Linux Distributions for Powerbooks? 113
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?"
Gentoo (Score:5, Informative)
Re:Gentoo (Score:5, Informative)
Gentoo (Score:3, Insightful)
Cheers.
Re:Gentoo (Score:1, Informative)
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.
Fink (Score:5, Interesting)
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.
Re:All? Beauty? (Score:5, Interesting)
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.
Re:All? Beauty? (Score:2)
Three? You only list two.
have to remember what crap you have in
/ and
/ contains the OpenStep layout, including a whole lot of symlinks and the use of
Re:All? Beauty? (Score:1)
Unless you spend your Mac OS X days on an almost hidden terminal emulator, there's also the file hierarchy that many visual programs use.
Re:All? Beauty? (Score:2)
Programs uses the same one as the terminal and the rest of the system.
The 'other' hierarchy is one for legacy programs which like to use
Re:All? Beauty? (Score:2)
OS X still uses the old OS9 style hierarchy (which is also similar to the one used in NEXTSTEP) with stuff in folders with names like System, Library, Applications, etc. rather than
Re:All? Beauty? (Score:2)
Fink was the answer. And, although SQLite was in the 'experimental' section, it still installed fine and works great.
Personal Preference (Score:2)
Personal Preference, I'm guessing. I smoke, and I started smoking basics back when they were the cheapest brand. They are no longer the cheapest, and they certainly aren't the best, but I still smoke them because I've grown accustomed to them.
OSes are no different. There may be tools that do just about the same thing, but they don't "taste" the same.
Gentoo, probably (Score:3, Informative)
Re:Gentoo, definately (Score:3, Informative)
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 [morphos.net] should be mentioned
Re:Gentoo, definately (Score:1)
Re:Gentoo, definately (Score:1)
Re:Gentoo, definately (Score:1)
Re:Gentoo, definately (Score:1)
so we're both right
Re:Gentoo, definately (Score:2)
Re:Gentoo, probably (Score:2)
Re:Gentoo, probably (Score:1)
Debian not old? (Score:2)
Re:Debian not old? (Score:1)
Yellow Dog, (Score:4, Informative)
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.
Re:Yellow Dog, (Score:2)
Re:Yellow Dog, (Score:2)
Nick
The difference (Score:5, Informative)
Any idea what the schedule is for the next Yellow Dog release? The current version is ages old by now.
Re:The difference (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:The difference (Score:1, Informative)
Re:The difference (Score:2)
YDL (Score:4, Insightful)
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 [opendarwin.org], which gets rid of the non-free parts of OS X.
Yellow dog = old (Score:1)
4.0 is coming out soon. 3.x (2003) is pretty good, 2.x was a bit dated.
http://lists.terrasoftsolutions.com/pipermail/yel
Re:YDL (Score:2)
I dual boot YDL and Debian on my iBook. YDL was much easier to install and configure but I've pretty much got Debian sorted now (sleep, power-saving, video acceleration, Airport, etc.) and the Debian packages are much fresher so I don't really use YDL anymore.
Already have "BSD"... (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:Already have "BSD"... (Score:2)
Wow! (Score:5, Funny)
Holy shit! That's a really big screen. How do you carry around a 12 foot powerbook?
Re:Wow! (Score:1)
On a more serious note (Score:3, Informative)
Use? (Score:1, Flamebait)
How can you 'make use' of the hardware when you install an OS with poor hardware support, weak drivers and virtually no software being written to take advantage of it? Then when/if you run something like MOL, you're just beating yourself over the head.
There's no advantage, just a whole heap of disadvantages (even when it comes to software support and speed), except for being able to say "I'm running Linux on a Mac!" And wai
Re:Use? (Score:1)
If I want to browse the web, lynx or XFree/XOrg+fluxbox/other-light-wm+dillo makes better use of my hardware then Cocoa/Aqua/Carbon+MacDE+Safari.
Re:Use? (translation) (Score:2)
No good linux support for PB 12" forthcoming (Score:4, Informative)
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:No good linux support for PB 12" forthcoming (Score:2)
Re:No good linux support for PB 12" forthcoming (Score:2)
Michael
Huh? (Score:4, Funny)
Re:Huh? (Score:4, Funny)
Re: (Score:2)
Linux on your Mac! (Score:3, Interesting)
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.
