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.

Comments

Not for newbies

[jchristopher]

As a newbie, let me just say that if you are just getting started with Linux, PowerPPC is not the place to go. You should stick with x86.

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.

Re:Not for newbies

[lizrd]

Several people have made a point to strongly disagree with you here. I'm going to have to throw in my two cents in agreement. Not only is the installation more difficult on a PPC than it is on a x86 (given a newbie oriented distro anyway), but many features that Mac users might expect are going to be missing.

Despite the fact that the most popular PPC distros are Red Hat based and use rpm there are very few .ppc.rpm files avaliable on freshmeat. People with more *nix experience may prefer to compile and install themselves, but newbies almost certianly don't. Add to that the fact that anything that avaliable for Linux in binary only form (Loki games, browser plugins etc.) isn't avaliable for PPC and you leave the former Mac user with the impression that Linux is a very limited operating system.

Mandrake offers the most up to date PPC RPMs

[Curious__George]

If you are a linux on PPC user, you owe it to yourself to try Mandrake. When I'm looking for RPMs to install, one of the things that normally bums me out is that the ppc.rpms are WAY behind the i386-i586 rpms (in versions available). Check out the RPMFINDER database if you don't believe me. The most recent versions are almost ALWAYS available from the Mandrake/Cooker project. I think these guys deserve our support!

(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

Re:Mandrake offers the most up to date PPC RPMs

[kerrbear]

Linux is a great way to put older Mac Hardware to use!

Can I just say that it is also a great way to put *NEW* Mac Hardware to use. I installed LinuxPPC on my Titanium Powerbook G4 and it rocks. You wanna put Dell Notebook Linux users to shame. Show them how you can triple boot Mac OS 9, Mac OSX, and Linux on a Tibook (using yaboot). And how you can run Mac OS 9 in an X window using MacOnLinux and then bring up Virtual PC to run Windows. All that plus an awsome screen and formfactor makes for some jealous x86 users.

Well I guess I'll shut up now and wait for the mod down from the anti-PPC people.

Who cares? Intel is big enough.

[torpor]

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.

Depends on their expectations

[macdaddy]

That's odd. On my Old World Macs I did just insert the CD and boot. Simple really.

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.

Re:PPC Linux questions

[Noer]

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).

Re:Now if i only had a Mac (troll!)

[Laplace]

I own a Blue and White G3, and I prefer to run Linux on it. Why? I prefer to spend my money on things other than computers. I was given the G3, so I run Linux on it. It outperforms OS9 and OSX in almost every way. It runs quieter than any I86 box I've owned.

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 most important question: Firewire?

[torpor]

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...

Re:The most important question: Firewire?

[Jeffrey Baker]

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.

Re:Not for newbies (re installation)

[Laplace]

It's not for newbies any more than Linux on I86 wasn't for newbies a year ago? Here are the steps for installing SuSE Linux PPC on a mac:

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.

Re:Geez, Mandrake over MAC OS X????

[Laplace]

I would buy a G4 cube on e-bay and slap linux on it. An inexpensive, small, quiet box would be perfect for my one bedroom apartment. And yes, I prefer Linux to OS X. I run both on my G3 (given to me, so it cost nothing) right now, and spend 95% of my time in Linux.

I wonder...

[jallen02]

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

Re:I wonder...

[krmt]

I disagree with this. While OSX has plenty of people excited, and does have the cool factor, you talk to anyone using it and you'll find battlescars. No one is wholly pleased with the product (including me), and while it is good and exciting, the bugs do hurt. A lot.

Linux also has problems, and they're very different than the ones in OSX. I can't do a single click program install in linux the way I can in OSX, but my floppy drive has no problems (a real OSX problem for my work.) This is to say that neither OS is perfect at all, and both could use improvement.

But to say people aren't excited about linux and are excited by OSX is a load of garbage. When I show people Linux it definitely scores cool points with them. More so than OSX, which has been running really slow on our legacy iMacs.

Despite the appearance of OSX and darwin, people keep using Linux, despite it's less simple and unified interface, because they have faith in it, same as you say about OSX users. More so than Apple, because many of us have been burned by Apple in the past and know that no one can screw us over in the Linux world.

I would disagree that OSX has the mindshare of everyone, because most every consumer who looks at it says "Cool, but it's not a PC, I can't run it, I'm not going to run it." You should see the problems we have trying to get people to use one of the three iMacs with OSX rather than the one PC here. It may be pretty, and it may have some good stuff under the hood, but it's not in the mindshare of "most everyone" any more than Linux is.

All in all, I think people are as excited about Linux as they are about OSX. While they may focus on doing different things well, if all you're judging on is "OSX looks cool" then you're not really measuring the level of excitement for linux. Just look at the posts on /. for the excitement over KDE 2.2, or the new kernel releases for example. This stuff is exciting, and the people who know about it are just as excited by linux developments as are Mac people by OSX developments.

Apple has done a really good job on OSX, and I'm looking forward to it getting much better, but to say it's generating excitement where linux is not is absurd. Linux has developed so much in the past two years since I started using it, and it will develop even more in the coming years, and I guarantee as it lands on more and more machines you'll see the excitement build, hopefully in the mainstream as well.

Re:I wonder...

[ikekrull]

Could it be because MacOS X, as a desktop OS, is at least 5 years ahead of Linux in terms of providing casual users the software and feature support they need to do their jobs?
Personally, i use Mandrake 8.0RC1 on my iMac, since it only has 64MB of RAM and its 266MHz CPU won't drive OS X very well - however, the video acceleration in X is piss-poor, and the idea that this system would be installable (The Mandrake installer screwed up fairly badly when trying to partition my disk, and had to be repaired by using pdisk) by joe average is laughable.

The idea that Mandrake 8.0RC1 (maybe they have a new ati driver for X in 8.0 final) provides acceptable desktop performance on a Rev. A iMac is also laughable.

Linux is great for people like me who are prepared to invest the time and effort to make it work for them, but theres no way 95% of the current Mac user base would want, need, or get excited about Linux because MacOS X is quite obviously a superior solution.

Re:I wonder...

[Noer]

Just to be fair, it's not all open source bits... the kernel is, but Apple's put a LOT of work into the graphics layer (Quartz) and Carbon, which is really an amazing piece of work. Then there's all the NeXT stuff - the Cocoa frameworks, and all that.

It's not as if OS X is JUST unix with a pretty window manager.

I have a PowerComputing PowerTower 166...

[cr0sh]

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)?

Re:Nice !

[connorbd]

Maybe, maybe not. But a quick glance through /. will tell you two things:

-/.ers love PPC hardware and would love to see more of it
-Not every Mac user is a six-colored-fire-breathing zealot. The ability to run something other than MacOS on Mac hardware is a selling point (a weak one, yes, but still a selling point).

On top of that, the PowerPC chips in theory are better than the Intel chips -- less power usage, more orthogonal instruction set, and a few other niceties. The only problem with them is Motorola.

/Brian

Re:this is great!

[connorbd]

Not everyone likes MacOS. Seems as though everyone (around here anyway ;-) ) likes Mac hardware, or the potential thereof. QED.

What we need is to get Linus using a G4 (yeah, right) and bury the hatchet with Paul Mackerras, and then convince someone, anyone, to start shipping commodity PPC mobos (doesn't have to be, probably shouldn't be, in fact, Apple).

/Brian

Hold on

[acomj]

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...

Steve Jobs

[acomj]

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.