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Several supported Linuxes run on Macs. Yellow Dog Linux 4.0 just shipped.

Ubuntu is shipping PPC in its upcoming 4.1 release, and has PPC ISOs as recent as last month.

Mandrake and Suse have downlevel versions for PPC.

For a more complete, albeit sometimes inaccurate, list of what Linuxes run on what hardware, visit Linux.org's distribution page.

Apple and IBM have been growing closer together, as a result of a) Apple using IBM's processors in their workstations, and b) IBM and Apple both rediscovering UNIX, esp the OSS kind.

Although IBM and Apple are just dating, I think that there are plans to have each other meet their parents. Doesn't it strike you as curious that IBM branded workstations a) ship with Windows, when IBM is pushing Linux and b) ship with a competitors CPU? Is it so curious that IBM might blush a little that OS X is non-windows and uses their own CPU?

Read through the Developer Site for Linux on POWER processors, and you'll find more than a few references to Yellow Dog Linux, which is Linux for PPC (particularly Macs) and even includes as a prize in a developer competition a new Apple G5 (with YDL pre-installed). Interesting that IBM doesn't see fit to award their own brand of personal computer, which I think underscores my point. Do they think that a G5 is somehow more desireable than a ThinkCentre?

And it's working on me: as a long time Apple tech supporter, I'm now in the position to recommend Windows PCs; and when I do, I rec IBMs. And not Dells.

Do yourself a favor, run Linux or get a Mac

Will it run YellowDog Linux? I'd believe it'd be a safe bet, considering IBM is sponsoring some power5 and G5 development contests on YellowDog's website. IBM and TerraSoft have had a fairly tight history as I recall.

But then again, what would be the point, as the system ships with Redhat or SUSE. YellowDog is based on Redhat. I'd pick Redhat given the choice, the support is better.

This wouldn't help the problem with a battery. Oh and the powerbook can run linux! http://www.yellowdoglinux.com/

I think you will find that linux can be real time.

For that matter, it can also be a dog, or a salad. :)

For us Linux users (who see no point in running OSX), it makes sense to get a laptop that just works(tm), and for that purpose Apple laptops tend to beat most of what the PC world puts out.

For an Apple-fan, it may not make sense to run Linux on an iBook, because the alternative is running OSX.

But for a Linux-fan, running Linux on an iBook makes sense because the alternative is a Dell.

For us Linux users (who see no point in running OSX), it makes sense to get a laptop that just works(tm), and for that purpose Apple laptops tend to beat most of what the PC world puts out.

For an Apple-fan, it may not make sense to run Linux on an iBook, because the alternative is running OSX.

But for a Linux-fan, running Linux on an iBook makes sense because the alternative is a Dell.

YDL does not support the 17in powerbook Check it out Here

I think you'll find that the parent is talking about Yellow Dog Linux. Sorry if that wink meant you knew and were making a joke.

No, Linux works alright.

Running Linux on PPC isn't so hard as it used to be with distro's like Yellow Dog Linux and gentoo and such. But a couple years ago it took a lot of effort to setup, port and package together the applications and kernels that were readily available on x86.

I ran x86 linux for a long time, but turns out I didn't _really_ know anything until switching to PPC.

You can run different OSes on PPC hardware, incluiding the hardware sold by Apple. Such as Yellow Dog.

Although undoubtedly good machines.
Macs are very expensive.
Only the middle-upper class can afford those.
Whereas with some old PC, you still can get a perfect Linux OS to run - so that poor granny can do her emailing, listen to pirated mp3s or surf for porn.
Applications for Macs do *not* come cheap; hardware do *not* come cheap.

I don't think you can set up a computer school for the poor in Brazil, running some 10 or 20 Macs.

You can with Linux though.

And as for open source - Does Mac have a repository of free software? (it's a genuine question - not a rant). Being an open source advocate OS should mean at least I can type "apt-get" software (or similar) and get a Photoshop/Corel Draw or Maya alternative installed with no worries.

