Linux on the iMac G4

Brent Foster writes: "The staff at iMacLinux.net have Linux running on the new flat panel iMac G4s. They have an initial installation guide available here(1). It has several photos of the iMac G4 during the installation as well as cat /proc/cpuinfo. They also have some photos of the unpacking available here(2). The iMac was sponsored by PowerMax, it is nice to see companies sponsoring Linux efforts, especially in the Apple world." John Buswell adds: "It currently works in novideo mode, but we plan on testing newer kernels and XFree 4.2 with nvidia patches later this week."

Comments

Answers why:

[MSG]

In responce to the many questions of 'why?', I'd submit some of the following:

I've used Fink. I've built all of the packages in the stable tree. I've read many of the patches. Not to belittle the excellent work that the Fink developers do, it feels hackish at times. Darwin's BSD layer isn't a very good UNIX, and causes many applications to not compile, or compile with bad hackish workarounds. Darwin imposes a lot of limitations that Linux doesn't have, and is buggy or not POSIX compliant in other respects. From a UNIX developers position, Linux is far and away a better UNIX platform.

Running Linux results in a much smoother UI, anyway. The Mac OS X interface lacks proper keyboard window switching, so users have to resort to the mouse more often. Introduce XFree86 into that picture, and you suddenly have separate keys for window switching in each environtment. Cmd+Tab will switch *applications*, including X, but you need a separate key combo for window switching inside X. I used Opt+Tab. So, if I wanted to switch from the Gimp to gnome-terminal, I can Opt+Tab. If I want to switch to Mozilla running in OS X, I Cmd+Tab to it.... Hackish.

The performance of XFree86 on OS X is also really pretty awful. The SysV shared memory implimentation on Darwin is too limited for the MIT-SHM extention to be used, and graphics under Quartz are largely unaccelerated. Things draw *slow*. If you're interested in X apps, Linux will perform much better.

Interested in KDE? Not available from Fink. Apparently KDE does some things assuming that work with ELF binary objects that don't work on Darwin (probalby in Kparts, but I don't know). KDE users are going to want to run Linux.

Personally, I'm not all that interested in OS X. I don't like it much. However, I *do* really like PowerPC hardware. Resume from suspend is much betther than on x86, which is great for laptops. Power use is better, and heat output is lower. Hardware is easier to configure.

Re:In 10 years you'll be glad your Mac runs Linux

[Junta]

Good point, however the argument really only applies to open-source applications, which tend to get ported to anything with a compiler anyway. Binary applications in Linux tend to be even shorter lived than other platforms (i.e. running a libc5/kernel 1.2.x binary application on modern equipment?)
As far as Apple goes, I would dare say they dragged on the m68k support as long as it was feasible, beyond a certain point the market has shrunk too much. Of Desktop/Workstation systems, I would say that Mac has either the longest or second longest lifespan of m68k products. (Sun ditched them way early after Sun3 hardware, and depending on how you count Amiga, Amiga might be considered longer support for m68k, since 3.9 was released in 2k, but then again, Amiga's support over the last few years has been rather tenuous at best.
Mac hardware tends to enjoy a much longer period of being up-to-date than, say, the PC market..