modified to handle other Operating System's applications with little or no change in code. If there was a mostly complete rewrite of the NT Win32 API and such for Linux and a Mac OS implemented in Linux Kernel space we'de all be a little happier (except Microsoft). :)
And yes, Apple sure knows how to make it's vendors and users mad with it's policies like a couple comments ago was said. I'd no more buy an Apple then I'd buy a HP or a IBM for mostly the same reasons - they want to control me too much. Then again I'm writing this on a Dell C400 laptop and it's not like laptops are open access! ;)