This guy will be modded troll, but...... (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:This guy will be modded troll, but...... (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:This guy will be modded troll, but...... (Score:2)
Well, as people have explained, he's probably shit out of luck since the video card isn't supported fully. Stick with an old G3 B&W or something if you want to mess around with Linux on a PPC and leave your beautiful new 12" G4 Powerbook to run MacOS X. Alternatively you can give it to me and I'll send you my 800Mhz G3 iBook which should work fine with Linux. :-)
Re:This guy will be modded troll, but...... (Score:2)
Plus there have been a barrage of OSX exploits, give it some time to mature. Just because the barrage was mostly ignored in light of the RAGING TORRENT of windows exploits, worms, and viruses, is no reason to forget it.
Best is pretty relative, I find linux gives a better combination of flexiblity and ease of use, OSX has no combination, it trades flexibility for ease of use.
OS X is the best unix desktop (atm) for joe sixpac
Re:This guy will be modded troll, but...... (Score:2)
2. Performance.
3. It's cross platform.
4. It's open source, (no don't hand me darwin, darwin is only one piece of OSX).
5. You can tune and adjust the internals as your needs dictate, in a MUCH more flexible fashion than OS X.
6. No one click install (which is a bad thing, one click installs result in configuration after the fact, that wastes time since most applications could ask the essential information during install and assume defaults for everything else).
In fact about the only thing which
Re:Linux on your Mac! (Score:1)
Re:Linux on your Mac! (Score:1, Funny)
"I want to run Linux. What's the best type?"
"No, you're wrong. You'll use what you are given and be grateful."
Idiot.
Software freedom still matters. (Score:2)
Re:Software freedom still matters. (Score:1)
Re:Software freedom still matters. (Score:2)
If I didn't want to run OS X, I'd have never bought the 12" AlBook I'm typing this on right now
Re:Software freedom still matters. (Score:2)
Please cite the part of my post which indicates that I "think that Mac can't give [one] freedom". The fact that one can run a free software OS (such as the ones I cited) on Mac hardware would indicate just the opposite -- Mac hardware is viable for those seeking software freedom because you can run a completely free OS on it and nothing but free software on top of that.
As to why buy a Macintosh, I don'
Knoppix (Score:3, Insightful)
Here da go --> knoppix for ppc [tu-bs.de]. Burn CD, boot, run knx-hdinstall, boot from hdd, edit
Re:Knoppix (Score:2)
YDL 4 Soon (Score:1)
don't fall into this (Score:1)
Re:don't fall into this (Score:2)
htf is something "too intuitive?"
---
When PC World reviewed OS X, they commented on how difficult it was for them to configure the machine to be seen by Windows PCs. They had spent about two hours looking for the configuration wizard, when one of them finally noticed a little checkbox in the Sharing pref panel that said: Windows Networking. They checked that and bam! All the PCs in the company could see their OS X box.
The reviewers themselves stated it took them so long because they weren't expecting it
Re:don't fall into this (Score:1)
A small nearly out of the way check box that takes 2 hours to find is not intuitive.
In other words, OS X was too intuitive for them.
Replace intuitive with something like, simple, basic, un-involved, etc.
I am not trying to be a grammar nazi, but Jesus this is an easy one. Where did you people go to school?
Re:don't fall into this (Score:2)
Re:don't fall into this (Score:1)
Re:don't fall into this (Score:2)
I agree, it's not intuitive by that definition. But whose fault is it? Their expectations were conditioned by years of crappy, braindead interfaces implemented by lazy programmers and designers.
A Mac user wouldn't have been misled like that, but more importantly, a completely new user to any computer would probably not have been either. It's about time someone took a good hard look at how hard networking is for the
Re:don't fall into this (Score:1)
Re:don't fall into this (Score:2)
Windows installs with everything on by default. Other OSes come with certain features off by default, which is why just about any OS is safer than windows out of the box.
Anyway, I think you sort of proved the point of someone coming from the windows side having difficulties with your question.
Gentoo on my Al Powerbook 15" (Score:3, Informative)
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.
