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Mandrake For PowerPC Is Coming

Posted by timothy on from the the-answer-is-*yes* dept.

Nikato Muirhead writes: "Need I say more?" and points to this page at LinuxToday which says that Mandrake is preparing a beta -- for PPC. Considering the price of a used-but-decent G3, this sounds fun to get in on. (E-mailing sympa@linux-mandrake.com with "SUB cooker-ppc" in the body will start you on the road to beta-testerhood.)

2 of 83 comments (clear)

  1. Although Mandrake is an excellent distro... by vorpal22 · · Score: 5

    I, like some of the other posters here, am an OS X user - in fact, when I heard about OS X Public Beta, despite being a poor university student, I was so excited that I specifically went on eBay and bought myself an older iMac, just to play around with it. The GUI is gorgeous, and I instantly fell in love. Wanna know why?

    I used to be a frothing at the mouth Linux advocate. I ran Linux exclusively (Mandrake 7.2, as a matter of fact - which I found to be an excellent distro) on my PC, and swore by it. However, after a year of running Linux, I constantly felt that I was always waging some kind of war against my computer. There was always sys admin to be done. And worst of all, so much time was spent configuring, and not enough being productive. For instance, say one day I want to change the theme of my entire desktop (and I'm running KDE, let's say). So I select a KDE/Qt theme, and all is well. But wait - I'm also running a few GNOME/GTK+ apps. This means that I've got to find a decent GTK+ theme, and find a way to change it - and the only ways I know of doing this are to edit .gtkrc, try to figure out the name of the GNOME configuration control tool, or load GNOME, which I don't particularly want to do. And then there's Netscape, and emacs, and xterm, which means editing .Xdefaults over and over and over (and over) again, until I find a color scheme that is acceptable.

    Anyways... I got sick of always battling my computer. I just wanted something that worked. Mac OS X works. You know what? I loved the Public Beta so much that I ran out and bought a new iMac the day that the final version was released. I installed it, and you know what? There was no fighting with sound, USB, etc... settings. Everything just worked. The OS X GUI is absolutely gorgeous. And after having installed XFree86 and XonX, With a couple keystrokes, I can switch my screen to an X server and run all my old, familiar Linux apps.

    Despite the fact that I absolutely loathe Microsoft operating systems, I must say that IE is the best web browser I've ever used, and Office is an excellent office suite. Guess what? Now that I run OS X, I can run both of them.

    Anyways... my biggest beef with Linux and *BSD is that the USB support is still not up to par. Due to the fact that I have a P3 and an iMac, and I switch between them frequently, I bought an excellent mac USB keyboard, a MS IntelliTrackBallthingy, and a USB hub. Thus, by flicking the switch on my hub, I can have the mouse and the keyboard active on whatever workstation strikes my fancy, right?

    Well, partially right... Certainly, if I'm running Windows, BeOS, QNX, or Solaris, then everything runs well, but if I'm running Linux or *BSD, it ain't gonna happen. On Linux, if I'm in an XFree86 session and I switch the USB switchbox to my mac and then back again, my trackball refuses to function. If I CTRL-ALT-F1 to console mode, then switch, then switch back, and CTRL-ALT-F7 to X mode, then about 75% of the time everything works as expected. The other 25% of the time, neither my mouse nor my keyboard is detected (at which point, they are never detected again). This means pressing the reset button and waiting for fscks. I wish that I could run FreeBSD on my P3, but BSD is even worse in this arena.

    A friend of mine put it well... (not to get flamed - this is the way I feel) - he said that Linux has the feeling of a big shareware project that never gets finished.

    So in conclusion... when I have a breathtakingly gorgeous OS that has the ability to run all the Linux apps (with the installation of an X server), and can run all the mainstream apps (such as MS, Adobe, etc... products), why would I even consider switching to Mandrake on my G3?

  2. That's right!!! by table+and+chair · · Score: 5



    If only Apple used standards like AGP, PCI, IDE, SCSI, USB, IEEE 1394... then we might be able to get somewhere with those crazy undocumented machines of theirs.