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Linux Distributions for Powerbooks?
sol2k asks: "I just got myself a G4 Powerbook 12' and I am still amazed at the thing. Mac OS X is beatiful and sometimes even too intuitive for someone crossing from the Windows world. I had some nice experiences with Linux on Intel machines but would love to try out a Linux on the Powerbook and make use of the great hardware. Here's a simple question: What are my options? I know about Yellow Dog (old and doesn't seemt to be updated often), Debian/PPC (a bit too much time to set up than what I have available) and Mandrake (9.1 - that's really old). What Linux adventures have you had on your Mac?"
:-) Well, I've installed Gentoo on a G3 - and it works fairly well. Only problem I ever had was the Firewire card. Everything else worked. (Including the sound card). Mac-On-Linux (MOL) is also really fun - run MacOSX INSIDE of Linux.
Gentoo runs on PPCs, and is (so I hear) less trouble to set up than Debian. Worth looking at, anyways.
Cheers.
Ok, so it doesn't really answer your question, but I guess I'd ask why you want to do such a thing? I think that's a lot of the reason for the poor distribution support (actually, I think Yellow Dog is fairly good). There's just not a lot of need to do what you're asking. If you like a tool, you can probably get it with Fink.
"Let your heart soar as high as it will. Refuse to be average." - A. W. Tozer
I've used Debian and YellowDog on my G3 laptop. I've avoided gentoo because I don't like the thought of compiling everything on a 231MHz processor. I have used Gentoo on x86, and it is my distro of choice. The support is excellent, so I would give it a try.
You call Mandrake and Yellow Dog old, but not Debian stable? :-)
Yellow Dog!,
although the distributions do not seem to be updated that often. There are always updates available via apt-get and rpm.
I dont see a huge point in going for a source distro unless you have something really new like a G5; Yellow dog is pretty well optimised for the more standardised (than pc) Mac/PPC architecture. In my experience it feel's rock-solid, fast and seems very stable than most x86 distro's i have tried. Terrasoft have also been doing PPC distro's for much longer than most vendors and as such I wouldnt dismiss it too quickly.
Electronic Music Made Using Linux http://soundcloud.com/polyp
Any idea what the schedule is for the next Yellow Dog release? The current version is ages old by now.
What I'm listening to now on Pandora...
How do you classify Yellow Dog Linux as 'old'? They update it regularly, in my experience--I guess you can't get nightly builds, or even once a month; but it's not that far behind.
And it's probably your best bet. Unless you want to hack on Darwin, which gets rid of the non-free parts of OS X.
--
$tar -xvf
With essentially BSD under the hood, I've never seen the motivation to put Linux on my Mac. With Fink, Qt, Mono, X11, etc., most things from the Linux world are already available, plus the nicer UI to boot. I don't have enough hours in the day as it is, and the time to admin/RTFM has been my biggest gripe about keeping Linux boxes as production machines at home.
I've been using fink for a while, and I'd have to say that it does not have all the tools I love. It sure has a lot of them, but not all. Even some of the ones it does have are iffy - gnucash, for example.
/, what crap you have in /sw, and what crap you have in both but is marginally different because / has the BSD version and /sw has the gnu version.
As for beauty, if by beauty you mean having a computer that contains three marginally but not entirely independent file hierarchies, yes, fink is beautiful. If you use fink for much more than a few X apps you like and think it's fun to have to remember what crap you have in
Fink is a great system for getting a few apps you need to work on your Mac, but it's not a perfect solution for every situation or every person. Heck, I dual boot Linux and OS X on my PB, but I also use Fink. Whatever works.
"I just got myself a G4 Powerbook 12'"
Holy shit! That's a really big screen. How do you carry around a 12 foot powerbook?
It's good to use your head, but not as a battering ram.
There's already been mention of BSD running things behind the scenes on a Mac. If you install the development tools that came with the system, you should be able to download, compile, and run almost any software which works on Linux or other Unix variants.
It's good to use your head, but not as a battering ram.
would love to try out a Linux on the Powerbook and make use of the great hardware.
