On Fri, 3 Jun 2005, F. Heitkamp wrote:
On Thu, 2 Jun 2005, vinai wrote:On Thu, 2 Jun 2005, F. Heitkamp wrote:Does Debian work with the accelerator boards for Macintosh computers? Has anyone tested or had experience/problems with any of them?It's not a matter of Debian working - it's whether the kernel supports them or not. For "newer macs" (i.e. anything with a built-in USB port), you should be able to use G4 upgrades just fine. The company making the upgrade card may have firmware updates for you to install, which may require you to run from OS X, but after that, you should be able to use them in linux without any problems.I have a "digital audio" G4 Mac with Dual 533 PPC 7410s. I was considering getting a dual 1.7GHz PowerLogix board. I say "considering" because I may just wait several months and get a G5.
I think these should work just fine. As to whether or not they're worth the $$ for the performance increase, that's something you need to figure out yourself for the jobs you want to do with this machine. Just as an example - if you're going to be doing something that throws around a lot of data, where memory bandwidth is key, you definitely want to save up $ for a G5. There are a few benchmarking tests available. They would be better able to help you make up your mind than anything else :) Also keep in mind, I think Powerlogix usually wants some software installed (either firmware updates or drivers for their cards), and that'll most likely require you to keep OS X around ... That being said, at work, I have a machine not too different from yours, a 667 G4. I'm also contemplating upgrading to dual 1.8 G4s and getting a slight nicer video card. It'll be cheaper than a G5, and that should more than give me the performance boost I'd need. cheers vinai