Slashdot Mirror
Gentoo Offers PPC LiveCDs
drunkentiger writes "Ripped right off their homepage: In a recent Slashdot article, someone asked if it were possible to create a fully-featured bootable Linux LiveCD for the Macintosh.
We thought this was a great idea. So today, we are releasing two full-featured LiveCDs for the PowerPC: one with KDE 3, and another with GNOME 2. Take a look at the KDE LiveCD running MacOS X in a window via Mac on Linux. LiveCDs can be downloaded here or from these mirrors."
Gentoo Linux is an interesting new distribution with some great features. Unfortunately, it has attracted a large number of clueless wannabes and leprotards who absolutely MUST advocate Gentoo at every opportunity. Let's look at the language of these zealots, and find out what it really means...
"Gentoo makes me so much more productive."
"Although I can't use the box at the moment because it's compiling something, as it will be for the next five days, it gives me more time to check out the latest USE flags and potentially unstable optimisation settings."
"Gentoo is more in the spirit of open source!"
"Apart from Hello World in Pascal at school, I've never written a single program in my life or contributed to an open source project, yet staring at endless streams of GCC output whizzing by somehow helps me contribute to international freedom."
"I use Gentoo because it's more like the BSDs."
"Last month I tried to install FreeBSD on a well-supported machine, but the text-based installer scared me off. I've never used a BSD, but the guys on Slashdot say that it's l33t though, so surely I must be for using Gentoo."
"Heh, my system is soooo much faster after installing Gentoo." .debs can be rebuilt with a handful of commands (AND Red Hat
supplies i686 kernel and glibc packages), my box MUST be faster. It's nothing
to do with the fact that I've disabled all startup services and I'm running
BlackBox instead of GNOME or KDE."
"I've spent hours recompiling Fetchmail, X-Chat, gEdit and thousands of other programs which spend 99% of their time waiting for user input. Even though only the kernel and glibc make a significant difference with optimisations, and RPMs and
"...my Gentoo Linux workstation..."
"...my overclocked AMD eMachines box from PC World, and apart from the third-grade made-to-break components and dodgy fan..."
"You Red Hat guys must get sick of dependency hell..." .rpms together on the command line, and that problems
hardly ever occur if one uses proper Red Hat packages instead of mixing
SuSE, Mandrake and Joe's Linux packages together (which the system wasn't
designed for)."
"I'm too stupid to understand that circular dependencies can be resolved by specifying BOTH
"All the other distros are soooo out of date."
"Constantly upgrading to the latest bleeding-edge untested software makes me more productive. Never mind the extensive testing and patching that Debian and Red Hat perform on their packages; I've just emerged the latest GNOME beta snapshot and compiled with -O9 -fomit-instructions, and it only crashes once every few hours."
"Let's face it, Gentoo is the future."
"OK, so no serious business is going to even consider Gentoo in the near future, and even with proper support and QA in place, it'll still eat up far too much of a company's valuable time. But this guy I met on #animepr0n is now using it, so it must be growing!"
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I'm assuming I can boot this on my older PCI Mac (PowerWave 604/120, old mac clone). Does anyone know differently?
This is great! When the Lab runs out of normal PC's theres always a few Macs left and now with my shiny Linux PPC cd I can use these heaten machines without cringing at MacOS 9 and actually have some decent apps.
There is no god
This is great, because making an OSX boot disk can be a pain in the arse. I could use this to run a program like Radmind to image a mac from a CD. With Unix(tm) tools able to run cross-platform, I can use Linux as a repair cd.
Very happy.
"Giving money and power to government is like giving whiskey and car keys to teenage boys" P. J. O'Rourke
I'm confused. Does this mean you stick the CD into your computer, it makes a huge RAM disk, copies in the source code, compiles it all, and two weeks later you have a system ready to use right away?
-- Ed Avis ed@membled.com
I have heard the Apple vs PC discussion a lot; however, recently a *nix friend of mine was asking me if the apple or PC hardware was better for a new *nix installation.
I don't know... so now I ask you...
Which hardware would you rather buy for a new home linux system?
Thanks in advance...
