Wednesday, January 11, 2006

Running Solaris 10 on Intel Macs (iMac or MacBook Pro)

Must be different or perverted thinking... when I saw the Intel based iMacs and the terribly named MacBook Pros out there, I had a sudden desire to browse for alternative laptops... with Xeon or Sparc inside. Then everything at Dell and around. Well - Sun's laptop running Solaris 10 costs $ 6,500 if I want it to be with 15" screen, and it is still only 80 GB for its hard drive (I want minimum 120 GB). Also, since I don't have to pay for Solaris 10 licence, $ 6,500 for a laptop is a bit much.

So, searched around, Fujitsu, Sony, Dell again, Sun... everything seems to sell with an operating system bundled. Dell would have had things that looked nice for the Solaris use (on laptop) but the principle turnaway for me -- all bundled with Windows XP. No thank you - since I will not want to use the laptop with XP, I do not want it installed there, and I do not want to pay for its license, as a principle. I want a laptop with Solaris. My different thinking now, after once migrating to OS X from Linux distros. I want back there, at least partially.

Since we will be getting one of those iNtelMacs .. well, iMacs with intel inside and thank god not with a sticker about that on the Mac, maybe we'll stick a 500 GB hard drive there, if there are any lying idle around (or get one spare of them from an XServe or XServe RAID) and I will rape it for a few partitions and operating systems. Very tempted.

So who would have thought? Getting a Mac, to run OS X -- and Solaris 10, and Debian, and any x86-based Linux distro there, and maybe even XP on it.

I have no clue where the idea for Solaris came now, but it just sounds like what I want to explore as for my use. Building programs for it from Linux sources does not look to be too complicated. I hope I will not have to touch the rpm files though (I admit, I am too spoiled in OS X for not needing to touch them any more).

2 Comments:

Blogger anna said...

Hi Craig :)

Feels sucky after one month I believe. But then Macs keep their value very well, so just enjoy your Mac.
Could you believe we can't install Aperture on our iMac G5? Uncracked Aperture that is... 400 GB hard drive as that could be changed, but still the Graphics card is not high enough for it...

Does the Mac make you happy? If so, then just enjoy :)

1:31 PM  
Blogger anna said...

You can definitely install Aperture on your system - it was only the first kind of iMac G5 where the graphics card was not enough. :)

Unix is definitely cool. Sinceworking on Macs for ages, I every now and hten missing building my own stuff, from source. So any Linux fills that need.

Thanks for all nice comments. :) I'll try to keep inspired to write a bit more often than have been able to recently. Working sometimes far too much...

11:06 AM  

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