Two Shots In The Arm For PPC Linux

pinqkandi writes: "SuSE Linux 7.3 PowerPC Edition has now gone into distribution. New for this version are more USB drivers, and improved memory management, among other things. It is now based on Kernel 2.4.12 and glibc 2.2.4. For $79.95 you get it and 2000+ apps on 8 CDs, 550 pages of documentation, and 60 days of tech support." Read on for another nice turn for PPC users with an itch for Free software.

If updated PPC distributions interest you, this might too: DocTomoe writes: "The staff at iMacLinux have put together one of the largest PowerPC specific Linux resources. The new site called TuxPPC covers all PowerPC hardware. The site is aimed at not just people with Macs who want to try Linux, but at Linux users who might be interested in getting into the PowerPC platform."guides and web forums, too.

So when will Mandrake release 8.1 for PPC?

Comments

SuSE might be worth a try

[alfredo]

I am now struggling with Mandrake8.0, I might as well try SuSE again.

I had loads of trouble with Yast2, maybe the kinks are out of it by now.

Excellent news.

[A_Non_Moose]

I just might get it, and update it ASAP.

I just have to remember not to shut it down or unmount any drives.

(just kidding)

Honestly tho, MOL (mac on linux) sounds just like classic...or am I off base?

Re:Excellent news.

[Anonymous Coward]

MOL is more like VMWare, but is very similar to classic, yes.

Re:Excellent news.

[Anonymous Coward]

If you mean that classic mac is:

• multitasking
  
• multiuser
  
• a great network OS
  
• open source
  
• just really freakin cool
  

Then, I suppose that you are not totally off base. BTW, the MacOS TCP stack is udder crap. Thank god for MacOS X and it's BSD code.

Other Distros

[Jebediah21]

SuSE and Mandrake a very nice distros, but I would still like to see Slackware or Debian for PPC. There are a lot of older pre G3 Macs out there that aren't exactly speed machines by today's standards. Of course there is always BSD...

Re:Other Distros

[Carrot007]

is this a figment of my imagination then?

http://www.debian.org/ports/powerpc/

Carrot007.

Re:Other Distros

[macinslak]

Debian for PPC has been around for a while. Installation is not pleasant of course, but it does work quite nicely on my old 603/200.

Re:Other Distros

[alexandre]

Debian is available, i m running it right now on a TiBook and i must say i'm impressed.

All the hardware is supported, and i mean all!

USB mouse with wheel...
sound hardware..
DRI support..
(well cant try firewire but ... )

Re:Other Distros

[GiMP]

I have debian running on my G3 Pismo (firewire) powerbook. It is great! I also have a 7100/80 I just aquired and plan to install mkLinux on.

I wouldn't suggest anything but debian for any platform, except maybe slack.. but that doesn't run on PowerPC out of the box :)

And no, installation of debian onto a PowerPC machine wasn't any harder then installing onto an X86 box. I did have a little learning curve when I had to learn the differences between how bootloaders work on newer Macs and X86..

Newer Macs use OpenFirmware, x86 has a bios and boot records, other PowerPC machines use Prep or Chrp, etc.. But that is an expected pitfall when moving to any new platform.

Re:Other Distros

[Anonymous Coward]

For the record, you do not need to put mklinux on that 7100 of yours. The standard linuxppc kernel now supports NuBus macs. (link found on linuxppc.org) It may be a bit more work to get the NuBus version of the kernel to work with a known distribution (or maybe not, i wouldn't know how mainstream this is.. either way if you wait a couple months i'm sure one of the mainstream distributions will pick up the nubus support) but in the end i'm sure it would be worth it to be able to run an actively-being-updated kernel tree instead of the old, poorly-supported mklinux kernel. ( Plus you can run apt-get still ;) )

Just to let you know. Good luck!

Re:Other Distros

[GiMP]

Wow! Thanks. I saw no mention of this anywhere on the net.

Mod parent up :)

Re:Other Distros

[Anonymous Coward]

MkLinux is so out of date I don't think it would be worth it.

I believe LinuxPPC has made their stuff now backwards compatible with the old X100 series of PowerMacs. Don't know if other distributions have included the modifications to support this hardware.

Also consider your time. It may be cheaper to buy a top of the line G4 than it would be to install and support a 7100.

Re:Other Distros

[genericpenguin]

There is a Debian PPC port. Check out:

http://www.debian.org/ports/

BTW, I'm a Mandrake user. :)

I Need Windows XP!!

[Anonymous Coward]

Upgrade for $199.95 and get a couple of apps on 1 or 2 CDs, a couple of pages of documentation, and a few days of tech support!

1. Experience a old, complexdesign.

2. Experience low-class security.

3. Experience slow communications.

4. Experience the Remote Fisting.

5. Experience expert pain and jock support.

...or get Linux.

Try Yellowdog

[Improv]

I recently installed YDL 2.1 on my iBook. I've been overall pretty happy with the distribution. It has its high points (nice software included) and its low points (installer didn't install yaboot properly, I had to fix it myself). I'd recommend it to anyone wanting to run Linux on their Mac...

Re:Try Yellowdog

[joe52]

Does anyone have any experience with the different ditros available for PPC? I have an old 7600 with a G3 in it. I used to run LinuxPPC 2000 on it and I am looking to turn it into a Linux box again. I am planning on going with YDL 2.1, but am curious about other distributions.

-Joe

Re:Try Yellowdog

[rograndom]

(installer didn't install yaboot properly, I had to fix it myself). I'd recommend it to anyone wanting to run Linux on their Mac...

Well, except for people who who can't fix yaboot, right?

Re:Try Yellowdog

[Mr_Icon]

I'm typing this from a TiBook running YDL2.1. I've had a bit of trouble with it. For one, it didn't recognize the CD-ROM during install (but there is a hint on what to do about that at the ydl site).

Second, the trackpad didn't work after a wake-up it confused the vertical with horizontal and acted all jittery. Thankfully, I found a patch and managed to build a working pmud RPM with it.

Then, CD-ROM again -- it just didn't want to work in the IDE mode. Oddly, this got fixed when loading it as ide-scsi (had to MAKEDEV sr).

My biggest "aarhg!" was when I tried ext3 and after a couple of reboots I lost my partitions. Not sure whether it's their ext3 patches to blame, but it's my biggest suspicion so far.

One reinstall later and after deciding not to touch ext3 on this kernel any more (2.4.10 with a bunch of patches), I tackled the biggest problem -- they shipped it with Gnome 1.2.1! (I don't like KDE, oh, and the KDE 2.2.1 version they shipped has a broken soundserver on PPC. I think they knew that when they shipped it). So, I managed to rebuild most packages from the Ximian-gnome install that the Monkey-people have for YDL2.0. Some packages I had to borrow from Red Hat Linux SRPM's -- surprisingly most of them rebuild for PPC quite nicely.

So, after about a week of playing with it, I have a working Linux/Gnome install with the latest goodies from Ximian like Evo RC2... But, unless you're familiar with Linux and like hacking, don't try YDL 2.1 on TiBooks yet. It's... not polished to the stage where it's a reliable distro.