Writer blindness - yes - but many would envy you :)

I love my Linux, if I had a Mac I would still put Yellow Dog on it.

Here's a Screenshot of Mac-On-Linux which allows users of PPC enabled Linux Distros Yellow Dog Linux to run Mac OS on their computers. This ss shows a PPC Linux user with Mac OS open and Virtual PC running on it, and DOS running on Windows. Just add a few emus and you're all set.

Well, before you decide to sell your Mac, try Yellow Dog Linux on it. It is a Red Hat fork.

1. Is there an application that you just have to have that runs on one operating system?

If yes, you have no choice. Change your life or live with it.

2. Do you want to just use the computer or want to fool around with the internals?

If you just want to use it as a tool, go out and buy something from Apple. Yes, they are more expensive at first, but they last longer (unless you have a dual USB iBook, of course), are trivial to use, don't get viruses, look great, and you can always run Linux on them if you change your mind. The only drawback is the lack of a good, free office package: OpenOffice.org for OS X just isn't there yet, and it looks like we're going to have to wait at least a year. Apple should have addressed this problem earlier.

If you want to play around with the computer for its own sake, you want Linux. If you are buying a computer from scratch, still buy an Apple, because the hardware is great. Then, install either Gentoo or Yellow Dog. If you have a computer sitting around, just install Gentoo. You will learn all kinds of stuff, and the system will work like greased lightning.

Notice there is only one case where you might get Windows: If there is an application that you really, really need and that only runs with Windows. The chance of that is getting pretty small for normal people -- I have had lots of fun point out that OpenOffice.org can export directly to PDF whereas MS Office can't. And Firefox and Thunderbird are better already than anything that Microsoft or Apple can offer. In about a year...

Where do I begin ??

Here you go

Can somebody please benchmark a dual AMD opteron against a dual PPC 970 (MAC G5)

Not so fast, a significant problem in such a comparison is that gcc has *much* better support for x86-64 than it does for PPC64. If there was even a chance that a dual PPC970 machine was faster than a dual x86-64 machine, the likes of Yellow Dog, and Momentum Computer would have been all over it.

Sunny Dubey

That's true. The power management on PPC Linux for powerbooks works wonderfully. Probably because the power management for powerbooks is all the same.

...unless you happen to have a machine with Nvidia display adapter (try any 12" PBook), in which case the sleep won't work, as the kernel does not know how to wake up the display adapter from sleep.

See here.

(It also seems that the thermal management in 17" PBooks isn't supported at all, which is rather severe).

The only linux I've ever attempted to run in my own 12" (non-DVI) PBook has been Gentoo 2004.0 LiveCD, and it regularly hanged in the very beginning of init - no kernel panics, after loading up the kernel it just said that init is booting, and stopped right there.

That's true. The power management on PPC Linux for powerbooks works wonderfully. Probably because the power management for powerbooks is all the same.

...unless you happen to have a machine with Nvidia display adapter (try any 12" PBook), in which case the sleep won't work, as the kernel does not know how to wake up the display adapter from sleep.

See here.

(It also seems that the thermal management in 17" PBooks isn't supported at all, which is rather severe).

The only linux I've ever attempted to run in my own 12" (non-DVI) PBook has been Gentoo 2004.0 LiveCD, and it regularly hanged in the very beginning of init - no kernel panics, after loading up the kernel it just said that init is booting, and stopped right there.

Yellow Dog Linux compatibility with Apple laptops highly highly depends on which laptop you have. I had Yellow Dog on my 12" Powerbook, and it just wasn't usable. Why? Sleep didn't work, Airport Extreme didn't work, brightness control didn't work. You can get a list of what features work on what Apple powerbooks here.

If the Yellow Dog linux guys can't get these features working on some of the Powerbooks, I doubt anyone can ( and they do this for a living for shits sake)

If you are going to spend money on an Apple laptop, I would highly recommend using OS X. I like to think of it as the Ultimate Linux Distro.

