Subject: Re: YDL vs. MacOS X
From: Chris Ruprecht (chrup999@yahoo.com)
Date: Mon Jul 02 2001 - 09:12:48 MDT
Hi John,
well, I think since this is THE YDL discussion list, we should be able to
discuss this and other topics and don't feel bad about it.
I have to admit that I did not spend much time using OS X. I did install it
at one point but found out soon, that it was - in my opinion - the worst
UNIX implementation I had ever seen. Most of the problems, I think, were
related to the graphical desktop and it's need for huge amounts of memory. I
killed it when I noticed that it wants all of my 256 MB physical RAM plus
1.4 GB of swap space.
I did install the development package (gcc + company) but I didn't get to
actually using it. You might want to specify ppc-bsd-something as a machine
type to get g77 to build - this should be close enough. ppc-darwin or
ppc-macosx have little chances of getting recognized at this point, maybe
they add that in into the next release. Personally, I have written only one
Fortran program in my life - the first program I ever wrote on a mainframe -
back in 1979. All it did was to generate a Celsius/Fahrenheit conversion
table ;-).
As to external devices on a PB (G3/G4): AFAIK, neither USB nor FW devices
are supported at this point. This might come in a future release - I think
it _HAS_ to come, since this is the technology Apple is going and people
will have their 500GB disk arrays under their desks. How fast TerraSoft (or
some other volunteer who loves kernel hacking?) can come up with a solution
is something maybe Dan can answer. Dan? Right now, I have not been able to
find a good external FireWire drive. I had 2 Maxtor drives freak out on me
after 2 and 1 days (respectively) of usage. Luckily, my local computer shop
took them back and refunded me the money. What I found is that there are no
true FireWire drives out on the market today. All they are, are IDE drives
with a FireWire adaptor built into the case. This sort of defeats the
object - instead of getting your 400 MBit/sec (and soon 800 MBit/sec), all
you get is your normal IDE/EIDE speed. The maximum I got (while the Maxtor
drives were working) was 150 MBit/sec.
What about expansion bay drives though? I can plug a 48 GB drive in there in
my G3/Pismo - would that work at all?
Best regards,
Chris
----- Original Message -----
From: "John Klinck" <klinck@ccpo.odu.edu>
To: <yellowdog-general@lists.yellowdoglinux.com>
Sent: Monday, July 02, 2001 9:19 AM
Subject: Re: YDL vs. MacOS X
> Chris,
>
> Interesting point. I got macos x just for the reason that you mention:
a unix
> platform for a powerbook g4. After getting the software, I found that many
of
> the tools I wanted did not compile on os x. I have not tried them all, but
> enough things were missing that it is a problem. I read a number of home
pages
> for software to get hints, but there seem to be rather serious differences
> between MacOSX and most Linux distributions. The first release of os x is
> relatively new, so these problems may disappear soon.
>
> I had hoped for a fortran compiler. Yes, I use fortran and it is alive
in
> some science fields. Even f2c would have been helpful. All I could find
was an
> os 9 application. I saw some messages that GNU gcc does not compile with
the
> macos x version of gcc. I had hoped to get g77 running but did not try it
when
> I saw that gcc would not compile. Being new, this may be my lack of
experience
> with linux, but I have worked with sun's version of unix so I am not
entirely
> without experience.
>
> Other tools are octave (a matlab workalike), Generic Mapping Tools,
NCAR
> graphics and some ocean circulation models which use netCDF. Many of these
have
> fortran callable routines so installation requires some fortran. I tried
to run
> the configure script on GMT but it died at the beginning because host type
was
> not found.
>
> I thought about installing YDL on an external disk just to have access
to
> these tools until os x became more widely used. I did not want to run a
third os
> on the single internal disk but I did not know how to do this on an
external
> disk. Firewire and usb are apparently not recognized, and there is no scsi
port
> on the G4 powerbook. Does anyone know how to put YDL on an external disk
on the
> new powerbooks?
>
> Thanks in advance. Sorry if this is not the place for a YDL vs MacOS X
> discussion.
>
> John
>
> John M. Klinck
> Center for Coastal Physical Oceanography
> Department of Ocean, Earth and Atmospheric Sciences
> Old Dominion University
> Norfolk, Virginia 23529
> phone: 757 683-6005, fax: 757 683-5550 email: klinck@ccpo.odu.edu
>
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