[plug][ot] Getting linux running ona beige g3 mac

[Craig Ringer]

> All this mac talk got me thinking - has anyone managed to get a DVD
> running as their desktop wallpaper under either KDE or Gnome yet?

I have, but not under KDE or GNOME. Under IceWM with mplayer, I just did 
something like:

mplayer dvd://1 -loop -rootwin -fs

(I don't have the mplayer man page on hand, I'm at work - but the 
command is essentially that).

The trick with GNOME or KDE is that they have an app that AFAIK creates 
a full-screen bottom layer window /over/ the root window. So the DVD 
would play behind that and not be visible. Solution? Don't know - 
possibly convince the desktop environment not to manage the root window, 
or maybe just kill the relevant process.

Its certainly not smooth or easy, and sadly there's no true terminal 
transparency.

> Bah. Remove microsoft products from OS 9 and everything "Just works"

I have. No IE to be found, no other MS stuff ever installed. The closest 
to MS that's there is the MS Word 97 import XTension to QuarkXPress.

MacOS 9 + QuarkXPress + Suitcase (font manager) + Network == 
crashintosh, at least for us.

Its like wintel PC vendors saying "we don't support 3rd party products" 
- so if your PC crashes whenever you install /anything/ its not their 
problem, it runs windoze and solitaire OK.

I don't think Quark is exactly the best engineered software in the 
world, and the mac networking model is FUBAR (one mac crashes, they all 
hang until it comes back up if they're connected to it) but these 
machines crash 2 - 3 x daily. Opening a dodgy quark file or image can do 
it. The problem is that the entire OS crashes, instead of the app 
crashing out or reporting "internal error - couldn't open document".

Hence, crashintosh.

> Rekon I'd take a mac first, maybe not the LC3. One thing in apples favor
> has always been superior hardware, and having an integrated opengl
> desktop now... Its hard to go past.

Not to start a flamewar, but for FOUR GRAND - no monitor - you can build 
a pretty seriously superior PC. Start with dual Xeon and go upmarket 
from there. I find apple's hardware painfully limited and not really 
upgradeable (I'll just nip out for a new CPU... no, wait). The new G4s 
don't even have an internal 3 1/2" ATA bay (sorry, get an external - too 
bad). *sigh*. I think that MacOS X has a lot going for it, but the 
hardware - well, its vaguely decent quality I guess. Too bad its 
overpriced, largely non-upgradeable, and slow.

Imagine OSX on a dual Xeon with a gig of RAM, a SATA RAID controller w 
mirrored drives, and a Radeon 9700. You could (just) do that in four 
grand - and ooooh wouldn't it be nice. Alas, Apple makes their money 
from hardware sales, so it'll never happen.

Craig