Yellow Dog on iBook: same issues (Score:2)
I installed YDL 3.0.1 on my 12" iBook G4, and had very similar results:
I can't comment on the sleep thing, since I didn't actually get to try to use YDL as a working OS, but I can add that you can't non-destructively repartition the hard drive. Hours of reinstalling the system and restoring files (t
Re:Yellow Dog on iBook: same issues (Score:1)
How about OldWorld Macs? (Score:3, Informative)
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.
Re:How about OldWorld Macs? (Score:1)
Actually, it works quite well. I've installed Gentoo on a Power Mac 6500 (I'm using it as a server) and it worked quite well.
Re:How about OldWorld Macs? (Score:1)
I know how to get Gentoo to boot on the G3 -- it's basically the same for Yellowdog, just that YD boots you into Anaconda (Red Hat's installer). My problem was that the CD image I downloaded didn't have any working kernel/ramdisk image combination (I'm not sure, but I think it lacked G3 support at all). Downloading and burning a useless CD image is a bit annoying.
Do you remember which CD image you used (or when -- I can probably guess which one I can use from its date)?
not good (Score:1)
Debian. (Score:1)
--saint
Re:Debian. (Score:2)
My 800 MHZ Powerbook runs (Score:2, Insightful)
NetBSD? (Score:2)
YDL on a 12" iBook G4 (Score:3, Informative)
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
why? Why? WHY??? (Score:2, Troll)
I've recently added a PowerBook to my network as well. And while I have many other Linux machines (even my PlayStation 2 runs Linux...), I personally can't see the point of running Linux on the PowerBook.
Just setup SSH, and install the X11 support from the OS X installation CDs. Then you can pretty much recompile any Linux app you want to run. Or do as I do -- get a cheap Intel box, install Linux on it, and access it remotely through the laptop.
OS X is the best desktop Unix right now. I'm not sure why
linux on powerbook (Score:1)
Debian on a 12" G4 Powerbook (Score:2)
I'm running Debian/unstable on a 12" G4 Powerbook. It's pretty good but there are some issues.
You will need the latest Linux kernel. I'm running 2.6.7. A few months ago you would have needed the benh kernel but all the stuff you need has now been rolled back into the Linus kernel.
Even with the latest kernel you will not get full support from your hardware. Here are the big issues:
Re:Debian on a 12" G4 Powerbook (Score:2)
I just checked an
Dear Slashdot (Score:2)
So, what are your suggestions?
Re:Dear Slashdot (Score:2)
dual-boot (Score:1)
I eventually decided to simply stick with OS X, which I do think is more useful (maybe with Fink for tools) for PPC/Apple hardware.
xServes (Score:2)
gentoo on ibook howto page (Score:3, Informative)
I put up a page with all the hard parts of the install [desertsol.com]
Re:Gentoo, Debian, ... not much else (Score:3, Informative)
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.
Re:Gentoo, Debian, ... not much else (Score:3, Informative)
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
Re:Gentoo, Debian, ... not much else (Score:4, Informative)
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
Re:Gentoo, Debian, ... not much else (Score:4, Interesting)
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!
Re:Gentoo, Debian, ... not much else (Score:2)
Well anyway, personnally, I much prefer to run linux on a i386 than a PPC. I admit, you *can* run linux on a PPC and it works (apperently) great!
I tried it for a couple of months, didn't like it at all. To me, having many of my prefered software to be either missing (lftp comes to mind) or
Re:Gentoo, Debian, ... not much else (Score:2)
The same is true of saying "___ runs like shit", Mr. Pot.
Re:Gentoo, Debian, ... not much else (Score:2)
What you meant to say was that Linux is missing support for some of the peripherals on your cutting-edge powerbook, and the distributions you have used haven't included all of the software you like.
Maybe you don't realize that Linux is a community effort? I'm sure that all of the other PowerBook owners out there would love it if you would work on some drivers to help fully support it. And I'm sure the distribution maintainers would happily accept package
Re:Gentoo, Debian, ... not much else (Score:2)
- Linux is much slower on PPC and is much less "optimized" because there's less developers working on it.
- Several applications do not work on PPC. This includes most "enterprise" apps such as Oracle and the J2EE stuff as well as several popular desktop apps.
- A lot of the newer hardware do not work well on linux, including the ever important airport express and power management.
- There is much less user activity and thus much less tech support available for PPC linux users.
- Comp
Re: (Score:2)