How can you 'make use' of the hardware when you install an OS with poor hardware support, weak drivers and virtually no software being written to take advantage of it? Then when/if you run something like MOL, you're just beating yourself over the head.
There's no advantage, just a whole heap of disadvantages (even when it comes to software support and speed), except for being able to say "I'm running Linux on a Mac!" And wait for an "Ooooo."
Are you trolling ?
Let's be honest, Linux on PPC runs like shit. have you tried any other distro's than Gentoo? While I have not tried Gentoo on PPC (dont hugely see the point ; unlike x86 ; PPC/Mac architectures are a lot less varied and therefore easier to more tightly optimise for a binary distro) In my experience Yellow dog on a blue G3 runs extremely speedy. Much faster than its native MacOS.
Electronic Music Made Using Linux http://soundcloud.com/polyp
Unfortunately due to the use of the NVidia GoForce 5 chipset in the PB 12", we will not see any linux support in the near future. This is because NVidia refuses to even release the specifications on how to wake the chip up from sleep. This means that on the PB 12", you cannot adjust the screen brightness nor can you sleep the laptop, which makes it pretty much useless as a linux laptop. This is really a shame, though, as the 12" would make a wonderful linux machine if we could get support.
In the meantime, you can always run linux on top of OS X using a virtual machine like Qemu. I have compiled all of my tools (including the full Gnome 2.4 and Mono and Monodevelop) with fink, so I don't really need linux on it.
Maybe I'm just ignorant of Apple naming conventions, but doesn't G4 Powerbook 12' mean a 12 foot screen?
What! why? You have a perfectly good running Un*x on your Mac already. You don't need Linux on it. BSD is better anyway.
Run Mac OS, get iTerm, SSHKeyChain, OmniWeb 5, NetNewsWire, SubEthaEdit, Photoshop Elements, TigerLaunch, Desktop Manager, WClock, WeatherMenu, and Konfabulator.
There is a ton more. There is a lot of freeware for the Mac. And you can run your Linux and BSD apps on it too. As you see above; Fink, BSD ports, and many others.
The above is not worth reading.
that contains three marginally but not entirely independent file hierarchies
/, what crap you have in /sw, and what crap you have in both but is marginally different because / has the BSD version and /sw has the gnu version.
/sw are far from 'marginally different'.
/private in order to make sure that any BSD/POSIX-like applications can still find the right directories.
/sw and fink to it's own devices and lay my waste on the rest of the system.
Three? You only list two.
have to remember what crap you have in
/ and
/ contains the OpenStep layout, including a whole lot of symlinks and the use of
I think the 'beauty' is that neither of these systems get involved with or fuck-over each other. I just leave
(BTW, you've also got darwin-ports if fink is not powerful enough for you)
4.0 is coming out soon. 3.x (2003) is pretty good, 2.x was a bit dated.
http://lists.terrasoftsolutions.com/pipermail/yel
...he's essentially right. OSX is the best desktop Unix available. Why replace it at all? You've got a spiffy G4. I just don't see the point. Now, if you had a G3, yeah, ok, I can see that, as OSX runs like a dog on that cpu. Yellow Dog would be a good choice there. But damn, a brand new G4? Keep the Mac system on it.
Life is hard, and the world is cruel
No, I am not trolling.
yellow Dog would be nice, except for that they update really, really rarelly (people are bitching about this a lot on the web) and as such, they have really old packages.
To me, this is not acceptable. I'm sorry, but the beauty of OSS is that the softwares are released "early and often". Running e.g. KDE 3.0 when 3.2 is out is not my idea of fun.
Also, on the Mac, you often *need* up to date package. For example, XFree. My iBook can't even start XFree with the version shipped with YDL.
So to me, YDL is not an option. Maybe if they do release an update, it will be worth it (until they are deprecated again), but for now, it's been too long.
Also, my point about many software not running on PPC is quite true.
Another thing is, binaries are rare. When you see anyone saying they have binary software, they usually don't run on PPC.
IP Therefore I am.
Yellow dog is pretty nice (well the logo is) but your stuck with rpm hell,
i had my gentoo system finished (base2 to X) in under a day , but i dont use gnome nor kde bloat so that will account for a lot.