Can't say anything about SuSE -- haven't touched the stuff in about a year.

Re:Try Yellowdog

[Anonymous Coward]

For the same reason I don't believe in Jesus...It's bullshit.

Re:Try Yellowdog

[Improv]

Hehe. Yeah.
Actually, the thing it did was, yaboot needs a
HFS partition to install the bootloader on,
and their installer doesn't check to make sure
that that partition is formatted before it runs
ybin (yaboot installer) on it. ybin gives an
error, but the installer doesn't notice, and says
that everything is fine. Oh well. It might've had
to do with my making the partitions (but not
formatting them) in a previous install attempt,
instead of making them in that go.

Re:Try Yellowdog

[cloudmaster]

I'm going to agree with YDL being good. I've got 2.1 on a G4 with MOL doing the majority of our appletalk serving and the other network services running on the native linux side. It's really quite nice (MOL is amazing after dealing with VMWare on x86), and seems better put together than LinuxPPC's distro. I've never tried SuSE/Debian on PPC - they already run our x86's and variety makes life more entertaining. :)

Re:Try Yellowdog

[Anonymous Coward]

Fuck you. (Anonymous First Troll reply.)

Re:Try Yellowdog

[MaxVlast]

Have you thought about OS X? I'm working on installing it on my 7500.

Two shots in the ass

[Fecal Troll Matter]

When are you morons going to realize that Linux sucks?

Man, is this place dead?

[Anonymous Coward]

Or what? Somebody post a YRO!

YDL 2.1 Server

[CrazyBob]

I my e-mail, tomcat, ssh, and ftp servers using YellowDog on a headless G4 450. It is by far my favorite distro (including any for the i386).

Re:YDL 2.1 Server

[robvasquez]

I my e-mail, tomcat, ssh, and ftp servers using YellowDog on a headless G4 450. It is by far my favorite distro (including any for the i386).

"If you slice a donut in 3 parts, you'll enjoy it 3 times as much."

You're missing a VERB between I and MY. Also, you slice a donut INTO, not in 3 parts.

This post suffers from BAD GRAMMAR! MOD PARENT DOWN!

AS/400 (iSeries) Support Too !

[DigitalDreg]

Remember folks, this just isn't for Macs - it runs on big iron too!

For those of you who are utterly confused - this Suse distribution also runs on IBM's AS/400 (new name is iSeries). Yes, you too can have good old RPG (not "role playing game"!) and COBOL apps running side by side with Linux.

Re:AS/400 (iSeries) Support Too !

[ZeroData00]

You know you could run COBOL apps on your linux box.

Oh, yes, Linux features...

[Anonymous Coward]

1:A slow, unusable design..

2:Less bugs, because no one cares enough about it to use it or report bugs. Exceptions are when there are MAJOR root security compromises...

3:Experience no communication because the Linux community can't pull their heads out of their asses long enough to make a usable GUI interface for hardware setup.

4:Experience Local Fisting... REMOTE? You wish...

5:Experience the most expensive desktop support in the industry.

6:Experience belonging to a group of whiney bitches that blame all their failures on other companies and take no responsibility for their terrible business stategy and crappy coding.

Linux as a desktop OS is such a joke...

Linux without reformatting?

[Anonymous Coward]

In my opinion one of the biggest blocks to the installation of linux on any machine is that no one wants to do the reformatting that is usually necessary to create a linux partition.

On the PC platform this is made someone less of an issue becuase of PartitionMagic, and because some linux distributions (mandrake i know-- any others?) have begun distributing a stripped-down version of Partitionmagic with their distros for creating and destroying linux partitions without affecting anything else.

My question is this: What are mac users to do about thi? Are there any macintosh equivilents of PartitionMagic? If not, could anything (perhaps a petition) convince Alsoft to create one?

More importantly, though, is there any reason there couldn't be a fork or something of linux capable of just booting off of an hfs+ drive, so that rather than needing its own partition linux could just coexist with a mac os install on the same hard drive partition? I know someone is going to suggest that since hfs+ can't have coexisting files named 'copying' and 'COPYING' in the same directory, that linux will immediately burst into flames if altered to boot from hfs+, but mac os x is a UNIX and it seems to get by with booting off of hfs+ perfectly fine, which leads me to indicate hfs+ isn't too bad of a FS for unices.

I'm not even sure yet if hfs+ partitions can even be *mounted* from linux-- i see something on sourceforge about an hfs+ project for linux, but haven't tested this since i'm too much of a wuss to manually install a 2.4 kernel onto my debian/ppc install-- but does anyone see any real technical obstacles to making linux capable of booting from hfs+? I can see a set-up-to-be-used-by-an-idiot, simple-install distribution of linux with MOL nicely integrated being marketed to everyone with old, non-os-x-compatible macs (which is a lot of people) as a way to get a system where your apps crash but GAIM and Evolution keep running being very, very financially successful (at least if enough detail was paid to making sure the setup of the distribution vaguely followed the principle of least astonishment, and if you made sure to have the default of the system NOT boot into something with a windows-puke-green background and the KDE start bar, and if you marketed it right-- "just like os x, only without the ugly bubbly interface!" or something).

Any comments?

Re:Linux without reformatting?

[Anonymous Coward]

There is a partition magic like program for the Mac, it is called Hard Disk Toolkit, and it is produced by FWB Software.

OSX versus Linux

[Improv]

I suppose to some degree it's a matter of what I
want in a system. I'm a very Unixy person, and
have no non Unix software that I want to run.
All my boxes are Unix, and I don't mind compiling
my software. OSX doesn't really fit well into
my personal Unix life -- I'd only likely use
XFree86 on it, and so it all comes down to
if I prefer the NeXTStep/Darwin CL stuff or the
Linux CL stuff. Having used NeXTStep, I remember
that managing it from the commandline was a
bother. So, to sum it up, Linux is more of a
generic Unix than OSX is, it's easier to manage
remotely, it fits in more easily into a Unix
network, and it doesn't include anything like
Aqua that I can't easily disable and wouldn't use.
OSX is an admirable effort to bring Unix to the
masses, but I prefer a more Unixy system.

Re:OSX versus Linux

[NDPTAL85]

Mac OS X has come a long way since it was NextSTEP. You can install the Unix parts on its own (that would be just Darwin) and at http://fink.sourceforge.net there's a package manager for OS X/Darwin called Fink. It incorporates some Debian tools such as apt-get and dpkg to help you compile or install binaries, but in the oh so easy it downloads and automates the stuff for you. And since I log into my OS X box all the time I don't really know whats so much harder to manage about it that you seem to mention.

good documentation

[zonker]

hey, i'm always up for software that comes with a nice thick book filled with good documentation... that often can make the sale for me, not a stack of cdroms... =)

I bought this right away

[Vardamir]

Hehe, I needed a dedicated dialup router/gateway for my home network and when I saw SuSE released 7.3 for PowerPC I bought a Performa 6400/180 on Ebay the next day. When all shipping and handling for both items were taken into account, SuSE still costs more than the computer!, but it is well worth it. SuSE 7.3 is an awesome platform, especially mixed with PowerPC. I can't wait for the G5's to come out, but if anyone out there is lucky enough to already have PPC64 hardware check out www.linuxppc64.org.

lib's broken on YDL & maybe others

[johnjones]

hey

YDL worked pretty well the others(SUSE Mandrake ) didnt even boot on my brand spanking new iMac

the problem ?
they did not know what to do with a blank disk
(dumb but shows how much REAL testing they did)

my only complaint with YDL was the fact that libm was not actually where it should be

I was running specCPU2000 and it would not compile !

so I recomend that YDL at least put the link in (-;

cheers

john jones

Two shots in the ARM?

