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Apple Businesses Software Linux

Linux Distributions for Powerbooks? 113

Posted by Cliff from the penguins-and-apples dept.
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?"
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Linux Distributions for Powerbooks? More

Linux Distributions for Powerbooks?

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  • Gentoo (Score:5, Informative)

    by SirPrize ( 590850 ) on Wednesday July 14, 2004 @11:19AM (#9697084)
    :-) 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 (Score:3, Insightful)

    by pardey ( 568849 ) on Wednesday July 14, 2004 @11:20AM (#9697099)
    Gentoo [gentoo.org] runs on PPCs, and is (so I hear) less trouble to set up than Debian. Worth looking at, anyways.

    Cheers.

    • Re:Gentoo (Score:1, Informative)

      by Anonymous Coward
      Gentoo [gentoo.org] runs on PPCs, and is (so I hear) less trouble to set up than Debian. Worth looking at, anyways.


      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)

    by 2starr ( 202647 ) on Wednesday July 14, 2004 @11:22AM (#9697113) Homepage
    All the tools you love on Linux with the beauty of Mac: Fink [sourceforge.net]

    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)

      by Bastian ( 66383 ) on Wednesday July 14, 2004 @11:37AM (#9697260)
      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.

      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 /, 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.

      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.
      • that contains three marginally but not entirely independent file hierarchies

        Three? You only list two.

        have to remember what crap you have in /, 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.

        / and /sw are far from 'marginally different'.

        / contains the OpenStep layout, including a whole lot of symlinks and the use of /private in order to make sure that any BSD/POSIX-like applications can still find the righ
        • Three was right: /, /sw, and ``spatial''.

          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.
          • 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.

            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 :Macintosh HD: instead of / and separate directories with : instead.
            • No, that's just a naming convention and actually changes depending on which filesystem you are running OS X on. It just tries to abstract the differences away since you shouldn't have to worry about them.

              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 /etc, /lib, /bin, etc.
      • Fink worked great for me when all I wanted was SQLite and nothing else. I tried to install it myself, but the ./configure had some sort of error and I couldn't figure it out for the life of me, but the MUD I develop for requires SQLite.

        Fink was the answer. And, although SQLite was in the 'experimental' section, it still installed fine and works great.
    • guess I'd ask why you want to do such a thing?

      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)

    by agraupe ( 769778 ) on Wednesday July 14, 2004 @11:24AM (#9697136) Journal
    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.

    • Re:Gentoo, definately (Score:3, Informative)

      by denthijs ( 679358 )
      using gentoo on a risc processor kicks arse, those 231MHz can crunch numbers like crazy
      Yellow dog is pretty nice (well the logo is) but your stuck with rpm hell, .. debian has its usual pro and cons, ..
      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:
      1. Gentoo
      2. GNU/Debian
      3. Yellow Dog

      And ofcourse; if you're thinking bout alternative OS's on powerpc MorphOS [morphos.net] should be mentioned

    • I've compiled Gentoo on a 233MHz Intel with 48MB of RAM. The key to speeding things up was to specify -O1 rather than -O2 -- you lose a bit of optimization, but the greatly-reduced compile time makes up for it.
      • My laptop only has 32MB of RAM. From what I've tested the compiler with (helloworld), even a stage 2 install would border on a week (just emerge system) if not longer. I have debian installed on it at the moment. I don't really care about it too much, because I will hopefully be getting a (non-Mac) laptop this fall.
  • You call Mandrake and Yellow Dog old, but not Debian stable? :-)

  • Yellow Dog, (Score:4, Informative)

    by polyp2000 ( 444682 ) on Wednesday July 14, 2004 @11:28AM (#9697174) Homepage Journal
    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.

  • The difference (Score:5, Informative)

    by Otter ( 3800 ) on Wednesday July 14, 2004 @11:28AM (#9697180) Journal
    In my experience, the big advantage Yellow Dog has is that their Mac focus means that Mac-specific bells and whistles (pbbuttonsd or Mac-On-Linux, for example) are much more likely to be provided and installed with sensible defaults. You get a polished system much more readily. I've had lousy luck with Mandrake and SuSE, but as always with Linux, YMMV.

    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)

      by Otter ( 3800 )
      Also, be warned that gcc compiles slowly on PowerPC. It's not a huge deal, but I haven't attempted to run Gentoo on PPC out of fear that 'emerge -u kde' really would last until it was time for the next version.

      • Re:The difference (Score:1, Informative)

        by Anonymous Coward
        I compiled KDE on a Sparcstation 20 running at 60Mhz. It took 10 days, but ran surprisingly quickly once it finished. Yeah, it took two minutes to come up, but once up wasn't nearly as bad as I feared. That 231Mhz PPC machine shouldn't be any problem at all. The best thing about Gentoo is you can optimize everything from the kernel up for your exact hardware, minimizing space* and maximizing speed. Don't want Gnome or the overhead? Just exclude it in your USES variable and compile. Sure, it takes a w
    • I work at YDL, and we are in the process of doing internal tests on 4.0. We began the testing process Thursday last week, and have already gone through 3 Alpha versions. We hope to have 4.0 ready for release by end of next week. (~Aug 1).