My personal top3:
And ofcourse; if you're thinking bout alternative OS's on powerpc MorphOS should be mentioned
How come everyone thinks debian is so hard?
/etc/apt/sources.list to point to your favorite debian mirror and then 'apt-get update && apt-get upgrade' and you're done. Or you can just stick with knoppix. It doesn't get much easier than that.
Here da go --> knoppix for ppc. Burn CD, boot, run knx-hdinstall, boot from hdd, edit
They do update, and a major update is coming very soon. Source? Freenode > #yellowdog This is the first release with the new YDL lead developer (Owen) so be on the look out for good stuff!
Are you secure enough in your masculinity to run 'man touch'?
guess I'd ask why you want to do such a thing?
Personal Preference, I'm guessing. I smoke, and I started smoking basics back when they were the cheapest brand. They are no longer the cheapest, and they certainly aren't the best, but I still smoke them because I've grown accustomed to them.
OSes are no different. There may be tools that do just about the same thing, but they don't "taste" the same.
"Inattention makes clowns of us all" -Bean
mac user crap about "intuitive" interface and whatnot. nothing about a computer is intuitive. give one to someone that has never seen one before and it will never do anything. also, htf is something "too intuitive?" seems to prove my earlier point...
Its a fallacy that Terrasoft dont have regular updates. Sure the distro's maybe dont have quite the same release cycle as x86 counterparts but There are always apt-get's and rpm's available regularly. YDL is updated regularly even if the distros come out less often, but they are usually very stable and mature.
... Most Distro's both PPC and x86 come in binary form; source code is usually supplied on a different CD. Im not entirely sure what point you are making in your final comment. But to reiterate my comment in a different a way.
..just yet .... (last time i did an rsync KDE 3.3 Beta wasnt in the tree).
;)
...
I was referring to a binary distribution, btw
The main point of compiling from source ala gentoo (as i do on my athlon dualie) in most cases is to benefit for the kinds of performance tweaks that are specific to a certain type of architecture. (Different optimisations for Intel, AMD and so forth) PPC however generally speaking is made by one manufacturer and in most cases on similar motherboards made by Apple. Point being, that a Binary distro ala Yellow Dog can be optimised to a higher degree than a typical generic x86 one; Id also trust Terrasoft who have been doing linux for PPC longer than most to have a much better idea about making a stable, optimised distro than a vendor that typically concentrates on x86 arch.
Of course if you insist on having bleeding edge then that is another case then gentoo is the way to go but hey Gentoo isnt really bleeding edge
It sound more like to me that you have never tried Yellow Dog, and are basing your comments on something that you have read somewhere or been told by someone. I'd suggest giving it a go because you will probably bite your lip and be surprised
Nick
Electronic Music Made Using Linux http://soundcloud.com/polyp
Really? It takes two seconds to compile Hello World.... Just forget about trying to run OpenOffice, or even the simplest of games. And diskspace (1.7G with 128MB swap) is a bit of a negative. And there's not much RAM. See what I'm saying?
Three was right: /, /sw, and ``spatial''.
Unless you spend your Mac OS X days on an almost hidden terminal emulator, there's also the file hierarchy that many visual programs use.
http://eth0.is-a-geek.org/
Well I decided to give Gentoo a try on my PB. It works except for a few very nagging caveats:
1. Sleep does not work. This makes it next to useless for a laptop OS.
2. There's only 2D support for the Radeon 9600 Mobility. ATI, to my knowledge, doesn't have an accelerated driver for Mac Linux.
3. The Airport Extreme card (Broadcom rebranded) is completely unsupported. This means you'd have to use a PC-Card or USB wireless adapter if you want wireless.
Those are my big three complaints. Its neat to fiddle with, but until those are addressed, I won't be using it regularly.
But I did try out Mac-On-Linux. Its really cool. But again no hardware accelerated video so can't play games, and iTunes won't recognize my iPod within MOL.