[Anonymous Coward]

Two shots in the ARM? I thought this was about PowerPC.....

PPC

[Elbereth]

Yeah, so where do I buy a PPC motherboard and CPU?

Re:PPC

[Anonymous Coward]

I think Apple sells them. They come with a lot of extra stuff, though.

Re:PPC

[Graymalkin]

That's so fucking funny. If I only had mod points...

Re:PPC

[jrockway]

Here or here

Re:PPC

[rograndom]

At the Apple Store. And you get a nice case, hd, dvd drive, or cd or dvd burner and a bunch of other nice stuff.

Re:PPC

[SuzanneA]

As others have suggested, there is apple :), but you also have a choice of a few Single Board Computer (SBC) vendors that sell PPC boards designed to run linux.

While a SBC doesn't seem a logical choice for a desktop, it does have some nice advantages. Most SBCs contain a fairly reasonable set of desktop-like components, such as 100baseT, 3d video, AC97 audio, etc.

An interesting thought is whether you could get a ETX/EBX format SBC card into the old shoebox size Sun cases. Though they would also fit into an external 5.25" SCSI enclosure with a little work, that would be fun too.

Re:PPC

[Pfhor]

Oh, you mean like a yellowdog BriQ.

http://www.terrasoftsolutions.com/products/briQ/

Re:PPC

[Alan Partridge]

There's also a small outfit called IMB or something that has some PPC gear...

Re:PPC

[Elbereth]

I think I'd rather buy a 64 bit DEC Alpha motherboard and CPU than spend $1000+ on an Apple system. Oh well.

Re:PPC

[Anonymous Coward]

Take a look at the 'news section' at the website of the german company bplan:
http://bplan-gmbh.de/news.html.
They have a new PPC Board coming soon, LinuxPPC is already running. They specs are good, a complete system should be available for 1000 Euro.

Re:PPC

[Lennie]

Apple makes nice laptops

- no fan
- HD in rubber
- burner/DVD/firewire/airport
- and the list goes on ! :)
- especially the batterylife is very good

Re:PPC

[anarkhos]

It'll be more expensive than a mac

Re:PPC

[Elbereth]

You've got a point. I wouldn't mind an iBook.

Time to go dumpster diving in back of the university again...

Re:PPC

[tgeller]

For a while, there was a community project to build PPC-based motherboards from IBM's "open" reference platform known as PowerPC Open Platform, or "POP". Ralph Giles started a mailing list (recently moved to opencores.org), and I built up a Web site at openppc.org. In addition, I created a commercial company to produce the boards. (These sites may be temporarily down -- our data center has had some power problems over the past two days.)

Then, IBM had problems with the new Northbridge design they specified for the board. Not wanting to release a flawed design to the world, they decided not to make the layout files ("Gerbers") available. With only schematics, lack of support from IBM, and waning confidence in the community, the project eventually fizzled.

Sic sic transit gloria PPC.

Re:PPC

[Anonymous Coward]

>Yeah, so where do I buy a PPC motherboard and CPU?

Here:

• Dual G3/G4 MicroATX Motherboard
• G3/G4 PPC Card for PCI
• another one

Some stuff in the works is here:

• geekish G3/G4 MoBo
• An IBM initiative (?)
• .

And some (German) announcement of a PPC System on a PCI card,aka MicroServer, would make a nice hardwared personal Firewall ;-))

• DCE MicroServer

Re:PPC

[Anonymous Coward]

Mod this guy up ! Very valuable info !!!

This Guy

Re:PPC

[Anonymous Coward]

this is so sad to hear. actually, i've fiddled with an idea of forming such a company on my own and a few partners and some of my ex-workmates. we had a half-ready design that got phased out that used a 750 from motorola, and it would be kick-ass to (try to) produce atx mobos from that design... however, i kinda know beforehand, that it couldn't ever hit the critical mass to be able to mass-produce cheaply. :-(

Re:PPC

[Anonymous Coward]

Not sure about the price, but I guess if you compare a high end macintosh to a high end bPlan Computer, it will be at least in the same class.

But it has some advantages apple hasn't - as long as it comes to my knowledge, so maybe you have to correct me:

- The bPlan Board is more open to developers
- You can have a dual cpu
- over firewire you can connect up to 1024 (iirc) boards togehter to one big cluster
- QNX should be ported, too
- You can easily remove and old CPU and put in a newer one (no zif)
- standard microATX board
- No apple design (for *me* that is an advantage)
- floppy is standard (don't laugh, I use them often)

Site problems

[MBCook]

I don't know if this happens with other browsers/OSes (I can only get to a windows box now), but IE (5.5) has MAJOR problems with that site. The page is wide as hell (we're talking a few 1000x the screen width), and the header and footer cells in the table are too tall too. I'm sure this is IE, becase no one in their right mind would make a site look like that unless it was a prank. Hope they fix this soon.

Re:Site problems

[Anonymous Coward]

that is a known bug in IE, i've come across several sites that it occurs in. there is a patch for IE 5.5, and you should probably upgrade to IE 6.0 anyway for security reasons.

if you go straight to www.imaclinux.net it works fine, so maybe they are unaware of the problem?

Re:Site problems

[x136]

It is IE 5.5. It does the same thing on my machine here, while Mozilla 0.9.6 renders it just fine. Also works fine on IE5 for the Mac.

Tech support of SuSE

[phreakinb]

I recently bought SuSE 7.3.. I tried to get tech support one night and i got a recording "Tech support is only open from 7-11 PST" or something like that.. Really early for most folks, or people that goto school. But theyt do have different hours on weekends, wich is a plus.

Mentat Streams is Crap?

[repetty]

Mentat Streams is crap? Really?

Why?

--Richard

Re:Mentat Streams is Crap?

[Doktor Memory]

It's not. Our anonymous friend was trapped in a time displacement effect, casting him back to 1991, when the only TCP stack available for System 7 was Apple's original MacTCP extension, which was in fact notably crappy.

MkLinux?

[GreenHell]

Well, I'm getting me a PowerPC to tinker with (I bought it a few days ago, and I'm waiting for it to ship here) and have been trying to decide ona distro..

Yellow Dog is the most commonly mentioned, Debian seems promising, but there's also MkLinux... Does anyone know anything about this? It's Linux based on a mach kernel, and was the original linux for Mac's. Now, I found it, thought it looked interesting (mmm... get to play around with mach... mmmm...) but according to TuxPPC the distro is Believed to be obsolete and unmaintained.

