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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?"
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
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.
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.
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