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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.
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.
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.
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
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
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.
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