Now, I can't currently connect to the ftp server to check the date on the files to see how old they are, but the news is out of date, so that isn't looking too promising. The web page however, has been updated recently (21/11/2001 to be exact)

So, my questions are: Does anyone know anythign about MkLinux? when was the source last updated? Is it any good? Anything at all?

Re:MkLinux?

[Anonymous Coward]

Apparently mklinux is still being worked on (www.mklinux.org). And yes it was the first ppc capable distro I don't know what it's got going for it anymore now that monolithic kernels have been ported to the ppc for a while. It'd be cool to run linux over the mach micro kernel, but why don't we do that on x86 (it is supported, just no binary distrobutions are available, you gotta roll your own if you want)? I'm guessing as a user your better off with suse or yellow dog, but mklinux does seem interesting to hack around with. But then again, I could be completely wrong.

Re:MkLinux?

[Anonymous Coward]

Yes, MkLinux is still undergoing active development. The project is still lead by David A. Gatwood, who now works for Apple Computer.

You could email him at dagatwood@apple.com

As for the web-site update. That was because the FTP server broke, and he left a note saying that I was building a kernel to get it back on-line.

Apple Computer still hosts the Mailing Lists for MkLinux.

As for being obsolete and unmaintained, I wouldn't believe that. The actual plan is to port stuff over to Darwin, but that hasn't currently been done, yet. David will know a lot more accurately than me what the status on that is at present.

Happy hacking. ;]

~ Matthew

Re:MkLinux?

[demon]

MkLinux was aimed mostly at pre-PCI systems, where a native kernel wasn't available. There is an alternative now, and with the fact that (to my knowledge) MkLinux is unfathomably outdated, there's really no excuse to use it at this point. Certainly not on a PCI PowerMac, but even on the NuBus systems, you may as well use native kernels.

page doesn't render

[Anonymous Coward]

I tried checking out that iMac Linux link and the page renders really badly. Anyone else seeing the page display REEEEEEALLLLLLY WIIIIIIIIIDE?

Re:page doesn't render

[Anonymous Coward]

thats a deliberate trick to weed out the wasters running IE 5.5 under Windoze :)

pretty stoked about this...

[motherhead]

I've been using yellow dog 2.1 for a couple of weeks now on a beige G3... it's nice, and at the least it runs much faster then OS 10.1 did after i jacked it in.

But I am loving SuSE 7.3 for Intel. it's tight, polished and stable as a mountain. everything works (except the usb wheelmouse thing, which i am sure i can fix when i get around to it) and more importantly, it lets me get work done. If i want to futz and play I'll load into Progeny Debian or Woody.

So anyway, my point is: if you want to use your OS for work and not Work on your OS I'd fly with SuSE and personally i can't wait to pick up a copy and slap it on my Macs, all of them actually.

one more point, if you are insane and install everything it's like 5.4 gigs of data, SuSE 7.3 includes a bootable DVD-ROM and man, that just freaking rocks as well... is there also going to be one for the PPC version?

Nope, You're Incorrect

[cjsnell]

Your assertion that there is no CL interface to OS X is incorrect. You can easily boot to console mode without loading Aqua. From there, you can start the X server.

As for remote administration, it's trivial. I run OpenSSH on my Mac. I can login to my box and do anything that I could do on my FreeBSD box--add/remove users, change networking settings, security settings, etc.
If that's not enough for ya, there are several VNC servers for OS X, as well as some commercial apps that provide remote control similar to PC Anywhere.

Chris

PS- Loose the stupid narrow formatting. It won't get you any more karma.

Re:Nope, You're Incorrect

[Wolfkin]

He explicitly compared the Darwin CL to Linux's CL. It's hard to get from what he said to any assertion that "there is no CL interface to OS X".
Was your non sequitur intentional?

Randall.

Re:Nope, You're Incorrect

[Improv]

Oh, I didn't mean to assert that OSX lacks a
CLI. Having used various betas of it as well as
NeXTStep and release versions, I know that it has
a lot of Unixy goodness. WRT admin, I largely worry
that there will be settings that can only be managed
through Aqua, and as I have no interest in Aqua, I
don't want to have to deal with it. VNC is nice, but
it doesn't feel as integrated as X forwarding to me.

WRT the formatting, sorry, it's a habit of mine
that's not likely to change. If they make the text
field bigger, I'll probably fit more on a line :)

Your message seems kind of hostile. Did I offend
you somehow, or is it just the fire of advocacy?

Re:Nope, You're Incorrect

[Anonymous Coward]

I can login to my box and do anything that I could do on my FreeBSD box--add/remove users, change networking settings, security settings, etc.

If you really did this and weren't lying about it, then you'd know what Improv was talking about when he said "generic Unix". System management interface on OSX/Next is completely different.

SuSE SSSSSSSuckSSSS

[Anonymous Coward]

Why pay all that money when you can run Debian? Besides Olaf is known to hack things haphazardly on the ppc version of SuSE.. Debian is your answer... more packages.. better quality.. and ffs! Who wants SuSE!?

Why Linux PPC?

[SumDeusExMachina]

Why in the world would someone want to go to the trouble of installing Linux on a weird architecture when they have the awesome UNIX power of OSX available to them? I mean, if I had any nice PPC hardware, I would be running OSX. Oh well, I guess there are just masochists in every group...

Re:Why Linux PPC?

[Anonymous Coward]

Not everyone with a PPC uses Macs you know - and therefore not everyone with a PPC can run OSX. After seeing OSX, I'd personally stick with Linux anyway. (personal opinion, I won't go in depth as to all my reasons)

My PPC machine is a high-end Amiga - I have AmigaOS3.9, MacOS9 (via the iFusion "emulator" (I hesistate to call it that since it doesn't emulate the processor, only the Mac specific hardware)) and YellowDog. (oh, and Win95, C64, Apple2 and ZXSpectrum under emulation aswell, but being "true" emulators I don't use em much except for a few games). Basically, YellowDog has been good to me, but I think I'll rush out and grab suse now...

Hardware-wise, if anyone's interested, my Amiga has a G4, 258Mb RAM (yes, thats 258, not 256), generic 4Mb PCI graphics card, Soundblaster 16 (yeh, I know, I just don't care that much about sound) and 34.4Gb HDD space (divided into a 2Gb IDE plus 8 4.3Gb SCSI drives). So please, no "Amiga Hardware is too old and outdated for this, go away you freak" comments. AmigaOS3.9 is still the OS I use most of the time - Linux comes a close second, distantly followed by MacOS then Windows comes somewhere after the C64 emulator I use for playing Castle Wolfenstein (no, not Wolf3D).

Re:Why Linux PPC?

[Anonymous Coward]

" Why in the world would someone want to go to the trouble of installing Linux on a weird architecture when they have the awesome UNIX power of OSX available to them?"

