Why would anyone bother with Apple? [was: Re: [plug] SME PC hardware linux supplier?]

[Craig Ringer]

On Wed, 2004-11-10 at 08:28, James Devenish wrote:

> Last year I needed to find some no-cost hardware for a headless
> monitoring station (which also provides some lightweight failover
> services). By luck, I found an old Apple PowerMac 8500 (circa 1997)
> in a storeroom. Nice. Having struggled to learn x86 hardware in recent
> years, using the old 8500 was a breeze. For a start, Apple seemed to
> have provided plenty of power connectors, at least a couple of
> reasonably-long SCSI cables and with various drive bays and mounting
> positions, so it was a cinch to add more hard drives. Naturally, I was
> able to hook up external hard drives with ease. The case is also easy to
> open (no screws) and modules can swing out on hinges as necessary. I
> don't know how much it cost, and I don't know how many "gearheads"
> might or might not have been involved (if any).

I also liked the older Macintosh hardware, and my comments on this
thread when concerning build quality issues etc were intended to refer
strictly to the newer Macintosh hardware.

> Nevertheless, it has
> contrasted in every way with the "Comdek A/OPEN professional computer"
> that I'm sitting in front of at the moment, which cost $3500 in 2001.
> For $3500, the machine same with no IDE cables for expansion (or, if
> it did, it came with only one short cable), it has no connections for
> external drives (other than USB), it has hardly any spare internal power
> connectors

I find it somewhat amusing that the same thing could be written about a
G4, right down to the price tag (though the G4 did have FireWire).

>  and the drive bays that are so badly positioned (at least
> in comparison with cable length and motherboard connectors) that I
> eventually gave up with one of the drive and I just dangle it vertically
> (obviously I don't leave it powered on unsupervised in that state).

That, on the other hand, is some really sloppy design. Sadly, I find it
to be far from rare in PC cases.

> However, getting Debian installed and booting on the old Mac was a
> challenge because the machine does not use OpenFirmware. Nevertheless,
> partitioning drives with Apple and Sun hardware seems incredibly easy
> compared to x860: none of the "logical" versus "extended" versus "C
> drive must be *here*" nonsense imposed by Windows and Intel (I assume
> the limitations are not imposed by Linux itself).

On x86 I think Linux does impose the limitations, but not as strictly.
For example, I usually partition linux machines with no primary
partitions - just put everything in the extended partition table. I have
never had much luck getting DOS/Windows to cope with this scheme.

I fully agree with you that the x86 partition scheme is utterly
retarded. I hope that EFI will eliminate it, but sadly I doubt it.

Still, some of the other worst "features" of common x86 system
architecture are finally going the way of the dodo, such as IDE disks.
At least SATA does away with the awful master/slave BS, has a saner
cable length limit, and can support basic high-performance disk features
like TCQ properly. I was _not_ _happy_ when I saw Apple had adopted IDE
disks, though I understood why they did it.

--
Craig Ringer