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Antimatter
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 Posted: Thu Aug 17, 2006 6:45 pm Post subject: Gentoo & the Mac-Mini? |
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I'm consdering buying the Mac-Mini this fall around sept/oct to replace my aging 60 pound tower of doom, anyway the whole device is among some of the smallest computer I've ever seen that actually was more powerful than my tower of doom.
Anyway I'm wondering how good linux support is of all of the hardware included with the Mac-Mini, and if I'll run into any problem or what so not? I'm just wondering, because I probably will toy around with OS X a while, then end up going ahead and installing gentoo on it, because that's what I'm used to anyway.
So is there any pitfall or gotchas about using linux on the Mac-Mini?
Thanks. |
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chunderbunny
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| Posted: Thu Aug 17, 2006 8:35 pm Post subject: |
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I'm running Gentoo on a Mac Mini right now. If you dual boot with OSX (and therefore use Bootcamp) you will ahve very few problems, apart from only being able to allocate 2 partitions to Linux.
When using bootcamp the video works just fine with the i810 driver in xorg. Wifi works with madwifi-ng. Sound works with in-kernel alsa (although the alsa-driver package works slightly better). Ethernet is supported by the sky2 driver (in kernel). There is a patch available for the IR remote. I've not used Bluetooth and I've never tried to set up suspend to RAM but everything I do use seems to work just fine. |
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Antimatter
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| Posted: Thu Aug 17, 2006 10:09 pm Post subject: |
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| chunderbunny wrote: | I'm running Gentoo on a Mac Mini right now. If you dual boot with OSX (and therefore use Bootcamp) you will ahve very few problems, apart from only being able to allocate 2 partitions to Linux.
When using bootcamp the video works just fine with the i810 driver in xorg. Wifi works with madwifi-ng. Sound works with in-kernel alsa (although the alsa-driver package works slightly better). Ethernet is supported by the sky2 driver (in kernel). There is a patch available for the IR remote. I've not used Bluetooth and I've never tried to set up suspend to RAM but everything I do use seems to work just fine. |
How come you can only allocate 2 partition to linux? because of Bootcamp or? That maybe a problem, I can kind of get around that limitation by having /boot on its own partition then having the second partition be an EVMS volume, so i can have more virtual groups inside, but its ineffecent to have the swap partition in EVMS or LVM because of the additional layer between the hardware and the system.
The video is 3d accelerated right?
And everything else sounds great to me  the odds is I probably won't ever use the IR remote or Bluetooth, so that's no big worries there.
So hows the performance on that little guy? |
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chunderbunny
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| Posted: Fri Aug 18, 2006 4:30 pm Post subject: |
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Yeah, it's because of bootcamp. Basically the EFI firmware doesn't support extended partitions, but bootcamp uses BIOS emulation that doesn't support EFI partitions. Under the BIOS scheme you would normally have 4 primary partitions one of which is an extedned partition which contains many more partitions. The EFI part won't allow you to have the extended partitions so you are stuck with 4 partitions total. OSX takes up 2 partitions, leaving you with 2 partitions for linux. You can't remove the OSX partitions because they are needed for the bootloader to operate.
3D video acceleration works, but only if you use bootcamp. The video card needs access to the video BIOS in order to work properly, which is only available with bootcamp.
If you don't care about 3D acceleration then you can not bother with bootcamp and OSX and use the eLilo bootloader to boot linux directly from the EFI firmware. This means you can have as many partitions as EFI supports.
Having only two partitions is annoying, but not overly so. Personally I don't have seperate /boot partition, just partitions for / and /home. I have a 1GB RAM upgrade so I don't need any swap at all. |
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Antimatter
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| Posted: Fri Aug 18, 2006 6:10 pm Post subject: |
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| chunderbunny wrote: | Yeah, it's because of bootcamp. Basically the EFI firmware doesn't support extended partitions, but bootcamp uses BIOS emulation that doesn't support EFI partitions. Under the BIOS scheme you would normally have 4 primary partitions one of which is an extedned partition which contains many more partitions. The EFI part won't allow you to have the extended partitions so you are stuck with 4 partitions total. OSX takes up 2 partitions, leaving you with 2 partitions for linux. You can't remove the OSX partitions because they are needed for the bootloader to operate.
3D video acceleration works, but only if you use bootcamp. The video card needs access to the video BIOS in order to work properly, which is only available with bootcamp.
If you don't care about 3D acceleration then you can not bother with bootcamp and OSX and use the eLilo bootloader to boot linux directly from the EFI firmware. This means you can have as many partitions as EFI supports.
Having only two partitions is annoying, but not overly so. Personally I don't have seperate /boot partition, just partitions for / and /home. I have a 1GB RAM upgrade so I don't need any swap at all. |
Hmm, I probably will end up building myself a NAS which I'll export /usr/portage/diltfile, /home, and various other part of the file system over to that, so *shungs* Most of the time most of my work is done via LVM/EVMS, and I usually only have 3 partition most of the time, and on the swap, I suppose with 2 gig of ram, I can live without swap, and if I do need swap I can always create a temponary swap partition on my LVM, it'll be slower than normal but better than the system going down.
And how come 3D acceleration needs video BIOS, if it does then how the heck does it work in OSX then? |
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chunderbunny
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| Posted: Sat Aug 19, 2006 5:05 pm Post subject: |
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| The OSX video driver is better than the Linux one, it has the ability to change the video mode without the video BIOS. |
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