OS changes

Fink – Home

I am going from 3 OSes down to 2.

I punted NetBSD/macppc today. It was an experiment but it seems like it works for machines that are not too old (like my 1995 vintage 9500) or not too new (the newer Quicksilver machines, as well as the iBooks).

So I installed Darwin, the Aqua-less variant of OS X, on the 9500. It’s not officially supported but a little help from XPostFacto and it worked fine. It fits in less than 400 Mb of disk space, which is fine. I had to revisit the nightmare that is NetInfo (yet another system management innovation: perhaps a good idea in a large(r) or distributed environment, but overkill for home use and obscure as well) but survived.

Next up: I switch my laptop to FreeBSD. Perhaps next week. I think I’m pushing my luck to try it so close on the heels of the other changes.

Now fink is quite happily installing itself on the 9500. Goodness knows how long it will take to build XFree86 on that machine . . . . . I could just pull the packages from the other systems here. The beauty of standardized hardware: package systems actually work between machines.

If I ever find myself using Linux again, I will have to go with Debian after what I have seen of the dpkg tools on OS X. Not very elegant, but they work and that’s more than can be said of RPM.