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."

Comments

This has been postet a lot of times, but still...

[Anonymous Coward]

Official Gentoo-Linux-Zealot translator-o-matic

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."
"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 .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."

"...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..."
"I'm too stupid to understand that circular dependencies can be resolved by specifying BOTH .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)."

"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!"

-

Because OSX boot disks can be a pain.

[japhmi]

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.

Re:Requirements?

[pcp_ip]

it will only boot on a "new world" mac.

Gentoo LiveCD?

[Ed Avis]

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?

Re:Gentoo LiveCD?

[Blademan007]

A Gentoo LiveCD is a bootable demonstration of what Gentoo linux would look like on your machine. However, it is not a source compiled installation. But once the LiveCD is booted, you can install a source compiled Gentoo installation.

Get a hold of these guys

[ferratus]

We finally found people who ACTUALLY do RTFA -- *and* the comments.

They should be considered role model for this place or something.

Fear them.

Re:Get a hold of these guys

[carl67lp]

I'm a documentation editor for Gentoo, and I know first-hand that many, if not all, of the developers scour the Web (well, their favorite sites, like Slashdot, anyhow) and report back any news about Gentoo in the press. They gladly take the bad news with the good--using the bad, as in this case (the former lack of a PPC LiveCD) to retool things, add new features, and generally make people happier.

A lot of people scoff at the Gentoo fanatacism--including the developers--but at least, in this case, I think a lot of that is warranted. Perhaps not all of it, mind you, but definitely a lot. I think we're a good bunch of guys and gals.

Gentoo on PPC is really snappy!

[MarcQuadra]

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?

Re:I'm glad to see this happen!

[Requiem]

"Look, babe, I put Gentoo on your computer!"

"WHAT?!? Where are my Sims?!?"

"Um...woops?"

I'm evil.

Not to mention dead.

Re:Finally I can use the Lab MACs

[rkz]

There is a clause about tampering with software but as soon as I take the CD out everything should be as it should be! Those pasty students who work on the helpdesk don't say anything to me because I give them porn DIVX's.

Re:Apple vs PC - Without the Flame War

[plastik55]

Which hardware would you rather buy for a new home linux system?

x86 hardware for a desktop, Apple for a laptop.

Re:Apple vs PC - Without the Flame War

[Anonymous Coward]

Uhm, well I'm going to answer this in two ways:

First, if your friend is just into *nix, then OSX is an option, without any Linux whatsoever.

Second, there is no reason whatsoever to pay the prices on Apple's hardware unless you plan on using Apple's software. Which isn't to say it's not worth paying for Apple's hardware, it just seems to be a strange choice, paying extra for a software/hardware bundle and not using the software.

So, in summary:

Get a clone if you want a cheap Linux box (do hardware research FIRST mind you).

Get a Mac if you want the best consumer Unix currently available and installing Linux is just an added bonus.

Re:I'm glad to see this happen!

[pen]

This post could have been much shorter:

"Dude! I have a girlfriend!"

Gentoo icon

[sdibb]

When are we gonna see a Gentoo icon for Slashdot, like the other Linux distros have?

Re:Gentoo icon

[Cro Magnon]

When it's finished compiling.

Re:Why Gentoo?

[FreeUser]

LiveCDs are cool. I'm use Knoppix all the time (Linux bliss in the computer lab, finally).
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 ... 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.

Torrent files

[MentlFlos]

Ok... yeah its karma whoring but here are the torrent files.

Gnome Flavor
KDE Flavor

Re:This has been postet a lot of times, but still.

[Joe Enduser]

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!

Re:This has been postet a lot of times, but still.

[sg_oneill]

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.