I dont know mabe cost !. one is a free download, or mabe you may prefer linux to
a bsd flavor. Oh and linux is a UNIX clone too..

Re:Why Linux PPC?

[bill.sheehan]

That I can tell you in one word: Performance. I have a rev. A iMac. 233 MHz G3, 160 MB RAM. Plenty of horsepower for Linux, but MacOS X just crawls on its belly and begs for mercy.

SuSE 7.3 PPC is on my Christmas wish list.

"But I just got you SuSE 7.3 IA32 for your birthday!" -my long-suffering wife

Re:Why Linux PPC?

[SumDeusExMachina]

Yes, that's all well and good that it runs faster than OSX, but the question is, what do you do with it? I mean, with the availability of a huge number of quality applications for OSX (like Office XP over, oh c'mon, StarOffice) should make it infinitly more attractive. It isn't even decent for web surfing, I can't even get Konquerer to render a lot of web pages right, let alone a slow mess of code like Mozilla, while on OSX the latest version of Internet Explorer (which, when I last checked, still rendered every page I have visited correctly, which is what makes it superior, because everyone designs around it) is available for free.

I suppose you could some kind of budget artist like timothy, in which case you would be using GIMP in preference to pricy Photoshop, but other than that, I can't fathom why you'd do it.

Re:Why Linux PPC?

[bcrowell]

I've been using OS X as my get-my-work-done OS for several months now, and although I'm fairly happy with it, I can see some good reasons to put Linux on it as well. Although it's true that a lot of Linux software is getting ported, not everything has been, and installing X-windows is reputed to be a pretty scary task. I've done a teensy bit of porting myself, and even with programs that have no GUI, it wasn't exactly trivial. F'rinstance, people write these makefiles for use with gnumake and GNU's autoconfiguration stuff, and it doesn't just compile without modification. I'm not saying it would be difficult for a stouthearted Linuxite, but for us ordinary mortals, it's a real obstacle. And do you really want to have to recompile that software every time there's a new release?

I'm also pretty frustrated with finding peripherals that work with X. I'm now the proud owner of two printers and two CD burners, none of which work with X.1.1. So actually I'm not convinced that support for peripherals is better with MacOS X than with Linux. There are lots of peripherals that say on the box they're Mac-compatible, and that Apple says are Mac-compatible, but if you try them, ... uh ..., they don't work in X. And SCSI support in X is virtually nonexistent. At least the Linux community hasn't bought into this philosophy that any peripheral more than 6 months old is a "legacy."

I hate to say it, but I feel like I need to pay MS for a Windows license just in order to be released from Peripheral Hell. I don't really want to have to have Windows, PPC Linux, and OS X all running under my roof, but it almost seems like I have to...

Re:Why Linux PPC?

[Alan Partridge]

Is your real name Dr Frankenstein by any chance? You HAVE created a monster, who wants to bet that an iMac is faster? Anyone?

Re:Why Linux PPC?

[Anonymous Coward]

did I jest hippen to catch u on yer most retarded day?

Re:Why Linux PPC?

[Anonymous Coward]

It's just the GUI part of the OS that is really slow. It happens to have a lot of features in it, so it's to be expected I suppose. If you really want to do a fair comparison, you'd probably best try out Darwin with XFree86 as the GUI system instead of Aqua.

I haven't noticed, at the command line level anyway, that Darwin is slower than Linux until you slap on the Aqua GUI with it's very complex Quartz rendering system.

My own personal biggest bitch is that Darwin doesn't have a OSS (that's Open Sound System, people) compatibility layer of any sort. No /dev/dsp or /dev/audio. This pisses me off because it means that I can't use very many Unix audio apps, some of which are indeed very useful, but will remain unported to OS X.

Re:Why Linux PPC?

[paul_the_nomad]

Because Linux is cheap, flexible and gives total control to the user.

Re:Why Linux PPC?

[Anonymous Coward]

It's unlikely an iMac would be faster - in hardware terms, the highest-spec amigas are faster than iMacs, and the Amiga OS is a hell of a lot faster than pretty much anything else (largely since it lacks memory protection, so context switches take pretty much no time).

Re:Why Linux PPC?

[Anonymous Coward]

Well, PPC archtiecture is much less weird than x86, in real terms. x86 is a bodged together lump of legacy crap duct-taped together - PPC is clean and shiny and nice.

Re:Why Linux PPC?

[Anonymous Coward]

And on that BOMBSHELL...

Re:Why Linux PPC?

[BlueGecko]

While I definitely understand why using OS X may simply not be an option on older machines (which I always find amazing, since OPENSTEP ran on 33 MHz machines with 32 MB RAM just fine), Linux to me doesn't make any sense on any computer where Darwin is supported. With Darwin, you get the Unix, you get the X window support, but you also get drivers for a slew of peripherals, you get an easier install than any Linux, you get, by definition, essentially perfect support for the Apple motherboards, you get flawless HFS/HFS+ and AppleTalk support built-in, you get the ability to tie in easily with a NetInfo network, etc., and the requirements for Darwin are just as low as LinuxPPC, as near as I can tell. PPC Linux has in my mind shifted as the solution only where someone either insists on Linux for whatever reason, or where hardware is old enough that Darwin doesn't support it. (And with Darwin now supporting pretty much all PCI Macs, that area is dwindling.) I am being completely serious when I ask, is there any reason to use Linux over Darwin in a case where both are supported, other than you "just want to use Linux"? (I even run Linux under the latter excuse, and enjoy it, so this is not Linux bashing. It's just that if I wanted to set up a production server, there's no compelling reason I've found where Linux on my system greatly outpeforms Darwin, or the opposite, for that matter. They both are very similar except when I want to do things such as add a user, at which point on one system I use traditional Unix tools and on the other I use NetInfo.) I am sure there are some reasons to use Linux over Darwin; I just don't know what they are, which is why I'm asking.

Re:Why Linux PPC?

[jbloggs]

uhh...try gmake

Re:Why Linux PPC?

[Anonymous Coward]

Actually, my machine isn't all that uncommon in whats left of the Amiga community - Most people who have stood by their Amigas have them upgraded to this kind of level now (except perhaps the SCSI since most people have A1200s which don't have SCSI onboard)
And nopes, my Amiga runs MacOS about the speed of an iMac with the same processor, AmigaOS is even faster... the only thing that really lets my system down is the Soundblaster 16 and the lack of USB, but as I said, I'm not that interested in sound. Not long until I can rape this box for parts and get myself an AmigaOne with AmigaOS4.0 though... now THAT will be nice.

By the way, excuse the "anonymous coward" posts... I'll get around to creating an account one day, I just don't tend to post much so never got around to it.

Oh, and before this gets moderated down as offtopic, I'll throw in the fact that the AmigaOne is a pretty standard architecture PPC motherboard and therefore it SuSE shouldn't take too much to get running on it. :P

Re:Why Linux PPC?

[Anonymous Coward]

Yep, my favourite quote from Fleecy Moss (often referred to as a kind of God in the Amiga world) is:

"Memory Protected environments are McCarthyite paranoid islands of mistrust and resentment where you have to sign in triplicate and use armed guards to move things from one island to another."

