Subject: Mac-FreeBSD (do they mean us?) (fwd)
To: None <macbsd-general@NetBSD.ORG>
From: Juha Inkari <inkari@snakemail.hut.fi>
List: macbsd-general
Date: 11/07/1995 21:12:26
Forwarded message:
>From owner-freebsd-hackers@freefall.freebsd.org  Tue Nov  7 18:30:05 1995
Date: Tue, 7 Nov 1995 16:14:39 GMT
Message-Id: <199511071614.QAA19187@deputy.pavilion.co.uk>
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To: hackers@FreeBSD.org, ports@FreeBSD.org
From: aledm@pavilion.co.uk (Aled Morris)
Subject: Mac-FreeBSD (do they mean us?)

In this month's (Nov 95) issue of LAN Magazine ("Britain's number one
Networking Magazine") an EMAP publication, there are several questions
regarding Linux in the Unix Q&A section.  The one that caught my eye
went like this:

****

Q Will Linux be available for the Macintosh in the forseeable future?
  I'm a mac user and the only Unix around for the Mac platform seems
  to be A/UX, which is rather expensive and doesn't seem to have been
  updated for ages.  I have ssen a port of FreeBSD but it is far from
  complete, and I have read that A/UX is not to be developed any
  further.

A As well as not being developed any further, A/UX is effectively a dead
  product, though we have heard that Apple and IBM are clubbing together
  to get IBM's AIX running on the Power Macintosh platform.  We tried
  the FreeBSD UNIX that you mention; however we found that it's nothing
  like as nice as Linux, and it is pretty featureless (it also crashed
  many of the machines we tried it on after only a few minutes). The bad
  news is that the development of Linux for the Mac seems to have ground
  to a halt for whatever reason - probably because the system was written
  with the 80x86 architecture so much in mind and porting's proving hard.
  Best thing to do is to keep your eyes and ears open for the Apple/IBM
  effort - though beware, you'll probably find that after all this waiting
  you'll need a Power Mac to run it on.  Aside from this, however, I
  believe MachTen is about to appear in PowerPC-native form for the
  Macintosh.

****

This is so amazingly unhelpful and inaccurate that I can't believe someone
gets paid to write it.

Anyone want to write a followup?  The magazine can be contacted at:

        LAN Magazine
        EMAP Computing
        Greater London House
        Hampstead Road
        London NW1 7QZ
        England

        Fax: +44 171 383 5578

        Email: advisor.LAN@computing.emap.co.uk

Cheers

Aled
--
telephone +44 973 207987