I've got a Powerbook G3 (Wallstreet) running Yellowdog. While Yellowdog was easy to install and get up and running, it's not my favourite distro -- it's based on Red Hat, and I'm a Debianite. I like Gentoo a bit as well. Unfortunately, both these distros seem to be fairly difficult to install on OldWorld Macs. Gentoo's Live CD has no support for OldWorld at all, and Debian's new D-I is currently broken for OldWorld. Any suggestions for installing Linux on OldWorld?
Apart from it not being Debian, I have nothing much against YD. It's well put together and mostly Just Works®. There are lots of extra packages available from third party apt-sources, so most apps not available in the default install, or those that are obsolete (Gaim!) are just a few Google searches and commands away.
My experiances are all bad. If you have OS X, just use it. Don't even bother with linux. There's no good reason, unless you're a masochist.
I installed YDL 3.0.1 on my 12" iBook G4, and had very similar results:
I can't comment on the sleep thing, since I didn't actually get to try to use YDL as a working OS, but I can add that you can't non-destructively repartition the hard drive. Hours of reinstalling the system and restoring files (twice) did not sit well with me since I never got a usable YDL system out of it. The graphics support should be on its way soon, but without the 802.11g, YDL is not an option for me.
HBH"Smart is sexy." -- D. Scully ("War of the Coprophages")
I run Debian on an older Powerbook (a Pismo... and I'm not replacing it until I can get a second battery bay in a new machine, dammit) and it's wonderful. I know that the install can be a little bit daunting at first, but the finished product is solid and very usable. Give it a shot.
--saint
Fink worked great for me when all I wanted was SQLite and nothing else. I tried to install it myself, but the ./configure had some sort of error and I couldn't figure it out for the life of me, but the MUD I develop for requires SQLite.
Fink was the answer. And, although SQLite was in the 'experimental' section, it still installed fine and works great.
Comment of the year
Gentoo. Its addicted me to wireless. Gentoo takes a while to get going, 2 days from stage 1 on this box. Once its installed its fast. Feels faster than my 900mhz dell at home, though I've never really done any benchmarks.
Because some people want software freedom. MacOS X is non-free software -- one does not have the freedom to share or modify some parts of the system. For people interested in software freedom, a system with proprietary chunks will not do. GNU/Linux or the BSDs can be the basis of an entirely free OS. MacOS X (which, I believe, is FreeBSD plus some proprietary software) cannot.
Digital Citizen
WTF are you shitting? It runs great! I have been running Yellow Dog on my old 7500 with a 180MHz PPC 604e for years and while it doesn't exactly burn up the track, it's perfectly usable. Even KDE isn't horribly slow. It whoops my old P-II 200MHz box up and down. And I've very rarely had trouble compiling things. The box too old for OS-X and MacOS 9 crashed every hour on the hour. Linux runs rock solid. So STFU!
-73, de n1ywb
www.n1ywb.com
Any NetBSD/PPC users here?
I'm as mimsy as the next borogove but your mome raths are completely outgrabe.
I recently purchased an iBook G4 and I'm dual-booting it with OS X and YDL. I wanted linux so I could A) keep in practice with the Linux world and B) so I could run Quanta for working on my websites (yes I can use Fink to run it... but it's a couple versions behind and not as smooth as it is on linux).
The problems I've had were that the graphics card didn't run X upon install. With the default kernel it would use the frame buffer driver for X and run with 4 colors (not so pretty or useful). I had to download a custom YDL 2.6 kernel from ppckernel.org and after THAT the sound and eth0 didn't work.
Bottom line is that it's going to take some tweaking to get your basic services to work. It may or may not be worth the effort. Fink is pretty good, and most things run fairly well on OS X (and the basic iLife and Open Office stuff should work well enough to serve MOST functions that aren't deeply involved in linux specifically.
My big problem with ALL of the linux on Mac distro's I've seen is that none of them take advantage of the more uniform hardware on a Mac. If you've got a mac... you usually know what model/version it is, you should be able to, during install, tell linux what system you're running and it should have all the settings "built-in" for the given hardware. Linux install on Apple hardware should be 10 times easier than it is on x86... but it isn't yet.
