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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.
Seeing as Mandrake, LinuxPPC, YDL, and Black Lab are based on RedHat's packages and packaging system, where is RedHat in this area?
No one ever says, 'I can't read that ASCII E-mail you sent me.'
It's always nice to see distros that don't focus only on Intel processors.
Portability is one of the major strength of free software.
{{.sig}}
There are just too many flaky things needed on various systems... whereas with RedHat 7.1 it was boot off the cd and you're done.
I know someone will post about how the cds are bootable on Mac, too, and they are, but it just isn't the same. On the old world macs you have to make a fake system folder on a partition... it's a big old mess.
Newbies have enough to worry about without throwing PPC specific issues into the mix - if you have experience, however, PPC is a nice platform.
This signifies even more choice for the long stomped-upon Macintosh user. Apple makes a very good hardware platform for Linux, with its superior G4 processors.
Linux already has more market share than MacOS, but what a great victory it will be when Linux has more market share among Apple users than MacOS does!
Even Slashdot wants to hide some things
My iMac is blue, so I don't think Yellow Dog or Red Hat would work, what distribution is approved for blue iMacs?
Je t'aime Stéphanie
I'll be amused when enough people are using Linux on Mac hardware that they start to complain about not being able to buy a Mac without an OS.
This space for rent. All reasonable inquiries will be entertained at proprietors discretion.
(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.
For the sorts of battles that RedHat is off to fight, the Intel space is plenty big enough, and getting bigger by the day.
Regardless of whether or not RedHat is doing it, or YellowDog, or Mandrake, Linux itself is still being ported to yet another architecture.
That's good news, no matter how you look at it.
; -- the corruption of government starts with its secrets. a truly free people keep no secrets. --
I do agree that it may not be the easiest platform to start out on with Linux. It is much easier than Alpha or Sparc though; you've got to give it that. It's not terribly difficult to master. You just have to be Linux-competent enough to be able to compile your own software sometimes. You also have to understand that not everyone programs in a portable way. You also have to understand that PPC development is usually 2nd priority or lower for many developers. Not everyone understands this. Also not all hardware works in PPC Linux variants. That's a pain. Personally I have numerous PPC-based servers (pre-G3 Macs mainly) that run flawlessly with LinuxPPC. Then again I'm also not a newbie. :-) YDL and LPPC have made great strides towards making PPC Linux very user friendly, at least on default installations. They sure beat RedHat to the punch on that one.
I've used Linux on x86 for quite a long time, and it's great. I've also used Solaris and SPARCLinux on SPARC cpus for a while as well, and those both perform quite well. So my question is, do PPC's perform anywhere near the speed of SPARC processors? They are both RISC processors, so the general principles are the same. I've got a possible source for a PPC machine, and was planning on using it solely for PPC Linux. I just wanted to know what I should expect. Which processor is the slowest you'd want to use a GUI with, things like that. I just don't want to waste my time putting PPC Linux on a Mac that's the equivalent of a 286, since that wouldn't be usable to me.
I mean, all the hard work is done by IBM in
this document.
A free Open PowerPC Platform implementation using
parts that companies like Asus, Abit, etc. are able to obtain in large quantities. What is holding them back?
Thomas S. Iversen
Why would someone fork that much cash for a G4 system and then slap Linux on it? I can understand if you've got MAC OS 9 on there, but if it comes with MAC OS X, it doesn't make any sense.. it's like "Well, we got all these PowerPC's and RS/6000's with a specially designed operating system call AIX for the hardware, but we're going to slap Linux on there so's we can be cool."
My previous employers got all hot and bothered over buying the newest apple hardware. I wanted to get my job done, so I installed Linux on my G3 at work. It did everything that I needed it to do, and I was grateful to be able to run Linux without creating too many waves in the company.
People like you fascinate me. You recoil at anything that is different, or anything that challenges your rigid preconceived notions. Pull you head out of your ass and try to look at the good in the world once in a while.
The middle mind speaks!
Great that it's on PPC.
The next question: how well does it support firewire?
I mean, *REALLY* support it? Can I take my PB G4, get an external firewire drive, and boot straight from it into the Mandrake Linux kernel?
Coz my internal hard drive on this PBG4 is getting mighty tight: it's already got MacOS 9.1, and a Mac OS X 10.1 partition on it...
Firewire...