Davak
When my girlfriend bought an iBook, I begged her to let me put Gentoo on it. She wasn't keen on that at all, enjoying the Mac OS X interface just fine, thank you.
Now I'm finally able to run Gentoo on her system without screwing anything up. This should prove to be a lot of fun:
"Look, babe, I put Gentoo on your computer!"
"WHAT?!? Where are my Sims?!?"
"Um...woops?"
I'm evil.
Honestly, though, this is going to be great for a lot of developers. Now we can take a couple of Gentoo LiveCDs around with us and boot nearly any personal computer up with our favorite distribution.
I work for Gentoo, but I'm also honestly hooked on it. And I'm no zealot either--I know its limitations and I know its strengths. But the release of a PPC LiveCD can do nothing but help the overall Linux effort, including Gentoo, and will undoubtedly be a boon for all of OSS.
Seriously!
SuSE had a decent PPC distribution too. This seems like such a no-brainer... probably the only way you could expect widespread adoption from the Mac crowd.
Is this truly the only Earth I can live on?
We finally found people who ACTUALLY do RTFA -- *and* the comments.
They should be considered role model for this place or something.
Fear them.
IP Therefore I am.
I've been running Gentoo-1.4 release candidates on my G3 server for almost a year now, I can tell you, Gentoo and PPC are an awesome combination.
The PowerPC architecture is amazingly snappy and responsive, even though my box only has a 450MHz CPU. I get the feeling that the PPC arch is a lot less 'laggy' than the x86, just a vague feeling, but it's quite nice. Compiling my whole distro with "-mcpu=750" and a few other options has made my old box into quite a workhorse. Anyone else want to share PPC/Linux experiences?
"Sometimes, I think Trent just needs a cup of hot chocolate and a blankie." -Tori Amos on Nine Inch Nails
As I look for a fast mirror to download from, I see that many of the mirrors have not been updated yet. In addition, some of them do not seem to have complete files (4.7M for an ISO is a bit small, don't you think?).
/releases/ppc/livecd/1.4_rc7 for the files.
Look around and see what you can find. Also, you'll want to look in
When are we gonna see a Gentoo icon for Slashdot, like the other Linux distros have?
just before killing you.
I tried playing around with yellow dog, but sometimes it would mess with my boot sequence, and I couldnt boot into OSX native mode.
This would be great, you dont have to touch the mac's boot sectors.
I dunno if this will work for the LiveCD, but if you have an oldworld mac, and don't have a macos install/hfs partition, check this out: http://www.mfdh.ca/~mfdh/apple/debian_on_oldworld_ mac.html
please don't /. it to death :) Perhaps someone has mirroring abilities?
I got a +5, Troll
LiveCDs are cool. I'm use Knoppix all the time (Linux bliss in the computer lab, finally).
... we get all the benefits of being able to give away live CDs to our less computer-literate friends with our favorite distro, but most importantly, we can use the disks ourselves to install Gentoo, upgrade, or rescue it, and all the utilities present are familiar and located in familiar places (something not always true with a liveCd from another distro). Of course, this works both ways if one prefers Debian, Mandrake, or what have you.
But what is the logic behind using a source-based distribution for a LiveCD?
I don't have anything against Gentoo, but fail to see *why* Gentoo...
Is PPC support better with Gentoo? Or are the Gentoo guys just the first ones to do this for PPCs?
First, Gentoo is much more than a source based distro.
1) portage is arguably the best package manager known to man. It exceeds IMHO apt-get, which is perhaps the second (or maybe third, depending on one's POV) finest package manager. Having easy access to portage from a live CD is fantastic for those who want to go the next step and actually install Gentoo, or rescue an existing Gentoo system.
2) Being a source based distro means one can optimize one's build to their own hardware. Taken a step further, one could optimize a Gentoo LiveCD for their hardware (PPC, Athlon v. Intel, etc.)
3) Source based v. Binary based is, for purposes of RUNNING the LiveCD, completely orthogonal, as the LiveCD itself contains all binaries. So, the best answer to your question as to why is "why not?"