If you're committed to running linux in a dual-boot way you may want to go ahead and partition before you get too much running on OS X and then wait for YDL 4.0 which should be better and is a re-work from the ground up based on Fedora.
CharlesP
wordtrip.com
I've recently added a PowerBook to my network as well. And while I have many other Linux machines (even my PlayStation 2 runs Linux...), I personally can't see the point of running Linux on the PowerBook.
Just setup SSH, and install the X11 support from the OS X installation CDs. Then you can pretty much recompile any Linux app you want to run. Or do as I do -- get a cheap Intel box, install Linux on it, and access it remotely through the laptop.
OS X is the best desktop Unix right now. I'm not sure why you'd want to downgrade to Linux -- all you're going to achieve is less functionality then what you already have.
(And this is coming from a guy who has been using Linux a whole lot longer than OS X. I love Linux for its openess and the freedoms surrounding it. I run more Linux thn anything else. But if you already have a license to run OS X, it's a vastly better desktop Unix, simple as that).
Yaz.
While I am happy to see that you were able to find a use for your old computer by running linux, telling people to shut the fuck up does not make you look really profesionnal and it makes it harder to take you seriously.
Well anyway, personnally, I much prefer to run linux on a i386 than a PPC. I admit, you *can* run linux on a PPC and it works (apperently) great!
I tried it for a couple of months, didn't like it at all. To me, having many of my prefered software to be either missing (lftp comes to mind) or published a few weeks or months later is not fun.
Also, perhaps your old hardware is fully supported, but my iBook G4 isn't. It took a while to get XFree working (it works now in the new version of X) and powersaving is still very shacky (that's not to say not working at all)
Because of this, I now run Panther (and now Tiger!) on my ibook and I'm very happy with it.
If you find that linux runs great, then great for you, but please don't insult anyone that doesn't agree with you.
IP Therefore I am.
There aren't many linux ppc distros, and all have been mentioned so far, except:
Crux PPC
From the site:
CRUX PPC is a lightweight GNU/Linux distribution targeted at experienced Linux users. The primary focus of this distribution is "keep it simple", which is reflected in a simple tarball-based package system, BSD-style init scripts, and a relatively small collection of trimmed packages. The secondary focus is utilization of new Linux features and recent tools and libraries. CRUX PPC also has an innovative ports system which makes it easy to install and upgrade applications.
The same is true of saying "___ runs like shit", Mr. Pot.
http://alternatives.rzero.com/
KDE on PB3400---very nice
Reality is all that stuff that doesn't care if you believe in it or not.--Solomon Short
What you meant to say was that Linux is missing support for some of the peripherals on your cutting-edge powerbook, and the distributions you have used haven't included all of the software you like.
Maybe you don't realize that Linux is a community effort? I'm sure that all of the other PowerBook owners out there would love it if you would work on some drivers to help fully support it. And I'm sure the distribution maintainers would happily accept package submissions of your favorite apps. In the meantime, yes please STFU.
-73, de n1ywb
www.n1ywb.com
Unless you spend your Mac OS X days on an almost hidden terminal emulator, there's also the file hierarchy that many visual programs use.
:Macintosh HD: instead of / and separate directories with : instead.
Programs uses the same one as the terminal and the rest of the system.
The 'other' hierarchy is one for legacy programs which like to use
What I meant was this:
- Linux is much slower on PPC and is much less "optimized" because there's less developers working on it.
- Several applications do not work on PPC. This includes most "enterprise" apps such as Oracle and the J2EE stuff as well as several popular desktop apps.
- A lot of the newer hardware do not work well on linux, including the ever important airport express and power management.
- There is much less user activity and thus much less tech support available for PPC linux users.
- Compilation speed is quite important on a PPC because binary packages are not always available. Want the latest Firefox with the security patch ? Compile it, cause you won't find it on mozilla.org. This is also something to factor in.
I *do* realize that linux is a community effort. I am a programmer myself and am involved in 2 OSS software. I also advocate linux everywhere I go. I am running several machines with linux on them and am doing everything I can to help the developers (including buying a bunch of stuff with real $)
Yes, I know it would be more productive to write drivers than to say it doesn't work, but I am already involved elsewhere and I've decided to use another machine.
