To Stephen's credit, Apple will no longer support PowerPC chips (such as his G4) in the next operating system (Snow Leopard), so some sort of switchover will be necessary in order to maintain SOME sort of state-of-the-art software packaging for PPC-based Mac users in the near future. Also, it is important to note that Leopard on a G4 iBook would probably run disgustingly (read: unusably) slow unless the memory is upgraded: It shipped with 256MB of RAM (and that money would be better saved for a new computer), and Leopard (on my Macbook Pro) is currently using about 700MB for the operating system. Switching to linux and X-windows allows for an old system to be, in a word, functional. While I love MacOSX and use it on the computers of mine which can run it usefully (G5 tower, PowerBook G4 w/2GB of ram), I've been much happier with Linux on my older macs. The machine on my desk is a G4 iMac with 256MB of RAM which has no trouble fitting mixed models in R while I browse the web on Firefox 3 while the computer itself serves 80% of the Psychology Department's web surveys. Under Leopard, these programs would not even run simultaneously, let alone usably. Further, while some amount of hand-compiling is necessary (Debian Linux provides almost all of the software I would need), it's also quite helpful--using Simon Urbanek's R optimization flags for G5 and G4 (see https://stat.ethz.ch/pipermail/r-sig-mac/2005-February/001641.html ) and my own version of ATLAS, the performance of R on that machine is comparable to the unoptimized internal-BLAS no-effort-necessary .pkg from CRAN running on a G4 with 2GB of RAM and 1.5 times the processor speed under Leopard. Sure, it took a whole night to compile/optimize ATLAS and most of the next day to compile R with those flags, but to a grad student like myself, that's vastly superior to waiting twice as long for my analyses to run...or to the impossibly high cost of a new computer. --Adam
On Fri, 12 Sep 2008, Doran, Harold wrote:
Are you aware that a BSD unix OS runs on the mac already? -----Original Message----- From: r-help-bounces at r-project.org on behalf of Dr Eberhard W Lisse Sent: Fri 9/12/2008 4:38 PM To: stephen sefick Cc: R-help Mailing List; Dr Eberhard W Lisse Subject: Re: [R] Power PC with a linux distribution and R Yes, I'd install the OS X Leopard (10.5.4) distribution on it :-)-O el On 12 Sep 2008, at 22:30 , stephen sefick wrote:
This is an operating system question, but it is with the intent of using R on that operating system. I have an ibook G4 Power PC that I am going to install linux on. Is there a better, worse, or perhaps easier (I am a linux newby migrating from mac) distribution that I should look at. I appreciate your help. I didn't post this in the sig-mac because I don't know if it fits there better than anywhere else. thanks -- Stephen Sefick
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