I have to agree. LinuxPPC 1999 was way better than LinuxPPC 2000.
I installed 2000 Lite on my beige G3, and ended up having to put in my 1999 CD just to get common software like patch and make. Patch- the lite didn't even have patch! What's worse, it needed irt cause it shipped with a broken hwclock, and they distributed the fix as a, um, as a patch;)
I ended up putting Linux From Scratch on that G3 instead, and have been delighted with it. Of course, glibc and gcc take a long as time to compile- but it was worth it.
Just on saturday I aquired a Rev B iMac. Installed LinuxPPC lite on it- and Lite put in a/etc/sysconfig/mouse and/etc/sysconfig/keyboard that do not work with USB and kernels past 2.2.10. Grrr... I had to fix those before it was usable.
I then installed YD C.S. 1.2 and got a working system from the start. I did build my own RPM for it (their rpm has the macros set to leave man pages gzipped, which causes problems with most spec files which specify man pages in the %files section without the gzip sufix- and a few other things) as well as a few other minor tweaks, but overall it was a much more pleasant install, and worked better w.o needing to edit stuff just cause of lack of QA.
I still say build your own, or use Debian, though. Red Hat based distros just plain suck.
Mac On Linux is erxtremely stable. I suggest you know what you are talking about before you talk.
My Mac-On-Linux stays up for days (except when I shut down MOL to log out and log into another user account) no problem with Eudora, iCab, Netscape, or the occasional MS Word 98 use. IE does crash it, but that's cause IE tries to do illegal stuff to give IE more than its share of processor, and that illegal code doesn't get along with MOL.
Mac On Linux is VERY stable. Even photoshop does dandy.
Mom and Dad's iMac (rev b, 96MB) crashes about three times a day. And no, they ain't computer idiots- Dad sys-admins a 6 CPU Solaris Enterprise Server, and has been using Mac OS since he had a 512k fat Mac with MacTerminal 1.0. He's been in computers for a LONG time, and has a four foot in diameter disk platter to prove it (btw- that disk platter is a point of pride for him. The driver he wrote for it was 4 times faster than the vendors driver at the time).
Mac OS 8.5/6 and 9 do not have protected memory or truly pre-emptive multi-tasking, and do crash 'cause of software bugs, both in the OS and in whatever.
Before I went Linux on My Mac, I would get about 5 days between crashes, but I had a lot of RAM. With MOL running under Linux and 96MB alocated to it, it stays up for about three days- but I only use it for Eudora.
Macs with a Lot of RAM tend to crash a lot less- but you know what? My one Mac that still runs Mac OS runs OS 7.5.5 and has 20MB of RAM and NEVER crashes, up 24/7- running EIMS. It's a 16MHz SE/30 (with a PDS ethernet card). So no, OS 8.5/6 and 9 are NOT automagically less crash prone than OS 7.x. All depends upon what you do. The SE/30 has been up for three months now (power failure took it down last time).
Running Virtual PC would cause a Mac to crash more often. I guarantee it.
The iMac DV used a new video chip, which is why you only could get 8-bit.
Current kernels (like very recent) actually do much better. see http://ppclinux.apple.com/~benh/ to get a better kernel for that iMac.
BTW- don't give me that primitive BS. Its best to check with the vendors and the vendor user lists before buying hardware for Linux. There are numerous intel video cards don't work so hot with Linux as well.
Always do research to find out what hardware is well supported before you buy with Linux in mind.
The PPC Linux Community is very much alive and kicking. In many senses, it seems to be better off than the i386 community. Say What?! I say that because I use both i386 (at work) and PPC Linux (at home and at work). We don't have to worry about 4 primary partitions- Mac Hardware supports as many primary partitions as you like, which is really nice for multi-boot systems (several different Linux's all living on one big huge drive). You need no planning when initially partitioning- make partitions big enough for what you want, and leave the rest as free space. We also have mol (Mac On Linux) which is free GPL software that allows us to run Mac OS native on the PPC Processor in a Linux X-Window (there also isa a console mode). Sure, PC's have vmware- but that's not free. And there's wine, which is nice and has some advantages over mol- but some software is really hard to get going with wine, and some just flat out doesn't work yet. With MOL you literally boot Mac OS native, installs via RPM with very little setup, and easily tcp/ip masquerades via ethertap. As far as speed goes, my 333MHz G3 is much faster at command line than the 400MHz AMD K6 I use at work (ram being just about equal). seti@home is not only faster under Mac OS than it is under Windows, its faster under Linux on PPC than it is under Linux on x86- signifigantly faster. XWindows is faster on i386 linux than it is on ppc linux, but we'll catch up. Probably the biggest benefit to Linux on PowerPC, though, is that since it is relatively young- it allows almost anybody to contribute to the cause, which is a tremendous learning experience. It really is. Well, I've said enough- there are plenty of reasons to run Linux on PPC. It is a little smoother on initial install on *some* intel machines- but everything is getting smoothed out. The smoothest Linux I've run on PPC is actually Linux From Scratch (probably 'cause it doesn't have all of Red Hat's BS in it, like LinuxPPC and YellowDog does) which I'm using now as I post.