There is no parallel to the seamless integration Apple has with their Operating System and hardware. Unless you buy an old school Apple laptop (i.e. one that doesn't support Quartz extreme and/or can't run OSX adequately), Linux is not a very intelligent choice. imo

Although I haven't used cygwin much, I would reckon that there is no comparison between OSX and Windows with Cygwin. From what I understand, Cygwin is somewhat of a Sub-environment on Windows and can not be made to act as the true "Windows CLI". The cli in OSX however can be used as an integral part of the OS, for system admin'ing (creating accounts, turning on/off services, changing passwords etc etc).

Has anyone tried running Yellow Dog Linux on a PowerBook?

I would be interested in hearing the performance and ease of use. I am particularly interested in the performance of the PowerPC chip and the integration of the hardware with the OS. In fact I would be interested in purchasing a Mac and wiping the OSX to run native Linux - can someone enlighten me on OSX; is it like running Cygwin on a PC?

The main reason towards my shift on the MAC hardware is the PowerPC chip, the keyboard lights discussed recently, Titanium/Magnesium Frame & shell, FireWire 800, the list goes on. What does other Slashdoters recommend on running Linux on a PowerPC architecture?

That won't happen. Apple sees Linux as a threat....

Forgive me if I'm wrong here. Reading http://www.yellowdoglinux.com/products/ or the link in the article:

'Y-HPC' -- Terra Soft's new 64-bit offering will be available pre-installed on Apple, IBM, and Momentum 970-based hardware, from the Terra Soft Store, and for download from the forthcoming YDL.net Professional account.
and

Built upon Yellow Dog Linux v3.0.1, a beta version of Y-HPC is now available for download via YDL.net Enhanced accounts, offering double-precision, 8GB memory addressing, 64-bit tool chain, and the 2.6 kernel.

The key bits being the references to YDL.net Enhanced & Professional accounts. Enhanced costs $85 which isn't completely free as in beer. Granted, that is cheaper (possibly quite a bit cheaper over time/multiple release??) than OS X. However, I don't think it's the cost factor that will be the major attraction. As you mention, some server apps may be faster on the G5/Linux platform rather than G5/OS X. When choosing between OS X & YDL for the desktop, I personally don't see the advantage for the mainstream user (i.e. the largest group of Mac users).

All that said, having this choice is a good thing and if I ever get a G5, I'll give it a go :)

Why is this important? Some of us really, really like Apple's hardware -- my iBook G4 was worth the money just because it is silent even under heavy loads, goes to sleep (and wakes) like a charm, and has a pretty impressive battery life compared to most x86 laptops. But OS X comes with a certain closed-system, choice-is-bad philosophy that just drives me nuts. Also, some of the programs included even in 10.3.3 are downright primitive -- Mail doesn't even have TLS in Panther -- and there is no cleanly integrated office package outside of MS Office.

This is where Linux (or dual-boot) comes in: Virtual screens, Kmail, OpenOffice 1.1 without having to boot a second window system, and if you still want to run OS X applications, well, you just do it from Linux with Mac-on-Linux. Hey, have your cake and eat it, too!

I can see lots of people moving to iBooks and PowerBooks and G5s -- heck, in that sense, I'm a switcher -- but keep in mind that just because there is a glowing Apple on the cover, it doesn't mean that there isn't a penguin on the inside. Mac OS X is good if you can stomach its closed-world, Steve-knows-best philosophy, but a lot of people will want the best of both worlds.

and a copy of yellow dog.

That's not too difficult.

I don't know, but it makes me wonder... IBM has always been Big Blue. Novell always used red (big red N, everything shipped in red, etc.) If you worked for any time in a Netware shop, you know what I mean. That seems destined to change, since Red and Linux is pretty much taken by Red Hat.

