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?"

Comments

Gentoo

[SirPrize]

:-) 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.

Re:Gentoo

[SirPrize]

Here's the link to Mac-on-Linux, along with the screenshots.

Re:Gentoo

[Anonymous Coward]

Gentoo [gentoo.org] runs on PPCs, and is (so I hear) less trouble to set up than Debian. Worth looking at, anyways.

Gentoo? Easy to set up? What have you been smoking?

Unless you finding chrooting, making partitions from the command line, watching 8 hours of compiler output, all to get a working terminal with maybe vi and lynx, and then more work for any graphics at all, including more compiler time?

No, I'd say Debian is easier to set up, though I've never done it on a mac.

Gentoo, probably

[agraupe]

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.

Yellow Dog,

[polyp2000]

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.

The difference

[Otter]

In my experience, the big advantage Yellow Dog has is that their Mac focus means that Mac-specific bells and whistles (pbbuttonsd or Mac-On-Linux, for example) are much more likely to be provided and installed with sensible defaults. You get a polished system much more readily. I've had lousy luck with Mandrake and SuSE, but as always with Linux, YMMV.

Any idea what the schedule is for the next Yellow Dog release? The current version is ages old by now.

Re:The difference

[Anonymous Coward]

I compiled KDE on a Sparcstation 20 running at 60Mhz. It took 10 days, but ran surprisingly quickly once it finished. Yeah, it took two minutes to come up, but once up wasn't nearly as bad as I feared. That 231Mhz PPC machine shouldn't be any problem at all. The best thing about Gentoo is you can optimize everything from the kernel up for your exact hardware, minimizing space* and maximizing speed. Don't want Gnome or the overhead? Just exclude it in your USES variable and compile. Sure, it takes a while, and yes you have to do a lot by hand, but it really is worth it.

* The portage tree eats some space, true, but you can share it over NFS with multiple machines, if you like.

On a more serious note

[raider_red]

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.

Re:Gentoo, Debian, ... not much else

[polyp2000]

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.

No good linux support for PB 12" forthcoming

[caseih]

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.

Re:Gentoo, Debian, ... not much else

[ferratus]

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.

Re:Gentoo, definately

[denthijs]

using gentoo on a risc processor kicks arse, those 231MHz can crunch numbers like crazy
Yellow dog is pretty nice (well the logo is) but your stuck with rpm hell, .. debian has its usual pro and cons, ..
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:

1. Gentoo
2. GNU/Debian
3. Yellow Dog

And ofcourse; if you're thinking bout alternative OS's on powerpc MorphOS should be mentioned

Re:Gentoo, Debian, ... not much else

[polyp2000]

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.

I was referring to a binary distribution, btw ... 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.

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 ..just yet .... (last time i did an rsync KDE 3.3 Beta wasnt in the tree).

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 ...

Gentoo on my Al Powerbook 15"

[Zemrec]

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.

How about OldWorld Macs?

[MrHanky]

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.

YDL on a 12" iBook G4

[BFedRec]

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

gentoo on ibook howto page

[zojas]

my ibook g3 700MHz dual-boots with gentoo linux.

I put up a page with all the hard parts of the install