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.".

Comments

Is installing really that hard?

[jeramybsmith]

Nowadays if you want to turn any older USB mac into a single booting Linux machine I would suggest that no hair pulling is necessary.

Most of the problems I see people still having has to do with repartitioning a dual-boot sytem.

Yellow Dog Linux.

[Anonymous Coward]

Yellow Dog Linux home page, here's a review on OS News.

There really are no problems running Linux on Mac hardware. :)

Re:Yellow Dog Linux.

[RevAaron]

The poster isn't asking about Linux in general on Mac hardware- read it again. The poster is asking about a *live* distro for the Mac. If you don't know what a live CD distro is, it's the kind where you toss in a CD, and it boots a full Linux install. Sets up a RAM disk, perhaps a folder on your Mac OS HFS+ or Windows harddrive and is a usable system without having to do an install. Examples are Knoppix- like he mentioned, or DemoLinux.

It's possible- there used to be one!

[RevAaron]

I don't know if there are any Live distros for the Mac anymore... There used to be a version for LinuxPPC though, a release or two their most current release (which isn't all that current anyway). I am not sure if it was on a bootable CD- I think it was a 100-200 MB file you downloaded and double clicked "Boot LinuxPPC Live" and bam, you were in. No need for a CD, although that was prolly doable too.

If you want all the KDE and Gnome apps,

[Mordant]

and you even want to run WindowMaker or Fluxbox, you don't need Linux.

All you need is Fink.

Re:If you want all the KDE and Gnome apps,

[Otter]

...and doing it that way, you have those apps available in your normal MacOS environment. I haven't seen Knoppix, but I believe it works the way the old LinuxPPC LiveCD worked -- you rebooted from it into a normal Linux environment, minus your Windows/Mac apps. Especially given the hassles of HFS+ in Linux, simply running those X11 apps in OS X seems a lot closer to what the questioner wants.

Re:If you want all the KDE and Gnome apps,

[coolgeek]

there are still some programs, like ImageMagick, that are total hair-pullers under OS X and fink doesn't make it easy either, cuz fink unstable is earlier than current distro of xyz app...

Re:If you want all the KDE and Gnome apps,

[SStrungis]

Fink is hellish for anyone not a Linux pro. I struggled mightily with it to get Windowmaker compiled using Xdarwin. It took FOREVER, and I cannot see anyone getting KDE working under OSX. Not worth the effort. It takes 20 minutes to compile Lynx on a G3 800 MHz iBook, forget KDE or something large like gimp.

Scott

Re:If you want all the KDE and Gnome apps,

[Mordant]

KDE binaries are available via Fink.

Re:If you want all the KDE and Gnome apps,

[Anonymous Coward]

Actually, you probably shouldn't try compiling KDE, but rather use the KDE binary that comes from Fink:

sudo apt-get install koffice

will install all necessary KDE components and then you are up and running. Takes about 25 minutes. :-)

Re:If you want all the KDE and Gnome apps,

[JimRay]

Or, you could just use the precompiled Imagemagick binary, found here: http://www.entropy.ch/software/macosx/welcome.html #imagemagick

Works beautifully. I use it on my development box for web based image manipulation, using PHP. The PHP code is totally portable to the production Solaris box, too.

Enjoy

Re:If you want all the KDE and Gnome apps,

[The Herbaliser]

Compiling KDE from source took a little under two days on my really old ibook. That sounds hellish, but really isn't, because it just ran in the background and I noticed no noticeable slow-down (I wish my XP box at work could do that... it's so easy to bring it to its knees). It was also incredibly easy, largely thanks to finkcommander.

the integration between KDE and OSX is absolutely beautiful.

Re:If you want all the KDE and Gnome apps,

[jbolden]

1) Your numbers sound kind of long. Try running the compiles at night. BTW are you counting the download time as the compile time?

2) Make sure to do the compiles piecemeal. If a program is going to require 40 dependendts then break the whole thing down into steps.

3) As for hellish I've seen very few of their compiles fail and those that do usually work by the next update.

4) Why aren't you just using the binary fink?

Re:This isn't too intelligent

[yomegaman]

Your subject line describes the contents of your post perfectly. He's asking for a LIVE CD distribution, like Knoppix, except for PPC. Is that so hard to understand?

Debian has come a long way.

[sonicsft]

Debian isn't really as hard as the poster says. While it may take a little trial and error, and you might have to rtfm Debian has in fact come a long way. I got my iBook online with debian, everything working, in the space of one weekend. The trick is researching what drivers you need and compiling a kernel (like the benh fork) before you try futzing with things. While there are a few random quirks with getting linux up in general, like how do you right/middle click, etc...They can be easily solved by doing a 30second google. But I have to say Apple has a history of not liking people doing strange things to their macs, if a live CD came out that made installing linux as easy as installing MacOS X then it would draw some negative attention from Apple I think. On the otherhand when my ibook suffered a logicboard melt down (semi-common occurence on my model) I sent in my ibook with debian still on the drive, and it came back fixed, good as new, with the boot loader still functioning and debian still on the drive.