So with IBM throwing money at Novell, and Novell getting into Linux, will we now have a combination, like Purple Linux? Or will Novell stick with SuSE colors, and turn green? Or combine the two for... Yellow Linux? No, wait... that's too confusing with Yellow Dog Linux around.

Ok, maybe all three... Blue, Red, Green OMG! It's White Linux!!!

Interestingly, from SuSe's FAQ:

Will there be a PPC edition of SUSE Linux 9.0?

Answer: no.

Although Suse once had a PPC port, it is clearly stagnant; this investment from IBM very likely means that it'll be revived, but that'll take a least some doing. Yellow Dog Linux remains the best choice to run Linux on your Mac, apparently, even the one with an IBM processor.

Linux is great because it's free

There is a project to port Anaconda to Debian, but it's not the official installer.

Still, competition with Anaconda might be one of Novell's incentives.

Also, Yellow Dog Linux uses Anaconda.

Apple bad for Linux? Here's where you can find the most beautiful Linux box you could ever have hoped for. Cluster them if it makes you happy---it's supported. But you say Unix based operating systems are more scalable for clusters and render farms. What do you think Mac OS X/Darwin is? Do you want to look at the source? Try starting here.

What propaganda are you talking about, anyway? Are you a troll or could you really just be this stupid? The Virginia Tech cluster was not made at the prompting of Apple, but some researcher did his homework and decided to use it. They came up with something that worked better than anything for the money and also landed third place in the Top 500 honestly. That's not just marketing spiel. A third party decided to use Macs for their cluster, and a third party that ranks these things honestly gave the cluster a well deserved third place. Do you honestly think Apple has no right to use this fact to promote their product?

As for the media thing, I don't know how anyone could honestly argue that Linux is easier to use for photography and movies than the Mac with its native software. What FUD has Apple spread about Linux with respect to media? Why would they have to? In this area, they don't even need to so much as acknowledge the existence of Linux because the people using Linux for media would use it anyway and no one else would bother using Linux for that. Life's too short.

They don't make that much money on software. I don't have the reference handy, but because of Microsoft Office, to this day Microsoft makes more money per Mac sold than Apple does because the overhead of the hardware is much greater. But Microsoft Office helps them sell their machines so they're happy---they're not really competing with them, anyway. And if you write freeware that will help them sell their machines, they'll be happy with that, too. They are a hardware company, and they probably see the extra software you buy from them more as form of support rather than as a product like Microsoft or SCO does. Hardware companies do sell support; they even sell some software support.

It just doesn't sound to me like Linux has Steve Jobs shaking in his boots. He caters mostly to a niche market of people who want a box they can just turn on and use. This is something Linux could never be unless it was running a proprietary desktop. A usable GUI is something that needs research and that means a lot of money for that research. Programmers are technical people and very few know well how to design for the rest of the world. And the people at Apple are happy if people just buy their computers---they'll even license resellers who sell it with Linux on it.

And free software is not as big of a threat to Apple. As long as there is proprietary hardware to which to interface, there will always be proprietary software. Because Apple is mainly a hardware seller, they will always have control over their software that GPLed software can never have.

Furthermore, no matter how you may want to see it, Steve Jobs has and still puts a good deal of time and money into the Objective-C interface for gcc rather than having developed his own propietary compiler. You'll probably put your own spin on why he had to do that, but all spin aside, that's probably a hell of a lot more than you ever donated or ever will, for that matter.

But Linux runs just fine on PowerPC?

Look!. And here!.

Do they still develop for PPC? It seems like all we get is gentoo these days.

And Yellow Dog, and Debian, and Slackware, and Mandrake, and SuSE, and...

Ahh, poor Gentoo fanboys, their minds are so narrow. Go back to your silly portage, little boy.

