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A Live Linux ISO for the Mac?
An anonymous reader asks: "My iBook is the strongest of my laptops, but it's not running my favorite OS. Knoppix and the various other live ISOs are nice for x86 machines, but (though OS X is nice, and I'm not disparaging it) it would be nice to have all the apps that come with KDE and GNOME, and to have them all available through a nice fluxbox or windowmaker desktop). I've seen smart people nearly cry trying to install Debian on their Macs, but then I've seen smart people nearly cry trying to install Debian in the first place. Knoppix has certainly made it easier to put Debian on x86 machines, but does such a thing exist for Macs? Mac OS X is a very pretty thing, and Apple has supported some great free software projects through it, it's just that on an older iBook (and older iMacs, even more so), a low-key GNU/Linux desktop moves more responsively, and has everything I need. If I could easily run a nice GNU system on them, old iMacs would be worth a lot more to me.".
Yes, I deliberately did not answer his question. I probably should have pointed that out. You, probably being a typical engineer, had a perfect literal comprehension of the question. However - I'm of the opinion that (like 99% of the people on Slashdot, probably including myself): the poster is an idiot who doesn't know what he wants. He's asking the wrong question. Read this again:
My iBook is the strongest of my laptops, but it's not running my favorite OS.
Okay, he wants to run Linux on his notebook.
I've seen smart people nearly cry trying to install Debian on their Macs
Gosh, so Debian is hard to install?
Knoppix has certainly made it easier to put Debian on x86 machines, but does such a thing exist for Macs?
He's thinking that he wants to run Knoppix because it can be installed as a clone of the CD - and there's zero setup!
I've tried Knoppix (have you?) and it's a nice concept that's a completely unusable waste of space when run from a CD. Talk about talking the advantages of Linux and throwing them all away by introducing a CD drive bottleneck that destroys anything resembling performance and - the killer - introduces instabilities. If you want Linux to crash and reboot frequently - run Knoppix from a CD. My average uptime of several attempts at running and randomly investigating programs: around 10 minutes (the same hardware is rock-solid under FreeBSD).
Also, given that the poster is going to be running on a notebook, I vouch that anyone wanting to run a Knoppix-like OS on a mobile machine from a CD (way to drain batteries even faster) - is either a madman or an idiot.
The poster clearly wants to do a real install, but can't get his head around Linux being easy to install with the right distro. He's stuck on a live filesystem, when that's not what he wants.
Gentoo has a PPC Live CD that will boot on any G3 or G4 Mac... the purpose of their live cd is more for installation purposes though than anything else, there's no X.