So basically, based on all that, I still think it's not a great machine to run linux on. You might be able to get it to run, but it's not at the same level of "polish" as linux on i386 is. This is a shame cause Apple makes great products, but that's the way it is.
Run like shit was perhaps a bit strong, but linux on PPC does not run flawlesly and isn't the greatest thing ever either.
If you ever buy a powerbook or a G5 or an ibook and you install linux on it and you realize half of what you want to run won't work or works really slowly, perhaps you'll change your mind.
IP Therefore I am.
It's been a while, but I'm sure that Yellow Dog uses deb, not rpm.
I just dug out my old Yellow Dog CDs, and it does use rpm after all. Now I'm trying to figure out what deb-based distro I used.
I'm running Debian/unstable on a 12" G4 Powerbook. It's pretty good but there are some issues.
You will need the latest Linux kernel. I'm running 2.6.7. A few months ago you would have needed the benh kernel but all the stuff you need has now been rolled back into the Linus kernel.
Even with the latest kernel you will not get full support from your hardware. Here are the big issues:
All the other hardware works well. DVD, CDRW, USB2, Firewire, audio, Ethernet, CPU scaling, etc.
Debian packages everything you need but doesn't configure anything the way you want it. So the initial configuration time is quite significant. I took 2-3 weeks to fix all the annoying problems (eg, the trackpad would trigger a mouse click when I tapped it with my thumb; fixed that with the trackpad program).
I recommend installing the powerpc-utils, pmud-utils, and powernowd packages. You should also enable dev/mac_hid/mouse_button_emulation and vm/laptop_mode.
I know a lot of people with similar G4 laptops (12" or 17", nobody with 15" for some reason). They all think I'm mad for running Linux. But I like Linux. I tried MacOSX and despite being a UNIX-like OS and supposedly the "greatest GUI in existence", I just didn't like it as much as Debian and GNOME. If the sleep worked I'd be ecstatic. I'm sometimes tempted to switch to MacOSX just for sleep support but I've never been annoyed enough to switch.
YDL mainly uses rpms, but they also give you the debian tools so you can do both, ...
;)
so we're both right
Debian?
It's hard to be religious when certain people are never incinerated by bolts of lightning.
I just got myself a 12' member through an email advertisement, and was wondering what to do with it now? I know traditionally you use it with women, but that's old - I was thinking of trying something newer. I haven't looked into much besides this - I'm just so happy to have the darned thing!
So, what are your suggestions?
cyn, free software and *nix operating systems enthusiast.
I took my 400Mhz TiBook and made it a dual-boot machine about a year ago. It worked very well and I did it because I had no experience with Linux.
I eventually decided to simply stick with OS X, which I do think is more useful (maybe with Fink for tools) for PPC/Apple hardware.
It runs great!
No, it runs like Linux. That means, you have spotty driver coverage, rudimentary (if any) power management, and you toss away all of the Altivec and GPU acceleration work that Apple's already done for you.
-jcr
The only title of honor that a tyrant can grant is "Enemy of the State."
I help operate a Beowulf cluster of 16 Apple xServes, and I'm wondering if anyone has had any success in getting Debian or Gentoo onto them. One of our goals is to benchmark performance differences between platforms so we'd like to get our Apple, our two x86 clusters, and our planned Sun Fire cluster running the same OS. I've tried both Debian and Gentoo in the xServes, but neither of them will boot. Has anyone solved this problem?
I put up a page with all the hard parts of the install
I have never had a problem running GNUcash - how is it iffy? I used to use quicken but I'm very happy with gnucash (i only look after my personal finances though)
I had some dependency issues during install (dependecies for packages required by gnucash not gnucash itself) but that was the only prob
No, that's just a naming convention and actually changes depending on which filesystem you are running OS X on. It just tries to abstract the differences away since you shouldn't have to worry about them.
/etc, /lib, /bin, etc.
OS X still uses the old OS9 style hierarchy (which is also similar to the one used in NEXTSTEP) with stuff in folders with names like System, Library, Applications, etc. rather than