-sonic

Re:Debian has come a long way.

[dunderwo]

if a live CD came out that made installing linux as easy as installing MacOS X then it would draw some negative attention from Apple I think.

That would be old, pre-Jobs Apple thinking, which did give them a tendency to arbitrarily clamp down on people modifying their (then) relatively closed platform, even when said clamp-down interfered with the company's interests. I don't really see that happening now. An easy, CD-bootable Linux distro would be another reason for people in a specific market to buy an iBook--in other words, it would be good for Apple. Even if they were concerned about the installed base of the Mac OS on Macintosh computers, I'd say that they have very little to worry about at the moment.

Re:Debian has come a long way.

[chasingporsches]

maybe on newer machines... but i had one hell of a hard time installing debian 3.0 on a powermac 5500/225. (yellowdog wasn't stable on this machine! maybe they should look into that? although i think it was a problem with BootX.) now, even though i got it loaded up, i still have to ssh in whenever i turn it on and reset the keycodes for the ADB keyboard... it is harder on older machines than new ones. i didn't have a problem on a powermac g4.

Re:Debian has come a long way.

[hswerdfe]

if the debain install is easy now. I would hate to see what is was like before, the only way it could possibly get harder is if two guy's with baseball bats started kicking the shit out of you when you tried to install it.

p.s. I run Madrake 9.1...:D

Re:Debian has come a long way.

[MarkCollette]

I agree that Debian was hard for me to install, as well, but that was only becuse of two bugs, which if fixed, would have made Debian trivial to install.

Bug 1: The installer used a 2.2 kernel, whereas the system I installed used a 2.4 kernel, which meant that software IDE RAID was interpreting the drive names differently (hda versus hdc). This mean a lot of (dis/en)abling drives in the bios and screwing with some grub file to make it all work. The trivial solution was to use a current 2.4 kernel in the install.

Bug 2: I use a realtek ethernet card, which was enabled via a kernel module, which required me to change some text file so that the system would load the module on boot. In fact, every single time I upgrade the kernel, that file needs to be edited. I don't know if that's Debian's fault of Linux's fault, though.

Debian is probably worth the pain....

[trouser]

I'm running YDL on my 500Mhz iBook . Easy to install, easy to configure, all up quite good. Hardware support is fine. I haven't got the modem working yet but I believe others have.

But Debian's package management is absolutely superb. The Debian install is a little tricky and I believe there are a few quirks to the iBook setup. It'll probably take a few days before you have all the hardware working properly.

Ease of installation is probably somewhat overrated. Ideally you only install the operating system once. Day to day use of the installed OS and particularly package managaement, upgrades etc are much more important, and in my opinion Debian is the clear winner here.

Re:Debian is probably worth the pain....

[BrokenHalo]

Ideally you only install the operating system once

OK, but none of us live in an ideal world. The closest we can get is a world where we get everything installed and running, and then think "hey! I should have put this/that/theother on its own partition!".

It's by tearing down and re-building what we've done that we learn how Linux (or any OS, for that matter) works.

I remember that one...

[douglasq]

It was a demo and you couldn't save a state. Once you quit, any changes you made were lost.

OS X on a G3

[MrTangent]

I'm running OS 10.2.6 on my G3 and it runs pretty damned well, all things considered. Granted I have 1 gigabyte of SDRAM and fairly fast 7200 rpm ATA/133 drives but I'm impressed with the speed on my "lowly" 400 mhz G3 Power Mac tower. I think OS X can run adequately on any 300mhz+ G3 (iMac, iBook or Power Mac). Granted you don't want to play graphics-intensive games on it, but you wouldn't be interested in Linux (or to an extent Macs) if you wanted to play games anyway.

In summation, has the original poster even tried to run OS X on the iBook? I'd give it whirl before dismissing it as a possibility.

Re:OS X on a G3

[Davidge]

I recently bought an old G3 PowerBook (WallStreet) 233 (Series II) for my wife. It came with 64Mb of RAM and a 2Gb HDD, and seems to run OS X 10.1 quite well (all things considered).

I ran YellowDog 2.3 on it for a few days to see how it performed, and in general, it ran pretty well too.

OS X 10.2 however would not install (or maybe it would but after waiting over an hour and not getting past the first two dialogs, I gave up - I presume this was more to do with the pitiful amount of RAM more than anything else).

Re:OS X on a G3

[MrTangent]

OS X generally needs at bare minimum 128 megs of RAM. I'd go at least 256 megs if I were you.

According to Everymac.com your Powerbook is an original Powerbook G3 (see bolded quote below) and therefore isn't supported in OS 10.2. However, you might try checking with XLR8yourmac.com because there are "hacks" available that enable "unsupported" Macs (old clones/beige, etc.) to run OS 10.2.

From Apple's OS X Requirements Page Quoted here:

Mac OS X Version 10.2 requires a Power Mac G3, G4, G4 Cube; iMac; PowerBook G3, G4; iBook; or eMac computer; at least 128MB of physical RAM and a built-in display or a display connected to an Apple-supplied video card. Mac OS X does not support the original PowerBook G3 or processor upgrade cards. Verify your hardware is supported from the list below

As with processor upgrades cards, this particular Powerbook, while officially unsupported, can probably be made to run OS 10.2 with a little ingeniunity and research. This page (cached, since the site seems to be down right now) might help you out.