But okay, I'm getting offtopic now...

Re:Why Linux PPC?

[Johnny Mnemonic]

A pretty thorough guide for OS X peripheral compatibility lives on Apple's site, which should come as no surprise.

From the Apple homepage, click on Made4Mac; this will take you to a searchable index of 3rd party product, both software and hardware. It also lists if said product is compatible with X.

Re:Why Linux PPC?

[Sfing_ter]

because osx only runs on imac or later(better),
thus, my old ppcs can't or won't run the windows like bloat of OSX. It is a beautiful gui, and I got great pleasure ssh-ing into my isps linux servers and ntalking to my friends from a G4, I did require a shower afterwards though... :}

Re:Why Linux PPC?

[bcrowell]

Thanks for the info! Here's a good example, though. I looked there for a CD-R drive compatible with OS X. They listed exactly two:

• LaCie Dupli 125 -- seems to be vaporware, since searching for "dupli 125" on LaCie's web page doesn't give any results
  
• Axonix SuperCD -- exists, but looks like a gigantic model for commercial disk pressing
  

Re:Why Linux PPC?

[Anonymous Coward]

I installed X11 without any problems, in fact, it was probably the easiest X11 install that I have ever done. I sucked a pre packaged disk image off of apples website. This being said, the last time I did a linux install was about 2 years ago when things were not as friendly as they are today.

I did not compile anything that required X11, but most of the stuff that I need X11 for would be running on some headless server.

OSX is nice for developing java apps.

Re:Why Linux PPC?

[genericpenguin]

Because recent security problems(like getting a root shell just by opening two programs in sequence) really don't cut the mustard.

I use MandrakePPC 8.0 for all our servers(we run a small ISP) and I use MacOS 9 for all my get-on-with-work stuff like Word, Excel,etc.

BTW, running single user mode should NOT give me root access without a password!

iBook Battery Montioring, Underclocking, Sound etc

[portege00]

My biggest question is this: does SuSE 7.3 PPC support sound on the iBook? I'm using Mandrake Linux 8.0 now, and it's decent, but I have no sound. This is most unfortunate when I'm trying to work and I can't listen to MP3s. Yellow Dog Linux 2.1 is supposed to have sound support, but the installation discs wouldn't mount in my CD/DVD drive. I haven't tried Linux/PPC, so I have no clue in that arena.

It would also be nice to be able to underclock my processor like in MacOS so that the battery lasts longer, monitor the battery life with software, and play DVDs. Hopefully, when I have more time, I will help others resolve these issues. I've heard rumors of an iBook Linux distro, and there's a page at SourceForge, but I can't confirm this.

Re:free?

[fault0]

free as in speech software

SuSE 7 Upgrade

[gabeman-o]

What about those of us who paid $50 only one year ago for SuSE 7/PPC? I still have to pay $50? Rediculous. This is open source software, not Windows. By the way, the tech support is crap, they wont support anything that comes off the cds. I asked for help with the default sendmail installation and they wouldn't help me because it was not a SuSE product, what part of their OS is made by SuSE? None of it.

Every package that comes with SuSE PPC is broken, I ended up recompiling everything that I chose in the installer by hand.

Not to say that I don't like SuSE, but they need to fix some things.

Re:SuSE 7 Upgrade

[Anonymous Coward]

What part of their distribution is made by SuSE?
Hmmmm, let's see Yast1, Yast2, SuSE X server, SuSEwm, etc..etc..etc... And that's just what I could rattle off the top of my head. Not to mention their SuSE specific version of KDE. I don't know about the PPC versions, but in my OPINION the x86 versions kick some serious ass.

Too Expensive!

[letchhausen]

Though I have used Suse in the past, one thing that really starts to grate is the expense. If they would offer a stripped down cheaper version like RedHat, then I would be likely to give this a try but until that time.......I don't really need a jillion CD's worth of apps.

Re:Why Linux PPC? (A: The GIMP)

[timothy]

At least, that's a sufficient answer to me, and the biggest easily-identifiable reason I'm waiting impatiently for mdk8.1 :) I have photoshop LE (came with a Wacom tablet), and it's OK, but after using both I prefer GIMP's interface in general for my personal photo manipulation and drawing. Both have good and bad points, and Sure, I'm just more used to GIMP after not touching PS for a few years, but hey. YMMV, etc.

For people who a) like or need IRC and b) prefer free software to shareware / guiltware / payware, xchat is also quite nice to have, though Mozilla's IRC capabilities are getting quite nice. (private msg's are handled much better by xchat, though.)

OS X is nice looking, though, now that I bumped up the RAM in my iBook ;)

timothy

why Macs?

[Anonymous Coward]

I always thought the idea behind Macs was to make a computer that even stupid people could use? So why bother with PPC Linux? MacOS is great for audio and Video so why mess with a good thing? I'm sorry I just don't get it. Also People can always get OSX if they want to fell "Unix Like". I just don't see the point of putting Linux on a Mac? your wasting extra money on Hardware to run an OS that can run on intel.

Re:why Macs?

[Alan Partridge]

Not quite, the idea was to build a computer that REAL PEOPLE could use. People with lives and stuff.

mklinux's uses

[Doktor Memory]

MkLinux was actually developed by Apple (in conjunction with some European academic group, don't remember who), back in the Amelio era. Itself, it was never very popular, but the code release allowed people to start building monolithic linux kernels on PPC Macs, and the assorted Mac Linux distros followed on shortly after.

Right now, the only reason to use MkLinux is if you want to run linux on one of the original powermacs: the 6100, 7100 and 8100. MkLinux is the only linux which supports booting on NuBus (non-PCI) based Macs, and is maintained for that reason only.

Re:mklinux's uses

[mkelley]

"MkLinux is the only linux which supports booting on NuBus"
Nope, sorry.

PPCLinux for Nubus systems has been going since last year and has a very active mailing list.

G4 867?

[friedo]

Anyone know if this distro will boot on the white 867MHz G4? Couldn't get LinuxPPC 2kQ4 to boot on this damn thing. :)

Re:G4 867?

[christurkel]

Yellow Dog Linux 2.1 works fine.

Re:Why Linux PPC? (A: The GIMP)

[frankie]

Umm...I don't think the GIMP is a reason to use LinuxPPC instead of OS X.

If it runs on *BSD/ppc, either it runs on OS X now, or it will soon.

You are wrong

[Vardamir]

MOL is more like Classic which is more like Win4Lin - they are all software emulation and not hardware emulation; they are not virtual machines like VMware.

Re:Why Linux PPC? (A: The GIMP)

[SiMac]

The GIMP runs rootlessly on Mac OS X. (Install using fink or gnu-darwin.) I bet getting xchat to work wouldn't be too much of a chore.