  • YDL (Score:4, Insightful)

    by Johnny Mnemonic ( 176043 ) <mdinsmore&gmail,com> on Wednesday July 14, 2004 @11:29AM (#9697182) Homepage Journal

    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.

  • Already have "BSD"... (Score:5, Interesting)

    by JGski ( 537049 ) on Wednesday July 14, 2004 @11:35AM (#9697249) Journal
    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.

  • Wow! (Score:5, Funny)

    by raider_red ( 156642 ) on Wednesday July 14, 2004 @11:42AM (#9697323) Journal
    "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?

  • On a more serious note (Score:3, Informative)

    by raider_red ( 156642 ) on Wednesday July 14, 2004 @11:45AM (#9697344) Journal
    There's already been mention of BSD running things behind the scenes on a Mac. If you install the development tools that came with the system, you should be able to download, compile, and run almost any software which works on Linux or other Unix variants.

  • Use? (Score:1, Flamebait)

    by __aafkqj3628 ( 596165 )
    would love to try out a Linux on the Powerbook and make use of the great hardware.

    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
    • Last time I checked making use of hardware can also mean less overhead.

      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.
    • P(x): I would love to x.
      r: try out Linux on the Powerbook
      s: make use of the hardware
      P(r) ^ P(s)

  • No good linux support for PB 12" forthcoming (Score:4, Informative)

    by caseih ( 160668 ) on Wednesday July 14, 2004 @11:51AM (#9697409)
    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.

  • Huh? (Score:4, Funny)

    by Will2k_is_here ( 675262 ) on Wednesday July 14, 2004 @11:54AM (#9697437)
    Maybe I'm just ignorant of Apple naming conventions, but doesn't G4 Powerbook 12' mean a 12 foot screen?

  • Linux on your Mac! (Score:3, Interesting)

    by rawg ( 23000 ) <phill@ken[ ]r.com ['oye' in gap]> on Wednesday July 14, 2004 @11:54AM (#9697438) Homepage
    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.
    • ...he's essentially right. OSX is the best desktop Unix available. Why replace it at all? You've got a spiffy G4. I just don't see the point. Now, if you had a G3, yeah, ok, I can see that, as OSX runs like a dog on that cpu. Yellow Dog would be a good choice there. But damn, a brand new G4? Keep the Mac system on it.
      • Because he's not as fscking myopic as you two? He wants to try Linux on PPC? Christ, why do people have to justify their desires to a bunch of slashdotters? HE JUST WANTS TO. Good enough for me, and most normal people. But not the pretentious Mac folks.
        • He wants to try Linux on PPC? Christ, why do people have to justify their desires to a bunch of slashdotters? HE JUST WANTS TO.

          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. :-)

      • The same reason OSX bogs down the G4 is why you should be running linux on the G4.

        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
    • What! why?
      You may not have noticed, but most people who put Linux onto their personal machines aren't doing so because they have to. They're putting it on there so that they can play with it. Of course all kinds useful things are done with Linux today, but it was originally written as a plaything, and that's still a perfectly good way to use it now.

    • Re:Linux on your Mac! (Score:1, Funny)

      by Anonymous Coward
      What the hell kind of answer is that?

      "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.
    • Because some people want software freedom. MacOS X is non-free software -- one does not have the freedom to share or modify some parts of the system. For people interested in software freedom, a system with proprietary chunks will not do. GNU/Linux or the BSDs can be the basis of an entirely free OS. MacOS X (which, I believe, is FreeBSD plus some proprietary software) cannot.
      • If you want freedom, and you think that Mac can't give you freedom, why buy it in the first place? Why spend more money on Mac if you can just get a PC?
        • Indeed. Al Powerbooks are cute, but IMHO Thinkpads or Lifebooks are better hardware. On top of being built like tanks, they can be had in configurations that are both smaller and faster than any Powerbook. They're also quite competitive price-wise.

          If I didn't want to run OS X, I'd have never bought the 12" AlBook I'm typing this on right now :P.

        • If you want freedom, and you think that Mac can't give you freedom, why buy it in the first place?

          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)

    by _aa_ ( 63092 ) <j.uaau@ws> on Wednesday July 14, 2004 @12:16PM (#9697650) Homepage Journal
    How come everyone thinks debian is so hard?

