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First Beta Of Mandrake Linux 8.2 For PPC
belbo writes "On Friday, an article on MandrakeForum announced the immediate availability of the first beta of Mandrake Linux 8.2 for PPC.
Apart from the features of the upcoming 8.2 release for i586, this beta offers network installation via AirPort, an AppleScript wrapper for passing parameters to BootX, a patched 2.4.17 kernel, support for 1394, support for Radeon/Riva cards (via XFree 4.2) and more." Great news. I run Yellow Dog Linux for PPC boxes, but am still waiting for a good Linux for PPC release that does everything well, and out of the box. Maybe this is the one?
No one on this forum has yet mentioned SuSE PPC as an alternative Linux for mac hardware. I was very disappointed with LinuxPPC when I first tried it, (and mkLinux, but that was way back).
I installed the first SuSE beta and have been using their distros ever since. The best things about it are the detailed printed documentation, the professional quality of the distro, great installation tech support and the bundled software (6 CD's worth).
It's also nice using a distro that is used on PC's. I don't feel like I'm using a stepchild OS. I'm sure this new mandrake will help reduce the stigma of running linux on PPC as well.
That said, however, with OS X 10.1, I very rarely find myself booting off of my linux partition. I miss the multiple workspaces, but I really like being able to use BBEdit and Office without starting up MOL.
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Sure, Linux is just another "free" option, but so is Darwin.
When I was running an old PowerBook 3400, I loaded LinuxPPC onto a Jaz 2GB disk and booted from that a few times just to say "Yeah, I had a UNIX-like OS running on it." Aside from that, it was just a toy.
Right now, there isn't a whole lot that Linux for PowerPC can do that OS X cannot do. Maybe these Linuxes can run on a wider variety of machines (read: non-G3 new-world ROM boxen), but aside from that, I really don't see any benefits.
Still, it is nice to see that companies still believe in and support the PowerPC archetecture as a whole and don't mind devoting resources to it.
Last night I installed Yellow Dog 2.1. It's so much faster than OS X on my iBook (500mhz, 640 MB RAM) that if I can get the Airport card working, there's no way I'll ever use OS X again.
It amazes me that a bunch of open source dudes can make an OS that runs faster than Apple's own - seriously Apple should take a lesson from this. They should be ashamed of OS X.