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I installed 2000 Lite on my beige G3, and ended up having to put in my 1999 CD just to get common software like patch and make. Patch- the lite didn't even have patch! What's worse, it needed irt cause it shipped with a broken hwclock, and they distributed the fix as a, um, as a patch ;)
I ended up putting Linux From Scratch on that G3 instead, and have been delighted with it. Of course, glibc and gcc take a long as time to compile- but it was worth it.
Just on saturday I aquired a Rev B iMac. Installed LinuxPPC lite on it- and Lite put in a /etc/sysconfig/mouse and /etc/sysconfig/keyboard that do not work with USB and kernels past 2.2.10. Grrr... I had to fix those before it was usable.
I then installed YD C.S. 1.2 and got a working system from the start. I did build my own RPM for it (their rpm has the macros set to leave man pages gzipped, which causes problems with most spec files which specify man pages in the %files section without the gzip sufix- and a few other things) as well as a few other minor tweaks, but overall it was a much more pleasant install, and worked better w.o needing to edit stuff just cause of lack of QA.
I still say build your own, or use Debian, though. Red Hat based distros just plain suck.
My Mac-On-Linux stays up for days (except when I shut down MOL to log out and log into another user account) no problem with Eudora, iCab, Netscape, or the occasional MS Word 98 use. IE does crash it, but that's cause IE tries to do illegal stuff to give IE more than its share of processor, and that illegal code doesn't get along with MOL.
Mac On Linux is VERY stable. Even photoshop does dandy.
Mom and Dad's iMac (rev b, 96MB) crashes about three times a day. And no, they ain't computer idiots- Dad sys-admins a 6 CPU Solaris Enterprise Server, and has been using Mac OS since he had a 512k fat Mac with MacTerminal 1.0. He's been in computers for a LONG time, and has a four foot in diameter disk platter to prove it (btw- that disk platter is a point of pride for him. The driver he wrote for it was 4 times faster than the vendors driver at the time).
Mac OS 8.5/6 and 9 do not have protected memory or truly pre-emptive multi-tasking, and do crash 'cause of software bugs, both in the OS and in whatever.
Before I went Linux on My Mac, I would get about 5 days between crashes, but I had a lot of RAM. With MOL running under Linux and 96MB alocated to it, it stays up for about three days- but I only use it for Eudora.
Macs with a Lot of RAM tend to crash a lot less- but you know what? My one Mac that still runs Mac OS runs OS 7.5.5 and has 20MB of RAM and NEVER crashes, up 24/7- running EIMS. It's a 16MHz SE/30 (with a PDS ethernet card). So no, OS 8.5/6 and 9 are NOT automagically less crash prone than OS 7.x. All depends upon what you do. The SE/30 has been up for three months now (power failure took it down last time).
Running Virtual PC would cause a Mac to crash more often. I guarantee it.
Current kernels (like very recent) actually do much better. see http://ppclinux.apple.com/~benh/ to get a better kernel for that iMac.
BTW- don't give me that primitive BS. Its best to check with the vendors and the vendor user lists before buying hardware for Linux. There are numerous intel video cards don't work so hot with Linux as well.
Always do research to find out what hardware is well supported before you buy with Linux in mind.
The PPC Linux Community is very much alive and kicking. In many senses, it seems to be better off than the i386 community. Say What?! I say that because I use both i386 (at work) and PPC Linux (at home and at work). We don't have to worry about 4 primary partitions- Mac Hardware supports as many primary partitions as you like, which is really nice for multi-boot systems (several different Linux's all living on one big huge drive). You need no planning when initially partitioning- make partitions big enough for what you want, and leave the rest as free space. We also have mol (Mac On Linux) which is free GPL software that allows us to run Mac OS native on the PPC Processor in a Linux X-Window (there also isa a console mode). Sure, PC's have vmware- but that's not free. And there's wine, which is nice and has some advantages over mol- but some software is really hard to get going with wine, and some just flat out doesn't work yet. With MOL you literally boot Mac OS native, installs via RPM with very little setup, and easily tcp/ip masquerades via ethertap. As far as speed goes, my 333MHz G3 is much faster at command line than the 400MHz AMD K6 I use at work (ram being just about equal). seti@home is not only faster under Mac OS than it is under Windows, its faster under Linux on PPC than it is under Linux on x86- signifigantly faster. XWindows is faster on i386 linux than it is on ppc linux, but we'll catch up. Probably the biggest benefit to Linux on PowerPC, though, is that since it is relatively young- it allows almost anybody to contribute to the cause, which is a tremendous learning experience. It really is. Well, I've said enough- there are plenty of reasons to run Linux on PPC. It is a little smoother on initial install on *some* intel machines- but everything is getting smoothed out. The smoothest Linux I've run on PPC is actually Linux From Scratch (probably 'cause it doesn't have all of Red Hat's BS in it, like LinuxPPC and YellowDog does) which I'm using now as I post.