MacShrine

MacTel-Linux has announced the achievement of a major milestone in their quest to port the open-source OS to Mactel hardware. Linux now boots on the new Intel 17″ iMac. Here’s what they had to say:

Using elilo and a modified Linux kernel, we can boot from a USB hard disk on the 17″ iMac. We are using the hacked vesafb driver to inherit the bootloader’s framebuffer, keyboard and a USB network card work. Gentoo runs and can compile the Linux kernel.

I suppose this deserves a “Congrats!”. I’d give it till the end of the year before we see full Linux compatibility on the whole MacTel line.

The efforts by the Windows community so far have proven to be useless, but that doesn’t mean “other” people have given up. The folks at Red Hat are already planning support for the new Mactels. They will work on a new boot loader that works with the new EFI BIOS on the Mactels. The only flaw in their plan though is that they don’t have any Mactels to test it on yet… On another note, other Linux users may be glad to hear that the KDE team plan to support the Mactel platform by providing libraries with their upcoming KDE 4 release. The power of open-source development, eh!