Brian's Brain

Part 2 of an earlier-mentioned article series on "An embedded view of the Mac Mini" is out, and although it's got some interesting information, it's a comparative disappointment. Entitled "Free software on a cheap computer: Running Linux and BSD on the Mac Mini" it's little more than one man's ode to open source, with little practical relevance (an opinion with which many in the traditionally open-source-friendly Slashdot crowd surprisingly seem to agree). Why? OS X is already built on a FreeBSD Unix foundation. Much of the operating system is already available open-source. And the free Xcode developer toolset already exists, too.

Why struggle with the fact that, as the author says, "if you need all the hardware and options fully supported, these open source options won't do it for you", when you don't have to? The only other justification I can see for deleting OS X and going with an alternative Unix-based O/S on this PowerPC hardware is to obtain real-time capabilities, which remains a work-in-progress. And if all you want is low-cost hardware to develop Linux applications, you can certainly do better than a Mac Mini, especially if you find a computer without Windows preinstalled.

Readers, what am I overlooking? The author's originally stated intention for part 2, mentioned at the end of part 1, was "The next installment of this series looks closer at how Apple's development tools stack up to the actual work of developing a prototype embedded application. Users used to plotting out memory maps in detail and writing their own filesystem code will be a little shocked." Sounds a lot more interesting than what he ended up writing about.