BTW, I agree that on older machines Linux is much, much faster (I have a server running LinuxPPC)

Mandrake PPC

[_hAZE_]

Mandrake is currently working on updating their PPC tree. I believe they are going to skip an 8.1 release and focus on an 8.2 release that will (hopefully) coincide with their i586 8.2 release. Testing is open to the public (like all Mandrake releases), you can download the tree from most Mandrake development FTP mirrors. They also have a mailing list that you can subscribe to for those interested in running the PPC port. Check out http://www.linux-mandrake.com/en/fdevlists.php3 for the mailing list and http://www.linux-mandrake.com/en/cookerdevel.php3 for information on downloading the development tree.

Re:Why Linux PPC? (A: The GIMP)

[SumDeusExMachina]

For people who a) like or need IRC and b) prefer free software to shareware / guiltware / payware, xchat is also quite nice to have, though Mozilla's IRC capabilities are getting quite nice. (private msg's are handled much better by xchat, though.)

Actually, if I recall correctly, BitchX is available for OSX. BitchX being free and all, you would probably agree that it is worth using.

Also, why are you so opposed to paying for software that people have obviously put a lot of effort into? If I really felt like editing images and being a digital artist in general, I would go out an shell out cash for Photoshop. Isn't it kind of hypocritical to diss commercial software on this site and then go off and offer people "subscriptions" to Slashdot, which you and the other editors have obviously worked (kind of) very hard on?

Partition Magic vs. DiskDrake

[i_am_nitrogen]

Mandrake no longer uses Partition Magic, but rather DiskDrake. DiskDrake is similar in interface and function to PartitionMagic, but it runs on Linux within the Mandrake Installer. I believe it is based on libparted. GNU Parted might work on PPC Linux, but I'm not sure. Also, there is Norton Utilities for Macintosh (which is absolutely nothing like NU for Windoze). I've heard it's very useful for recovering data, doing partitioning, etc.

Anyway, I think this (SuSE 7.3 on PPC) is another small advancement for Linux that, among all the other small advancements, will slowly but surely take Linux to the top of the OS food chain. Now if only we could get major vendors to ship dual-boot systems...

bichX and paying for software

[timothy]

re: bitchX -- though a lot of people swear by bitchX, to me it's at best a distant 3rd behind xchat and mozilla's IRC mode. So it's no argument for me, really, on that count. Using the nicely cross-platform Mozilla (on borrowed Windows machines, my Linux-running desktops or my iBook running Mac OS) isn't exactly a terrible hardship, and that module seems to improve faster even than the rest of Mozilla, but it's just not my favorite.

re: Paying for software -- never said I was opposed to paying for software, only that I prefer Free software to the other kinds. Paying for (or just using) Free software seems a better long-term investment to me than paying for (or just using) the other kinds. I prefer not to spend more money than I have to (doesn't everyone?), and I like software with available source, in part because that means there's no reason it has to disappear if / when its vendor disappears.

(Did you ever use the word processor called "WriteNow"? Clean, fast, fit on 2 floppies ... if the source was open, I might be using a modern descendent of that program today.)

I can diss any software I want :) Most software sucks. Mozilla crashes sometimes, and that's my most-days, most-hours window on the world. No Free *nix desktop handles fonts with anything like the panache of Mac OS. More generally, most user interfaces (not just software, or computers -- think of the user interface of everything from buying an airline ticket to car radios) are horrible. Sometimes software has problems that come from being proprietary (security problems that don't get fixed for a long time because of a ponderous review and fix cycle, say), but software problems come in all varieties, and any non-trivial program probably has bugs worth crying about.

With Photoshop vs GIMP specifically, like I said before, I prefer GIMP, and it runs under Linux, my preferred OS for right now. PS runs on my laptop, and I have a paid-for (limited version) copy on there. If you don't prefer GIMP, and want to shell out the money for a full version of PS, well, great, no problem! I'm sure the PS coders are bright guys and earn the salaries they're paid. In certain applications, PS is currently a better choice; those just aren't the ones I have. (No 4-color printing, for instance.) I do wish for better text-handling in GIMP, it's true, but we choose different bundles all the time, and my font complaints don't overshadow my general preferences.

Cheers,

timothy

Re:bichX and paying for software

[Anonymous Coward]

You can run bitchX on OSX. I've seen it. It can be done.

depends how much you want to fuss ;)

[timothy]

I rarely add software to an installation of Mandrake or Red Hat, and were I a SuSE user I could probably add an "extremely" before the "rarely." Even the smaller, downloadable all-GPL version of mandrake has most of the software that I want / need on a daily basis. (Except for upgrading certain things, grabbing a new Mozilla once in a while, etc.)

To get gimp to run on OS X (it runs, Yes ...) is a larger pain than installing a simple Linux system, and does me no good when using OS 9, anyhow. (For speed reasons, even with 10.1 and 384 megs of memory, I find myself usually booting that machine into OS 9.)

But you're right, I wasn't thinking about macgimp when I wrote that.

timothy

Re:free?

[Alan Partridge]

look, buster, for less than double that $80 Apple will sell you OSX 10.1.1 AND OS 9.2.1. Yeah, I'm sure you get 2000+ apps, but I understand there are something like 15000 apps available for the MacOS. Linux is a hobbyists OS - face it.

Shadows of NeXTStep

[Improv]

I remember playing with OSX beta2 a lot, and
release versions a bit less. It certainly has
changed a lot, but I don't think it'd really be
suitable for someone like me who has no interest
in Aqua. Fink does sound nice, and I'll take a
look at it (hopefully it's like the BSD ports tree).
The thing that I remember about NeXTStep that I
didn't like was that much of its configuration data
was in formats that were unfriendly to hand-editing,
making you use their tools (UserManager.app,
NetInfoManager.app, and so on) for basic systems
tasks. That irritated me in that it made the
system both harder to script and difficult to
remotely administer. There's also the issue that
the DPS-based remote NeXTStep display was not
compatible with X11 remote display (something
not unlike Aqua). I consider remote display
to be very important, and having a box that
I need to walk over to in order to change
something is a pain.

Anyhow, I'm sure OSX is great for regular Mac
users, as well as people who would like to run
both Mac and Unix software. It's not for me --
I'm purely a Unixhead, and so I'm more likely to
run *BSD or Linux on whatever systems I have that
happen to be Macs.

Re:free?

[jonknee]

Well if you count running a commercial server farm as a "hobby" you're right... Linux may not be a popular *desktop* OS it's really popular/powerful in the server market which isn't just for hobbyists.

Its a new day

[NDPTAL85]

Netinfo and UserManager (now called Users) are still on OS X. But thats only for Mac OS X. Darwin on the other hand since it does not include Aqua allows you to edit things by hand using: niload(8), nidump(8), nigrep(1), nifind(1), nireport(1)....etc. Actually Mac OS X lets you do this too. You can install Darwin by itself and since there's no Aqua, there's no chance you'd run into anything like you did on NextStep. XFree86 also works fine on both Darwin and Mac OS X. In any case check out: http://publicsource.apple.com/ and look around. Read the "Ask the Darwin team" pieces they are fun. And if you get confused, for some strange reason Apple jumped the version number of Darwin from 1.4 to 5.1. Weird. Here's what my Mac OS X 10.1.1 gives me back for a uname -a:

Darwin Alexander 5.1 Darwin Kernel Version 5.1: Tue Oct 30 00:06:34 PST 2001; root:xnu/xnu-201.5.obj~1/RELEASE_PPC Power Macintosh powerpc

Re:Its a new day

[Anonymous Coward]

erm, all of those command line utils, nireport, ni load, et. al. are also included with OS X 10.1.1 (and prior) with BSD layer(? not sure, I always load it)

Plus OS X gets to run all those goodies that linux will never likely see...

