Date: Thu, 13 Jul 2006 00:52:11 -0600 From: "Chad Leigh -- Shire.Net LLC" <chad@shire.net> To: Chuck Swiger <cswiger@mac.com> Cc: FreeBSD Questions <freebsd-questions@freebsd.org> Subject: Re: mac mini (intel)? Message-ID: <39940DB1-1FC9-488A-B5DA-9272228A8568@shire.net> In-Reply-To: <44B5E1B5.2010600@mac.com> References: <50F15D66-0E50-4EE8-BCEC-67688B08FBB2@shire.net> <44B5E1B5.2010600@mac.com>
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On Jul 13, 2006, at 12:01 AM, Chuck Swiger wrote: > Chad Leigh -- Shire.Net LLC wrote: >> A day or three ago someone posted about having 6.1-CURRENT (I >> believe) run on a MacBook laptop. >> Does anyone have it running on a Mac Mini (intel)? I might be >> interested in getting a couple to handle email services to nfs >> mounted mail stores. I like their small size and ability to stick >> several of them in my racks without really taking much room. (We >> are short of rack space at the moment for many new servers). > > Does FreeBSD 6.x actually boot on the hardware of these Macs yet? > (They're using EFI, not the classic PC BIOS.) With Boot Camp you have at least pieces of the PC BIOS in emulation. Anyway, someone posted to the list that they have it booting on a MacBook (or MacBook Pro, don't remember) and had mouse pad issues. That would indicate that at least someone has gotten it to work... > > Anyway, their size is nice, but both the PPC and Intel Minis use > rather pokey 5400 RPM laptop drives, so their I/O performance is > mediocre. They'd make better candidates for CPU/memory-bound tasks. yes and no. I have heard feedback from others that say that the SATA 2.5" drives in tge intel minis actually perform quite well and are light years ahead of the PPC minis. But in my case, the mail store is mounted with nfs and resides on a Solaris 10 machine with two RAID 6 on an Areca controller, mirrored together with ZFS. So the disk is only for the OS. > > Also, it's no fun at all to take them apart to swap in a new drive > or more memory. I have the tools :-) . Trip to Home Depot solved that issue. I actually have a Mini but it is in use as an OS X development machine to test the intel versions of some software so cannot be touched to test FBSD. It is not too hard to open once you know the secret (and are just futzing with RAM). Took me 5 minutes once I had researched it on the net. Chad > > -- > -Chuck --- Chad Leigh -- Shire.Net LLC Your Web App and Email hosting provider chad at shire.net
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