Mac Mania 2/MacMania 2.toast/Demo's/Tools&Utilities/PowerPC/PPC News 1054

Text File | 1994-05-26 | 1.6 KB | 33 lines | [TEXT/ttxt]

COMP SCIENCE STUDENTS PORTING FREEWARE UNIX TO THE POWER MAC

(May 13th) Two computer science students at Bowdoin College in
Brunswick, Maine, USA are porting the free Linux Unix clone to the
Power Macintosh. Linux is a Posix-type Unix, originally written for
386/486-based PCs by Swedish programmer Linus Torvalds with the
assistance of a loosely-knit team working across the Internet. It is
freely distributable under the same term as the GNU Unix.

Charlton Wilbur and Jem Lewis began laying plans to developing a
freeware Unix on the Power Macintosh platform in January and say that
they hope to have a stable kernel running on the Power Mac by the end
of August, together with the basic Unix utilities (cd, ls, cp, mv,
gcc, emacs, vi, and bash). Until then, they want to keep the project
tightly controlled, but once it is running relatively bug-free, they
say that it will be freely available for Alpha testing and for others
to help develop device drivers etc.

The new version of Linux for PowerPC cannot hope to be binary
compatible with Intel Linux, however the pair say that they are
striving to maintain source code compatibility between the two
versions, so that a small amount of source tweaking and a re-compile
is all that is necessary to run existing Linux applications. They say
that they are currently  beginning to do some of the kernel design
and coding, and are beginning to port gcc. In a posting to
comp.linux.announce they said that they would appreciate not being
innundated with e-mail requests at the moment.

We'll keep you posted on developments.

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