Tread lightly on the things of earth

After a week off, I’m back in the saddle.

A gallstone tried to get the better of Steph on Monday, but rapid medical intervention stopped any of its fellows from repeating the performance. Laparoscopic surgery is amazing: four small holes—then no more gall bladder!

I spent the hospital room time configuring an install of Gentoo Linux/PowerPC on a TiBook/667. Takes a lot of dickering to get it like I want it. Then with an emerge mol command—and more dickering—I’ve got Mac OS X (OSX) running alongside Gentoo in Mac-on-Linux (MOL). Ctrl-Opt-F1, I’m at Gentoo’s first text console; Ctrl-Opt-F7, I’m in Gentoo’s X11; Ctrl-Opt-F8, I’m in full-screen OSX. Woo-hoo! Amazingly, I’m not noticing much performance degradation in OSX; it remains completely usable (once I got X11 and MOL video settings correct, that is).

Why run Mac OS X and Linux? After all, OSX is a full-blown Unix system; install fink and you can build nearly any Unix software you need. Yet I persist in wanting to run Linux, too. Here’s my starting list of reasons:

• Linux is leaner and somewhat faster than OSX on any given hardware
• Familiarity: I already run Linux (Debian) on most of the PC boxes I tend to
• I’ve been reading Richard Stallman’s collected essays (Free Software, Free Society) and am freshly aware how much I value the societal benefits of truly free software. (GNU/Linux, of course, is completely free—free beer and free speech—whereas OSX is half free, half nonfree.)
• I like fiddling with cool tool combos more than I like assessing the practicality of doing so :-)
• Because—thanks to the efforts of some of my free software heroes—I can

This Gentoo Linux/Mac OS X combo is seriously cool. But drat, I’m too [tired|lazy] to write up my current settings. That’s okay because Christophe and Nicolai have already done an excellent job. Thanks, guys.

(Why Gentoo Linux? Because I already know Debian GNU/Linux runs like a champ on PowerBook hardware; I’m a huge Debian i386/ppc fan. I’m interested in Gentoo’s build-everything-from-source nature because it reminds me of NetBSD, which I also inexplicably love. Since NetBSD doesn’t yet have many laptop power-management niceties AFAICT, Gentoo strikes me as kind of a cool Debian/NetBSD hybrid. And more ready for prime time than the real Debian GNU/NetBSD project.)