Also you might want to upgrade the processor to a G4 in that Powerbook and gain OS 10.2 support, not to mention an extreme increase in speed (+Altivec support!) by buying one of these Crescendo G3 or G4 upgrade cards. I've personally bought stuff from Sonnet and can very much recommend them. I buy all my Mac stuff generally from the fantastic (and fast/cheap/honest) Macsales.com but you can find Sonnet Mac upgrade peripherals at just about any Mac reseller. If you do upgrade the Powerbook, be sure to pick up some RAM (I'd max it out to 512 megs if I were you) while you're at it. OWC/Macsales have very reliable and extremely cheap RAM. Just make sure to get the right kind by checking with one of the sites I provided.

Good luck.

Think this would do the trick?

[Anonymous Coward]

I Googled for... livecd ppc linux http://distro.ibiblio.org/pub/linux/distributions/ gentoo/experimental/ppc/livecd/nostages/gentoo-ppc -1.4_rc6-120403.iso

Re:Think this would do the trick?

[kerneljacabo]

No, it wouldn't. Gentoo uses livecd's to get you into the "install environment". The gentoo install process is alot more interactive then any other distro's installer. We chose this method of installing because you need a minimal GNU environment to compile and install everything. You could boot it on an imac and in theory set up a ramdisk and everything else, but I think the asker was clear in what his intentions/needs were.

KDE and GNOME

[Akito]

use fink if you want to install these, combine it with the apple X11 distro and you have one smoothe integration of GNOME (my favorite) and 10.2

Gentoo?

[justMichael]

I'm not sure if this has everything you are looking for but, Gentoo has live CD's for PPC.

Here is some info

Here are the ISO's

Re:Gentoo?

[zojas]

I second that! I run gentoo on my 700MHz ibook, it's way faster than OS X (even with 640mb ram!)

I documented my install

Re:Gentoo?

[deque_alpha]

Gentoo currently has the closest to what you are looking for ATM, though it really isn't all that close. It is a "live" system, but minimal at best. Just enough to get an install going pretty much.
I ditched OSX on my iBook in favor of Gentoo about 6 months ago and haven't looked back. Gentoo does a lot of stuff with the Live CD's on x86, and I really don't know why, but the interest just doesn't seem to be there. Hit the various #gentoo (especially #gentoo-ppc)forums on Freenode and try to rustle up some people. I'm sure they will have good answers as to why it hasn't really been done, but I expect most of them will be along the lines of "Nobody wants to".

Wallstreet is 2nd PBG3

[Anonymous Coward]

The original powerbook g3 was a derivative of the 603 based powerbook 3400 and is not supported under Mac OS X. The Wallstreet powerbook is supported.

Re:Wallstreet is 2nd PBG3

[Anonymous Coward]

It could be done on that original PB G3 using Xpostfacto

But certainly you would need to upgrade the RAM from 64 MB for OS X...

Define Smart Please

[tyrione]

If I can help an endearing woman watercolor artist/housewife, back in the late 1990's while working for Apple Enterprise Tech Support get Openstep 4.2 on a Toshiba Laptop with all the bells and whistles any 'smart' person with IT knowledge of hardware, device drivers and basic understandings of BIOS within the x86 realm should sure as hell know how to get Debian to install.

God how hard is it to download the disk images, burn them and boot off of CD? It's self explanatory.

And yes no distro seems to match even NeXTSTEP/Openstep's Installation process that now is part of OS X--that's a credit to the brilliance of the folks I as a peon was lucky to have bagels and cream cheese or playing foosball with (EOF Team were awesome players by the way)--but damn if you can't handle that for sure what hope is there for the general consumer to be able to install, outside of the RedHat world or SUSE world?

I'm trying to figure out what's stopping you from downloading the latest Trolltech source, compiling it for OS X and using OS X's xfree86's Quartz optimized X Server, then either compile KDE from source yourself by changing some of the configuration flags, or seeing if there are available packages already via Fink.

Not hard at all

[Anonymous Coward]

Debian is really a lot easier to install on an ibook than it is on x86 hardware. There's no fuss setting up XF86 or finding out about device drivers; all hardware is well known.
Install Debian, grab the latest benh kernel if your ibook is less than a year old (I don't know whether older ones need it too), compile with the .config which comes with BenH's patch, and on you go.

If you fail to get it right, a question on the debian-powerpc list is bound to get an answer within a few hours; the ibook is one of the most used ppc computers it seems.

A live CD

[jbolden]

If a live CD came out that made installing linux as easy as installing MacOS X then it would draw some negative attention from Apple I think.

Why? Apple makes pretty close to 100% of their profits on hardware sales. Software is just a way to sell hardare. They have had no objections to the Unix crowd that likes the iBook/Linux combination. Linux customers are customers that pay them lots of money and then they don't even have to support. Its hard to see Apple's downside.