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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?
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.
photosMy Photostream
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?
Have you read the moderator guidelines? Well, have you, PUNK? (and I want a Karma: Gnarly option)
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...
Everytime you look at porn a devil gets their horns.
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...
For every problem, there is at least one solution that is simple, neat, and wrong.
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).
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.
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.
For every problem, there is at least one solution that is simple, neat, and wrong.
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.
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? I thought this was about PowerPC.....
Yeah, so where do I buy a PPC motherboard and CPU?
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.
Comment forecast: Bits of genius surrounded by a sea of mediocrity.
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? Really?
Why?
--Richard
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?
"I won't mod you down - I feel the need to call you a twit explicitly, rather than by implication."
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?
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.
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...
Is your company running tools written by ma
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.
Trolls make great pets. Adopt one today!
free as in speech software
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.
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.
Hey, you think your house is cool?
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
jrnl: http://tinyurl.com/c2l8yr / foes: http://tinyurl.com/ckjno5
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.
News for Nerds. Stuff that Matters? Like hell.
Anyone know if this distro will boot on the white 867MHz G4? Couldn't get LinuxPPC 2kQ4 to boot on this damn thing. :)
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.
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.
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 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.
Don Head
UNIX/Linux Administrator
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?
Is your company running tools written by ma
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...
A solution to the problem with music today
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.
... if the source was open, I might be using a modern descendent of that program today.)
:) 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.
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
I can diss any software I want
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
jrnl: http://tinyurl.com/c2l8yr / foes: http://tinyurl.com/ckjno5
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.)
...) 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.)
To get gimp to run on OS X (it runs, Yes
But you're right, I wasn't thinking about macgimp when I wrote that.
timothy
jrnl: http://tinyurl.com/c2l8yr / foes: http://tinyurl.com/ckjno5
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.
That was classic intercourse!
Not quite, the idea was to build a computer that REAL PEOPLE could use. People with lives and stuff.
That was classic intercourse!
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.
For every problem, there is at least one solution that is simple, neat, and wrong.
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.
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
Mac OS X and Windows XP working side by side to fight back the night.
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.
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.
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.
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.
...like this?
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.
Sam: "That was needlessly cryptic."
Max: "I'd be peeing my pants if I wore any!"
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.
I gots ta ding a ding dang my dang a long ling long
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)
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.
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
I will not be pushed, filed, stamped, indexed, briefed, debriefed or numbered.....my life is my own.