; -- the corruption of government starts with its secrets. a truly free people keep no secrets. --
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!
Hey! Wouldn't that be a cool idea for Apple and Victorinox to get together and offer a G4 Powerbook in the Swiss Army Red (replace the apple logo with the Swiss white cross?) Too cool. It would be a win/win for both companies!
I am a marketing GENIUS! hee hee!
Curious George
***General Consultant to the Human Race*** My opinions are free. You get what you pay for.
To myself mostly, and rather quietly usually, how Apple has created OS X and made it excite people so much more than Linux?
I look at Apple and the company they are. They are not special. They took existing software anyone in the world could have downloaded and turned it into something that has geeks and Mac enthusiasts alike excited.
What did they do with their operating system that is freely available that the Linux people have been trying so hard to do on the desktop and have yet to really come through like Apple has.
Surely the combined bulk of Linux developers is not less than the employees of Apple is it?
Apple has taken little open source pieces and parts and turned it into a truly interesting operating system that gets a "Cool factor" from most anyone I know that likes Macs.
Why can't Linux excite people so? Does the money make that much of a difference? Apple steps up and gets the word out using its standard marketing channels and creates a bonafide hype that people buy into, contrast to your average Linux story. Whats the give?
I know this will be seen as off-topic but I argue it is completely relevant to any PPC, or Linux distro. If only they could somehow capture what Apple has done with OS X. Anyway.. just my quiet musings.
None of OS X is perfect, it has bugs, but people do have faith in OS X and they keep on using it for the most part.
While OS X does not have the share of servers nor desktops and has not proven itself in either, it definitely has the mindshare of most everyone. WE all know about it and know its supposed to be the perfect blend of desktop ease of use and a # prompt to the underlying OS.
Just my thinking, I still don't have a good answer.
Jeremy
It's all about software. You can't run Microsoft Word or Photoshop under Linux. That's the problem. OS X supports all of the existing MacOS software, plus great Unix software like Apache. It's the best of both worlds.
From what I understand, there is something different between this box and others that won't allow me to install certain PPC distros. It currently has a SCSI 8gig HD and SCSI CD-ROM drive, plus 32 meg RAM. Currently it has OS/9 on it, and boots fine.
I want to drop a distro on it, but I am not sure which one would work. I don't want to spend money or time getting a distro if it won't work for me. Can anyone give me pointers on what distro I should use with this box, as well as how I should go about getting/buying the distro (ie, if I have to burn an ISO, can I do it on my SuSE box at home easily enough)?
Reason is the Path to God - Anon
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...
I think a lot of the mind share has to do with mr jobs.
Steve Jobs is a computer legend, no matter what you think of him personally he deserves a lot of credit for mainstreaming the gui/ mouse and pushing the computing envelope. ( a gui computer with 128k ram and no hard drive.... even today it seems somewhat amazing)
So when steve talks, lots of people take notice. I think alot of the hype around OS-X has less to do with what it is than what people expect the "next" (no pun intended) thing in os's to be, and steve is selling this future.
He's also captured the imagination of unix folks with open source underpinnings and the ability to run word and photoshop and grep / script at the same time. Its GCC based so expect a lot of that nice GNU software will run on OS-X in short order making it more powerful at little expense to apple.
We'll see how it works out. Can't hurt to have more unix boxen out there though, especially in schools.
What impetus do Mac users have to go Linux when Darwin BSD and MacOS X are so much better on a mac: better support, better optimized code, better applications and they fit the mac paradigms (single mouse, light administration and security, heavily wireless, heavily scsi and usb, form with function)? There are no applications for Linux that can't be compiled to a faster, better, prettier version on OSX or XFree86 on Darwin (if the "cost" of the $90 OSX upgrade is prohibitive; which, if you're a mac user, it isn't).
In the PC world, there's no OS like OSX -- a mainstream OS which runs a massive amount of tested Nth generation commercial software, a great load of new software, a host of free software and all based on a Unix kernel with a swift, powerful UI and no need to get under the hood. For the hackers in the world not satiated by OSX's many, many superior offerings, there's GNU Darwin. What good is Linux to these chaps? Mac users may have a small allegiance to the Penguin thanks to the great work done in mk linux back when the macos was still for the most part a slow buggy piece of shit (os 7.6), but we've surpassed you -- we already have unix on a desktop!
Hey freaks: now you're ju