While the tools available to Gentooers allow for more optimization out of the box than, say, Debian by default (yes, you can build debian from source with apt-get, but as one who as done so I can say it is quite painful), to those running the LiveCD the only affect will be a faster, snappier LiveCD, assuming they have downloaded an ISO optimized for their architecture.
For those of us running Gentoo it is a godsend
The Future of Human Evolution: Autonomy
Gnome Flavor
KDE Flavor
Real men use rpm -i --force, you insensitive clod.
I'm too stupid to understand that circular dependencies can be resolved by specifying BOTH .rpms together on the command line
Yes, that's me. But at least I know how to find useful Linux tips by including stupid as a search term!
Have Linux installed at your place in Amsterdam, for cheap
Really, I think that's true for most people on Slashdot in general. I myself always WANTED a 'cleaner' source-based distro without the hangups of Debian, and Gentoo provides it. It's very possible to achieve a stable and fast system with Gentoo, you just have to be moderate with your make.conf settings.
I think the BEST thing about gentoo is the installation process. I finally learned how daemons get started, how to set up networking and NFS. All these things were either hidden from me behind GUI utilities or prevented from working properly by services that I didn't know about on more 'turnkey' distros.
Mandrake is cool because a newbie can get it to work. Gentoo is cool because a newbie can become a knowledgeable user after a few installs.
Thanks to Gentoo I finally understand HOW all this *NIX stuff works under the hood and I am MUCH more competent on any *NIX box. I no longer cower in fear of the bash prompt, instead I command my boxen like a pro.
Also, I never liked the 'full-featured' desktops for linux that ship with RedHat or Mandrake. GNOME and KDE always felt slow and unfocused to me. With Gentoo it was amazingly simple to build a system with WindowMaker and the apps I needed without having the overhead of KDE/GNOME running behind it. When I boot up gentoo my RAM usage is 14MB, my 'barebones' mandrake box uses 72MB to get to "login:"
"Sometimes, I think Trent just needs a cup of hot chocolate and a blankie." -Tori Amos on Nine Inch Nails
There is no such thing as a RW mode for CD-RWs. They can be written and blanked only. They cannot be used like a regular hard disk, unless you want to delve into proprietary systems like DirectCD, InCD, etc., none of which work under Linux.
It's hard to be religious when certain people are never incinerated by bolts of lightning.
I'm amazed that Gentoo Games was not mentioned they released Wolfenstien and have a bittorent to download it!
Ah.. hehe.
That reminds me of an old search tip I worked out as a techy.
If you cant find an answer to the problem with a bit of equipment, put the name in and add either "fu*ked" or "hosed". Wierdly it works 99% of the time for me.
Excuse the Unicode crap in my posts. That's an apostrophe, and slashdot is busted.
I agree about the future of computing, but I think every neighborhood / office /building /small business will want someone who knows the technology inside-and-out to implement it on a large scale.
Sure, compiling the kernel isn't something Joe User wants to do, but if Joe User want to sit down and work, someone in the company's job is to make sure his PC is getting decent performance. The boss isn't going to want to buy new servers and PCs when there's plenty of life to squeeze out of what's already there, those days are (almost) over.
I don't want everyone to start adminning gentoo boxes, I'll admin boxes for them for some loot. That's my niche. The users will be running Gentoo, but they'll never have to look at GCC output or think about syncing the portage tree.
Also, your idea that Operating Systems are going to get simpler is just not feasable. They'll get easier to USE but the tradeoff is that under-the-hood they'll be that much more complex. All technology is like that, a modern car is a very complex machine; sure, automatic transmission is easy to use, but it's a LOT more complex to design, fix, or diagnose than the old manual trannies. Windows XP is (arguably) easier to USE than w98, but it's really an order of magnitude more complex beneath the presentation.
"Sometimes, I think Trent just needs a cup of hot chocolate and a blankie." -Tori Amos on Nine Inch Nails
Simply install your filesystem(s) of choice on your spare / and /boot partiton, mount them under /mnt/gentoo (or whever), untar the stage 1 tarball into /mnt/gentoo (or wherever), mount -o bind /proc /mnt/gentoo/pric (or wherever/proc) per the install docs, and install in a chrooted environment.
:-)
Simply, eh?