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This article first appeared in the August 1998 issue of the Louisville Computer News. It was written by Lee Larson.
by Lee Larson (LeeMLarson@aol.com)
My friend Greg is a firm believer in the old saying "He who dies with the most toys wins!" Greg intends to win.
Greg's basement, which his wife calls "the Cyber Dungeon," is filled with an amazing variety of computers, both new and old. All day , he works as the administrator of a large network of Windows 95 and NT machines. The Cyber Dungeon has been declared a "Microsoft free zone."
Greg is a hacker, in the original, good, sense of the word. Nothing makes him happier than exploring the intricacies of his machines. Years ago, the first real hackers machine was the original Apple ][. Then the cheap PClones and the Amiga seemed to attract the tinkerers. Lately, there's no doubt the hackers are migrating to various flavors of Unix. Linux is the most common destination, but there are sizable islands of support for other flavors such as FreeBSD and NetBSD.
A couple of weeks ago, I was in the Cyber Dungeon with Greg and he brought up the article I wrote here last month about using a single machine as a gateway to the Internet for all the other machines on my home network. That article mentioned three Mac OS software solutions: IPNetRouter, SurfDoubler and Vicom Internet Gateway.
His acid comment was "Why don't you tell them how you really do it?"
He's right. My gateway to the Internet is an old Macintosh IIci running a Unix variant called NetBSD. This surprises many Unix hackers, who know nothing about Unix and the Macintosh.
Actually, Apple introduced a nice Unix, called A/UX, in the '80's as an alternative operating system for the original Mac II machines. A/UX was interesting because it ran a Mac OS 7 shell on top of a real Unix. This allowed it to run both Macintosh and Unix programs at the same time. The Mac operating system was integrated into the system so well that a normal Mac user couldn't easily tell whether the machine was running A/UX or Mac OS 7. Unfortunately, A/UX got only half-hearted support from Apple's management, and was always too expensive to be widely adopted. For a while, it was the operating system behind the Appleshare file servers, and that kept it alive. But, they never updated it for PowerPC compatibility, so it died when Apple abandoned the 68040 microprocessor.
It's interesting that Apple's management has come full circle on this issue. The so-called "modern operating systems," such as Rhapsody and Mac OS X, which Apple is planning to release very soon, are, at heart, new versions of the Mac OS integrated into Unix. To be more precise, when Apple bought NeXT for $400 million, what it really wanted was the operating system called NeXTStep, which is based on a Unix variant called Mach. Rhapsody and Mac OS X are the Mac OS running on top of a Mach kernel. One can only speculate how far along they'd be if the $400 million was sunk into A/UX development instead.
After Apple bought NeXT, different free versions of Unix for Mac hardware suddenly seemed to sprout up all over the place. The most important of these is MkLinux, developed and supported by a group inside Apple. MkLinux is based on a Mach kernel, as are the forthcoming Rhapsody and Mac OS X. MkLinux runs on almost all the PowerPC Macintoshes and clones, including several PowerBooks.
As is usual with Unix, the source code for MkLinux was made public. This finally showed many programmers the right way to access some of the proprietary hardware inside Macs, so other Mac versions of Unix quickly appeared.
An alternative to MkLinux is LinuxPPC, which is a more traditional version of Linux for the PowerPC processors. It has a normal Linux monolithic kernel instead of a small Mach kernel. LinuxPPC more limited hardware-wise, because it only runs on the PCI-based machines, but it does seem a bit faster than MkLinux on my PowerBase.
MkLinux and LinuxPPC are available on both CD-ROM and by anonymous ftp. There are very active mailing lists and informative web pages supporting both of them. Much more information about Linux on the PowerMacs can be found on the web at http://www.dartmouth.edu/~jonh/lppc-cache/1.html.
The older Macs have not been left out. The most mature of the free Unixes for the 68K Macs is NetBSD/Mac68K. This is what I've been running at home on an old Mac IIci. It runs on most of the Mac II series and the Quadras, with the notable exception of the IIfx. The free program IPnat turns it into a gateway to connect all my machines to the Internet. (The Linux equivalent would be Masquerade.) More information about NetBSD/Mac68K is available at the main NetBSD support site.
Closely related to NetBSD/Mac68K is OpenBSD/Mac68K. I've never actually seen this variant running, but all reports are that it runs on pretty much the same hardware as NetBSD/Mac68K, and even runs many of the same compiled programs. More information is at the main OpenBSD support site.
A newcomer is Linux/Mac68K, but this version is still in its infancy and doesn't support nearly as many machines, and is not nearly as solid. The Linux/Mac68K home page is at http://www.mac.linux-m68k.org/.
It should be mentioned that all these free Unix distributions for the Mac are not Mac OS, but are purely Unix. This means that when your machine is running any of these Unix operating systems, it can't run ordinary Mac programs. In fact, it won't work much like a Mac at all. The choice of user interface is either a text terminal window or a graphical X-windows environment. Neither of these is as self-explanatory or consistent as the standard Macintosh front end. Unix is filled with arcane commands and obscure configuration files, so it's a hacker's paradise. But, several of the standard features of Unix, such as protected memory, preemptive multitasking and advanced networking are the most needed additions for both Mac OS and Windows 98.
Apple released Disk First Aid 8.2. The purpose of this update seems mainly to support repairing volumes containing the new HFS+ file system introduced with Mac OS 8.1. In particular, it can repair some of the damage caused by using older hard drive utilities, such as Norton Utilities, on an HFS+ volume. It's also the first version of Disk First Aid that can fix the active startup drive. A nice touch is the new countdown timer, which makes it less of a mystery how long scanning and repair operations might take. Disk First Aid 8.2 can be found at http://swupdates.info.apple.com.
There is a problem with many of the original G3 Power Macs losing Appletalk services when over ethernet. A fix for this problem is contained in the G3 Ethernet 2.0.4 patch, which can be found at the URL given above.
Microsoft officially acknowledged and promised to fix a security problem in Word. The problem is that when a Word file is saved, some information from deleted files which used to occupy that section of the hard drive can become part of the file. The extraneous information will not show up in Word, but can be seen, if the file is examined with any plain text editor. The extra information will be copied along with any file that's emailed or copied to a floppy disk. A Microsoft spokesman said "We are aware of the issue concerning Word 98, and are investigating remedies. The problem is caused by the way Word 98 allocates space on a disk for file storage. The Mac OS-like many other OS file systems-does not erase files when you delete them, it simply removes a reference to them and marks the space they occupied as 'free.' Since Word 98 does not initialize disk space the Mac OS allocates for a File Save operation, a small amount of unused space in the file may contain random data from previously-deleted files." In the meantime, any Word file can be made secure by saving it to a freshly formatted floppy disk.
Sometimes perception versus reality in the press can really hit home. In the quarter just ended, Compaq lost 3.6 billion dollars. This is more than three times the total amount that Apple lost during the year they were getting pounded in the press. The usual press quote is that "excluding the price paid for the acquisition of Digital Computer Corporation, Compaq actually made 32 cents per share." Rarely was the same type of statement made about Apple while they were acquiring NeXT and Power Computing. By the way, Apple made 65 cents per share last quarter.
The August 24 meeting of the Louisville Computer Society will be a general question and answer free-for-all. Come one and all with your questions (and answers)! The Louisville Computer Society meets on the fourth Monday evening of every month at 7:00 PM in the East Government Center on Juneau Drive in Middletown. For more information, see their web site at http://www.aye.net/~lcs, or e-mail lcs@aye.net.
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