MacOS 9, OS X And Linux On An iBook?

zoltanse asks: "As I am changing jobs, I have to return my company notebook, so it is time again to think about new hardware. Given the recent hype around OS X I am considering buying an iBook to give it a try. More important of course is my day-to-day productivity, so being able to run Linux is important, too. Does anyone have experience with this kind of setup? What are the pitfalls of running MacOS 9, OS X and Linux side by side on well equipped hardware? Is it possible at all, practical, or painful? What about the supported add-on hardware, like wireless LAN?"

Comments

Avoid the most recent models

[ebenson]

If you wish to run GNU/Linux on Apple hardware your better off staying away from the most recent machines, pretty much every time apple makes a revision on thier hardware it takes at least a couple months before the support makes its way into the kernel and stabalizes. If you find an older revision you will have alot better luck. However, do be sure to get the so called `Newworld' era machines, (pretty much anything 1999 and on) the `oldworld' (beige etc) hardware is much more difficult to run OSX on, and is much harder to boot GNU/Linux without MacOS.

As for running GNU/Linux, OSX and OS9, this is quite possible, you just need to think ahead when partitioning, `newworld' Apple hardware needs a small 800K "Apple_Bootstrap" partition to hold the yaboot bootloader. see my partitioning doc at http://penguinppc.org/usr/ybin/doc/ ; ; ; along with the yaboot-faq. my bootloader installer (ybin) also lets you create a boot menu for the 3 OSes.

For newwer (G4 era) Apple hardware the best kernel source tree to use would be Ben's: http://ppclinux.apple.com/~benh/

I recommend the Debian distribution for powerpc hardware, in my experience its the most complete and stable.

--
Ethan