Hello everyone..

I am just stepping into the world of linux on the mac side, and I honestly don't know what distros are out there for a mac.

I'm wanting to put it on my ibook, because I am just not liking mac os.
I have issues with a operating system that smiles back at me... makes me think i am crazy or something..


I've seen yellow dog out there, but I thought I'd get some feedback to see what you folks think...



Thanks a bunch!

Hi.

Try googling for 'linux ppc' (the iBooks are G3 machines which are PPC processors).

There's quite a few out there. Mandrake and YellowDog both have PPC distros. They're both based on RedHat's RPM system, and you're likely to be able to get the software you need as RPMs. I'd imagine these two would be pretty easy to install too.

There's also Debian, and Gentoo for PPC, but I'm not familiar with these. From anecdotal evidence of these distros on i386, they'll probably be a bit harder to install. And then again, maybe not.

Hope I've given you some searching fodder for Google.

Dave

Yellow Dog PPC, you can find it at linuxiso.org along with pretty much any other distro you want. I installed it on my iBook 900mhz alongside OS X (both Panther and Jaguar at different times) and have yet to have any issues. Mandrake PPC gave me nothing but problems, specifically display issues. I guess there was some sort of known issue with a Radeon 7500 card that I could not get fixed for the life of me.

I just installed Yellow Dog 3.0.1 (Sirius) on my 500 MHz Dual USB iBook. It's essentially RedHat 8 recompiled for the PPC architecture. Anaconda installs it on top of or alongside OS X easily, and it runs MUCH faster on this machine than OS X Jaguar or Panther ever did. It took some tweaking to get XFree86 to run in hardware accelerated mode, but since I figured it out everything has been great. I suggest if for anyone who wants to try Linux on their Mac.