Yellow Dog linux

well it will probably lack some of the chips and stuff to run OS X, but maybe Yellow Dog Linux will have a jump on turning these new Xboxs into something for more than games. They already have it running well on G5 Macs and their own hardware that uses 970 Chips (as well as G3 and G4 chips).

everyone knows Xbox and PS2 and all those game systems are sold at a loss, and they make up for it when users by software and maybe accessories. So the fact that someone will be selling hardware with a G5 for $600 won't matter too much. By the time the Xbox ships they may have 970/G5 chips in eMacs and they run about $1000 anyway.

Yeah, I used to run Yellow Dog Linux on PPC. What I mainly meant about Linux not being on Xbox2, was the comments about the ditching common components. If they resort to some proprietary flash mem bank instead of a HD or something weird, people are going to have to reverse engineer and write drivers, instead of just "finding" them.

Oops. Of course I meant:
- Yellow Dog

Last year, I bought an 8500 for $60 on ebay, loaded it up with cheap ram (check here) and thus began my adventure of endless tweaking of X mode lines, etc. :-) But seriously, it was fun.

Also, the yellowdog-general and yellowdog-newbie mailing lists are pretty newbie-friendly.

HTH

I've yet to see Debian or YDL support a new apple computer straight out of the gate. When they do support a new model, its most often in a crippled state. Like some posters here have mentioned, the nvidia Go line of graphics cards are barely supported and lack 2d and 3d acceleration. Other items still NOT supported are Bluetooth, Airport Extreme, and external video (on powerbooks). These features were all in the 12" powerbook that came out over 12 months ago!!! The powermac g5 support page just simply lists "No."

YDL hardware support page

Linux on ppc is just not worth it on a new machine. But on a positive note, by the time support is available, the computer will be too old to upgrade to the newest MacOS and will need the linux build.

Perhaps because it uses a video card which nVidia can't be bothered to support on PPC?
Cf.

• (lack of) linux support
• requests to nVidia
• (lack of) response from nVidia

My reasons to do this would be to access the wealth of software out there. Does OS-X have the ability to support gnome and/or Kde apps? I figure it can be done, but how much hassle would it be?

I have mod points right now, but I'll respond to this instead.

KDE and Gnome have been ported to run on MacOS X. Apple provides a version of XFree86, which is bundled with Panther, or a free download for Jaguar. X11 runs rootless, which means all of your X11 windows are mixed in with your normal OS X windows. KDE and Gnome have both been ported. KDE is a little farther along than Gnome, but both are available through Fink. Check to see which packages are available.

Also, with KDE, the Qt library has been made available under the GPL for MacOS X, just like on Linux. So KDE software can be ported to MacOS X native with much less hassle than before.

Apple also supports Linux on their computers. TerraSoft makes the Yellow Dog Linux distro. They are also an Apple Value Added Reseller, and they sell Macs with YDL preloaded without voiding the Apple warranty.

Yellow dog linux

try yellowdog linux; it may not be entirely up to date but it's mostly there. i regularly rebuild fedora source rpms to use on my ppc linux box and they also have a 64-bit version for the g5 ready.

Well maybe, if you consider Mac OS X a game ;-)

Seriously, I think you're way off. On ATI-equipped Macs, Mac-on-Linux is a great way to have both OS X and Linux available, so you can run those not so few applications that haven't yet been compiled natively -- without rebooting, and not so incidentally, get good access to HFS+ from ext2 and vice versa. But no dice on the 12" Powerbook, thanks to nVidia not compiling their drivers for the PowerPC.

Why?

Until they do, or until the tables are turned with Linux-on-Mac, we can't do this because essential laptop functions like sleep, video acceleration and dual display are poorly supported... I encourage people to bring up the issue at every opportunity with Apple, with nVidia, and maybe here.

See also, Yellow Dog Linux.

But Apple's AirPort Extreme WLAN cards aren't supported under Linux either, according to Yellow Dog's support. They neither support modem, bluetooth or external displays. Hell, they even don't support sleep, which kinda sucks in a laptop. At least most Centrino laptops probably support APM (and ACPI, if you can tune it to work).

I have an Apple 12" PowerBook. Never tried running Linux on it, though.