Linux on the desktop?

[Anonymous Coward]

Maybe in 2010.

I've happy living in the future with OS X, thank you.

Re:free?

[Anonymous Coward]

are there a lot of "commercial server farms" running on Apple PowerMacs then? IBM's Power3 and 4, perhaps - but I'll bet a pound to a pinch of snuff that those systems are cruising along on AIX or an IBM Linux build.

Re:Just think

[motherhead]

perhaps, or then again, games, multimedia and graphics apps... you can get a look at the packages if you interested. but yeah, lots of dev stuff and proticals that are more archane then usefull.

then again SuSE does start you with everything switched off and requires you to flip them on. yeah, there is the obligitory firewall app, but they have made it a bit more comprehensive then red hat's and mandrakes (i.e: "what level of security do you desire, small, medium or large")

actually quite a bit of it is also window managers and GUIs, very slick the lot of them and though i am not completely sure they are all there. every last rat bastard one of them.though i did dig how easy it was getting KDE 2.2.2 off the SuSE website and gnome looks as good as Ximian's, though i have not found a way to jack the latest release of Evolution (99.whatever) into 7.3.

though as far as OS's go, they still haven't reached the stage where "Remote Assistance" is a prebundled "feature"... so thanks MS.

question

[Anonymous Coward]

...but do they have an X server for rev. A powerbooks?

Try Debian

[loco123]

After I got sick of trying to get Polish locale to work in MacOS X, I decided to go with Linux on my TiBook.

Tried Mandrake, LinuxPPC, Suse and Debian.

Mandrake was easy to install, but a nightmare in maintenance (rpm craziness).

LinuxPPC and Suse just didn't seem right, since I'm a BSD freak. Debian suited me best. It's well organized, clear and simple. With apt-get I'm always up to date with PPC packages. Installation is only a tiny bit trickier than on a PC.

Re:iBook Battery Montioring, Underclocking, Sound

[Anonymous Coward]

I think you had to upgrade to a recent benh kernel to get sound, as i did. (and it works, also with sleep support)
good luck

Real world example

[loco123]

I love MacOS X. It's beautiful, functional and generally the best OS I've ever used.

However, it doesn't support Polish fonts nor locale. Ineed to write Polish text with proper national characters. After a few months of hacking and struggling with MacOS I installed Linux, which turned out to be a better sollution for me.

SuSE Support? Think Again.

[Anonymous Coward]

I bought SuSE 7.1 specifically so I could get some help with PPC Linux on my Blue & White G3. Sadly, I discovered the extent of their support: basically they'll help you read their manual.

For example, when I asked for help with IPsec, their support team said it wasn't part of 7.1. When I showed them the web page on their own site trumpetting IPsec support in 7.1 and sent them a copy of their own packaging with IPsec highlighted, they said it wasn't covered by their 14 days of free support.

Great idea!

[Jules]

And let's make sure that all those nice Intel boxes are only running licensed copies of Windows. We wouldn't want to upset the shareholders' dividends by having those anti capitalistic types utilizing old hardware. You know, those old machines that Mac OS X or Microsoft XP will not run upon.

You mean...

[Jules]

...like this?

It should be fucking here already!

[Anonymous Coward]

jesus. like how long do they want to fucking take? are they going to sell the mobo individually? now that's going to be a hoe for my G5.

Re:It should be fucking here already!

[Anonymous Coward]

200 developer boards will be on sale next month.
If you're an developer or computer dealer, contact bPlan.

End-Consumer boards should be on sale Feb/March 2002.

You will be able to buy the board as it is or as a part of a complete system.

ummm...

[Anonymous Coward]

Is WHAT a figment of your imagination??

Actually, he's right.

[demon]

MoL sets up a full virtual machine, using the PPC's self-virtualization capability. AFAIK Win4Lin is the same sort of situation. Classic, OTOH, shares filesystem and display (and other device) access so that everything can run together, I'm guessing using some sort of QuickDraw trickery.

So MoL is much more similar to VMWare. VMWare does use the host CPU to run what it can natively, like MoL does, unlike say, Bochs, where everything is emulated.

Re:iBook Battery Montioring, Underclocking, Sound

[Anonymous Coward]

you don't have to underclock your G3. you can put it into nap mode and (being a static design) it will drop its power usage almost ten-fold. try it: echo 1 >/proc/sys/kernel/powersave-nap

Uh, try running MacOS X on a machine with =64MB

[ikekrull]

And you'll see exactly why Linux is useful for the Mac.

MacOS X is more-or-less unusable on this machine.

I know RAM is cheap these days, but my Rev. A iMac uses some god-awful half-size RAM SIMMs, which are expensive and hard to find.

I run Mandrake 8.0 on the iMac, and with KDE it seems pretty sluggish (starting apps, general performance), but WindowMaker is very usable and GNOME is faster too.

Re:iBook Battery Montioring, Underclocking, Sound

[rseuhs]

My biggest question is this: does SuSE 7.3 PPC support sound on the iBook?

Sound works great on my Powerbook G3 400 ("Pismo") - actually better than in MacOS9, since I can use BOTH speakers and external sound at the same time if I want to. (And I control volume of speakers and external independently)

Debian for PPC works well

[rorycl]

I used to use LinuxPPC. It was easy to install and meant that getting a small 7200 up and running with apache, proftpd and so on was easy (this was our office's first foray into Linux 2 years ago - now we have our main servers all running Linux). However, as a newbie, I found it difficult to upgrade the system sensibly.

Now our office runs Debian potato on our VALinux servers, and an old 7600 powermac. It is very convenient to have the same distribution running on different machines. As new or upgraded Debian packages are released simultaneously between all architectures the software realease levels of the Mac and Intel boxes is the same.

I can recommend using Linux, particularly Debian, for older power macs. While they are no longer powerful enough for recent MacOS applications, they run very well indeed as small mail, web or ftp servers.

When installing woody on my Lombard PowerBook, I found it fairly time consuming to get the Debian installers to work, partly as I chose to do it during a change the woody boot-floppies. However once that was sorted out, the base install and boot setup went smoothly, with some help from the extremely helpful members of the Debian PPC mailing list.

If you don't mind spending a bit of time reading the (generally excellent) installation guide and doing the odd bit of configuration by hand, I believe you will find Debian PPC highly rewarding.

SuSE PPC iso image

[NeonSpirit]

For those in the forefront of SuSE, when should I expect the 7.3 iso image to apear, there is currently only 7.0 and 7.1.. Did 7.2 PPC exist ? Spirit