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

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

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.

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.

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.

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