Linux on Mac Pro

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Level 1

84 points

Linux on Mac Pro

I have a budget to buy some computers for doing some solid state calculations (read compute intensive as opposed to I/O intensive). The software I plan to use utilizes MPI. I already have it running on my Mac Pro. I also have the need to run a package (CASTEP -- http://www.accelrys.com/products/mstudio/sysreqs.html) that runs under linux. The program "Materials Studio" has a windows only front end and will run the server bit under linux. I will run the front end via VMWare, but I would like to have the compute server running natively under linux for speed. Note that I already have CASTEP running under Turbo Linux without problem. CASTEP is very compute intensive so I doubt a virtual machine would be a good choice (it would be better to buy a special machine for this in the first place). What I would like to is to run 64 bit linux on it natively and run CASTEP on this. Thus I would like to buy three Mac Pros, configure each with 8 GB of memory, network them with either fiber or gigabit ethernet and use them in a network. Two of the machines would run MacOS (probably Leopard by the time I get them) and one would run linux. An important question is then -- what linux will run on the Mac Pro well? Of course I want 64 bits as well. Suggestions would be gratefully received. Thanks in advance.

2.3 GHz MacBook Pro and Quad MacPro, Mac OS X (10.4.10)

Posted on Sep 10, 2007 9:06 PM

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Answer 1

Kappy

Level 10

362,007 points

Sep 11, 2007 6:33 AM in response to Paul Fons

Why bother with Linux? OS X is Unix, and Leopard will be fully 64-bit capable.

Presently there is no Linux that can directly boot an Intel Mac. You can run them through VM Fusion or Parallels or do some major mods to get them to boot a Mac directly, but none of the available Linuxes can boot an EFI-based Mac.

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Answer 2

The hatter

Level 9

61,031 points

Sep 11, 2007 8:49 AM in response to Kappy

I KNOW Ubuntu DOES boot Intel Macs! (where do these rumors come from anyway?)

I've booted Suse 10.3 beta and waiting for the next 64-bit release of Ubuntu but I think the 32-bit version (7.04 "Feisty" perhaps?) should work. Check their forum.

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Answer 3

Kappy

Level 10

362,007 points

Sep 11, 2007 10:45 AM in response to The hatter

Not out of the box. I've tried it. You can boot the 'Try it' CD but once installed it will not directly boot an Intel Mac. You can perform mods and use rEFit to get it to boot, but not as it comes out of the box. They don't support the EFI bios of the Intel Macs - at least not two months ago.

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Answer 4

Sep 11, 2007 6:18 PM in response to Paul Fons

I've been running Gentoo on my Mac Pro for quite awhile. I have been extremely happy with it. When I first set it up, there was very little info on setting up linux on the Mac Pro. Besides Gentoo, Fedora will run on on the Mac Pro and so will Ubuntu. Ubuntu has a very active Linux on Intel Macs community. Their forums have been great. The only issue I had with setting up Gentoo was booting off of the cd. I had to boot off of a external usb drive to get it to work correctly. I believe the most recent version of the Gentoo installer doesn't have this issue.

My setup is a Mac Pro with Dual 3.0ghz dual cores, with 10gb of memory, dual raptor drives, dual wd7500aaks drives, and 4 GeForce 7300 cards with 8 monitors. I didn't want to bother with Bootcamp, so I installed rEFIt to handle the booting this way I can still use OS X...although the only times I have done that were to install the SMC Update and a couple of rEFIt updates.

As I remember, dealing with Apples Disk Utility was a nightmare. It was constantly crashing/locking up on me and never produced the same results across various runs. I had to use a 3rd party partitioning tool, but I can't remember which one. When I added the additional drives, I just used one of the command line partitioning tools under linux.

I have setup the 2 gigabit nics to be bonded for performance and failover.

I spent more time screwing around in OS X than I did to install and compile Gentoo with Gnome and lots of extras. The compiling really didn't take that long on the Mac Pro. I had a working system pretty quickly.

In the next few weeks I'll be getting an additional Mac Pro, but this time go octo...even though new Mac Pros are probably on the horizon.

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