Skip site navigation (1)Skip section navigation (2)
Date:      Fri, 11 Aug 2000 13:49:53 +0200 (CEST)
From:      Marc van Woerkom <marc.vanwoerkom@science-factory.com>
To:        katia16@hotmail.com
Cc:        freebsd-questions@FreeBSD.ORG
Subject:   Re: supported hardware
Message-ID:  <20000811114953.566D91EF1@nil.science-factory.com>
In-Reply-To: <F176iyAphwFutJLtosJ0000020d@hotmail.com> (katia16@hotmail.com)
References:   <F176iyAphwFutJLtosJ0000020d@hotmail.com>

next in thread | previous in thread | raw e-mail | index | archive | help
> Hi!  I'm going to be entering college this year and am investigating running 
> linux or unix on my laptop. 

Welcome to the club. :)


> I writing because I was hoping you could tell 
> me if my Macintosh PowerBook 5300ce could run FreeBSD or not.

That Powerbook's CPU type is PowerPC. 

So far FreeBSD runs on x86 and Alpha CPUs.
The Sparc port is not alive anymore.
I heard rumours about an upcoming  PPC port, but even if they are true that
will still take quite a while until the product is ready for general 
consumption.

Right now you could try NetBSD, this BSD has been ported to a huge
amount of platforms.

An interesting option would be to wait for Apple's upcoming Mac OS X.
It is kind of a mix of 

  Mach Kernel + FreeBSD parts + NetBSD parts + NeXT parts + Mac OS parts

Some portion of that system has been released under the name Darwin.

I am not sure if it has been released so far, but it might be
an interesting option as it might feature a nice compromise of UNIX and
Mac GUI, one that is likely be very well suited for your hardware.


> be a wise choice for an operating system, I don't plan on doing anything 
> fancy, just word processing and e-mail/web via ethernet.

To be honest, most operating systems allow that today, even cr*p like
Win95.

I don't know what subjects you will study, but if you plan to do anything
technical, open source systems like BSD or Linux will allow you to learn
a lot about computers, if you like. 

Regards,
Marc


To Unsubscribe: send mail to majordomo@FreeBSD.org
with "unsubscribe freebsd-questions" in the body of the message




Want to link to this message? Use this URL: <https://mail-archive.FreeBSD.org/cgi/mid.cgi?20000811114953.566D91EF1>