Slashdot Mirror
Mandrake Linux 8.0 Final Released For PPC
rstewart points to this press release, writing: "Mandrake has released version 8.0 final for the PPC architecture. Now Mac users have a choice of distributions between Mandrake and Yellow Dog. Now if only we could easily buy parts and build them cheap in our basements. " And PPC choices already include SuSE, LinuxPPC, Debian, NetBSD and more.
(Linux is a great way to put older Mac Hardware to use!) Mandrake offer's great online installation instructions, too! Also, check out the Mandrake Linux PPC 8.0 FAQ (it says "beta", but applies to the more recent releases, as well.)
Curious George
***General Consultant to the Human Race*** My opinions are free. You get what you pay for.
Well, the very slowest PPC made (601 at 60MHz, circa 1994) was still far faster than a pentium 60.
That machine won't run LinuxPPC though; a 100MHz 601 in a 7500 is probably the minimum.
That's about like a pentium 120.
What's the machine you're going to run it on? I think you'll be pleasantly surprised... a 300MHz G3 runs Linux quite fast... and that's basically an iMac. I'm not sure where it'd stack compared with a Sparc (which Sparc? Ultra-IIi 400MHz is one thing; an old Sparc Classic is quite another).
-- "Those who cast the votes decide nothing. Those who count the votes decide everything." -Joseph Stalin
Reformat your hard drive. You need an hfs partition (not hfs+) to install the boot loader on. This is a good place to put OS9 if you want to run Mac on Linux.
Install Linux. This includes setting up your swap, root, and other partitions.
Install yaboot (a lilo like program) onto the hfs partition. Configure yaboot. No worse than lilo
Set up the open firmware to boot lilo (not too hard), or set up the open firmware for dual boot. Dual booting is the hardest part, although there are some tools that automate the process. I dual boot so I can play with OS X. Mac on Linux meets all of my OS9 needs.
The distributions keep getting better and better. GCC is a general purpose compiler, so it generates general purpose (real slower) code on almost every platform. I've been using some flavor of PPC Linux for almost 2 years now, and find the platform to be very mature.
The middle mind speaks!
I've been experimenting with that lately, but it's still too early to ditch Linux entirely. For one, running X Windows apps in Darwin is a lot slower than in Linux, and rootless X is still buggy. Further, Linux is way ahead of OS X when it comes to the number of available ports. Also, Linux is a lot more configurable. And finally, Linux supports "real" filesystems.
I don't think that is going to work. In the 2.4.9 kernel, inserting the ohci1394 module into the kernel has the effect of shutting down the machine. Apparently there is an adverse interaction between the 1349 code and the power management unit on the PowerBook. Therefore, you are not going to be able to use the FireWire port for anything significant until the 1394 drivers are cleaned up a bit. Give it a month, I'd guess, because there are very smart people actively hacking on this.
I've run LinuxPPC R4 on my beige G3 (266 MHz, 64 MB RAM) before, and was extremely impressed. It was highly responsive, and seemed quite capable of saturating my 100 Mbit Ethernet connection when I was testing. I will admit that I eventually removed it because I missed the Mac OS interface too much, (and am about ready to move to OS X, so probably won't go back to Linux on my Mac), but I have only good things to say about Linux's PPC performance.
This isn't your fault, it's the fault of marketing drones, but the PPC really isn't a RISC CPU. It does take some RISC concepts--for example, it has many registers (32x32bit integer and 32x64bit floating point registers on all PPC CPUs, and 32x128bit vector registers on the G4), all instructions are 32-bits in length, the chip was designed to enable things like OOO from the start, etc. However, the PowerPC actually has just about as many instructions as an Intel chip. In fact, IBM redefined RISC to mean "Reduced Instruction Set Cycles" when they decided they wanted to advertise the PPC as a RISC chip. (See http://www3.sk.sympatico.ca/jbayko/cpu.html#Sec5Pa rt3 for details.) (As an example, the G4's AltiVec unit adds 160 new instructions for SIMD ops. It's really hard to call the G4 a RISC chip anymore even if you do consider the G3 one.) So I wouldn't exactly group the SPARC, which last time I checked doesn't have a multiply instruction in its standard spec, with the G4, which has an instruction that means "add these eight integers to those eight and then multiply them all by this constant" as a standard opcode.)
I have been using linux on my Powerbook laptop for over a year. I have a website dedicated to getting Linux running on my particular laptop. I just recently nuked my old hacked LinuxPPC partition, and began to search for a replacement.
I first tried the beta of mandrake, and what i found was that despite its faults, it could shape up to be the easiest distro to set up on ppc processors. One item i found in the install that no other distro's included was the option to set and choose what keys you wanted to use to emulate the second and third buttons (e.g. f12, f13). And once it was installed, even though there were som rough edges, you could see the hard work the mandrake team went through. The one thing i find strange about the distro, is that all Drak* utilities are written for GTK, rather than QT, it just seems out of place in this kde centered distro.
now on to ydl 2.0. i was dissapointed in this release, because, i went through two installs (to see if i missed anything the first time round) and there was NO individual package selection. This is a big minus in my book. Plus after the system was up, even though this is subjective, it seemed much slower than my hand upgraded linuxppc distro. But, other than thos two faults, it is a good distro overall.
ok, on to suse. This mega distro with four cd's worth of stuff is a really good all inclusive distro. It had so many packages, everything you could want. I think this is a great power user's distro, because there are so many esoteric packages, and you can customize it all you want. The only item which can be considered a drawback, but i dont think so, is that the suse way of doing things is slightly different than the other rpm based distros. Its all up to personal preference.
Well, these are my short list of opinions on linux on PPC based machines, and if Mandrake fixed all the rough edges that were in their beta distro, it will IMHO be the best PPC distro out there.
Finaly something I know something about.
I've installed linux on PCs and macs. The 2 macs I've installed on are "old world" machines a starmax motorola clone and a 7200.
It was fairly easy and straightforward (the documentation could have been better though.....)
I used linuxPPC The one thing that helps on the ppc side is that most hardware is fairly standard and autodetected.
It works great.. I have a firewall/ip masq machine and a server...