    Here da go --> knoppix for ppc [tu-bs.de]. Burn CD, boot, run knx-hdinstall, boot from hdd, edit /etc/apt/sources.list to point to your favorite debian mirror and then 'apt-get update && apt-get upgrade' and you're done. Or you can just stick with knoppix. It doesn't get much easier than that.
    • Jesus I wish I had mod points. I occasionally pop Knoppix (STD) into my desktops when I want a 'wow that's fast' Linux desktop and I have been considering an Apple laptop 'just because' ... but I haven't got any experience with OSX or whatever. Thanks much.
  • They do update, and a major update is coming very soon. Source? Freenode > #yellowdog This is the first release with the new YDL lead developer (Owen) so be on the look out for good stuff!
  • mac user crap about "intuitive" interface and whatnot. nothing about a computer is intuitive. give one to someone that has never seen one before and it will never do anything. also, htf is something "too intuitive?" seems to prove my earlier point...
    • ---
      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
      • *sigh* [reference.com]

        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?
        • It's hardly "small, out of the way". It's right there in System Preferences -> Sharing, with a very nice start/stop toggle button next to it.
        • "A small nearly out of the way check box that takes 2 hours to find is not intuitive."

          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
          • The real qustion is why is that box marked off by default?
            • You just love windows, don't you? =)

              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)

    by Zemrec ( 158984 ) on Wednesday July 14, 2004 @01:06PM (#9698216)
    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.

    • I installed YDL 3.0.1 on my 12" iBook G4, and had very similar results:

      1. No graphics hardware support (could only use command line, no graphical desktop)
      2. No AirPort Extreme support: the company which manufactures the card is not currently discussing the possibility open drivers.

      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

      • I also have a 12" G4 iBook. YDL came out with graphics support for it at the end of this January. I have emailed you a copy of my communications with YDL's Troy Vitullo (there are some other discussions mixed in, but you should be able to get what you need - if not, contact Troy).

  • How about OldWorld Macs? (Score:3, Informative)

    by MrHanky ( 141717 ) on Wednesday July 14, 2004 @01:50PM (#9698733) Homepage Journal
    I've got a Powerbook G3 (Wallstreet) running Yellowdog. While Yellowdog was easy to install and get up and running, it's not my favourite distro -- it's based on Red Hat, and I'm a Debianite. I like Gentoo a bit as well. Unfortunately, both these distros seem to be fairly difficult to install on OldWorld Macs. Gentoo's Live CD has no support for OldWorld at all, and Debian's new D-I is currently broken for OldWorld. Any suggestions for installing Linux on OldWorld?

    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.
    • Gentoo's Live CD has no support for OldWorld at all

      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.

      • Insert CD
      • Copy ramdisk image to hard drive
      • Open BootX
      • Select "Use ramdisk" and the path to the ramdisk you copied
      • Boot!
      • That was a quick answer! Thanks...

        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)?
  • My experiances are all bad. If you have OS X, just use it. Don't even bother with linux. There's no good reason, unless you're a masochist.
  • I run Debian on an older Powerbook (a Pismo... and I'm not replacing it until I can get a second battery bay in a new machine, dammit) and it's wonderful. I know that the install can be a little bit daunting at first, but the finished product is solid and very usable. Give it a shot.

    --saint
    • the new 15" and 17" powerbooks have a backup battery that lasts something like 2 to 5 minutes, allowing you to hot swap batteries
  • Gentoo. Its addicted me to wireless. Gentoo takes a while to get going, 2 days from stage 1 on this box. Once its installed its fast. Feels faster than my 900mhz dell at home, though I've never really done any benchmarks.
  • Any NetBSD/PPC users here?

  • YDL on a 12" iBook G4 (Score:3, Informative)

    by BFedRec ( 257522 ) on Wednesday July 14, 2004 @05:04PM (#9701098) Homepage
    I recently purchased an iBook G4 and I'm dual-booting it with OS X and YDL. I wanted linux so I could A) keep in practice with the Linux world and B) so I could run Quanta for working on my websites (yes I can use Fink to run it... but it's a couple versions behind and not as smooth as it is on linux).

    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

  • 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

  • KDE on PB3400---very nice

  • 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:

    • The nvidia chipset isn't fully supported. No backlight graduations (it's either on or off). No 3D support. The 2D support
  • I just got myself a 12' member through an email advertisement, and was wondering what to do with it now? I know traditionally you use it with women, but that's old - I was thinking of trying something newer. I haven't looked into much besides this - I'm just so happy to have the darned thing!

    So, what are your suggestions?
  • I took my 400Mhz TiBook and made it a dual-boot machine about a year ago. It worked very well and I did it because I had no experience with Linux.

    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.

  • I help operate a Beowulf cluster of 16 Apple xServes, and I'm wondering if anyone has had any success in getting Debian or Gentoo onto them. One of our goals is to benchmark performance differences between platforms so we'd like to get our Apple, our two x86 clusters, and our planned Sun Fire cluster running the same OS. I've tried both Debian and Gentoo in the xServes, but neither of them will boot. Has anyone solved this problem?

  • gentoo on ibook howto page (Score:3, Informative)

    by zojas ( 530814 ) <kevin@astrophoenix.com> on Saturday July 17, 2004 @01:09PM (#9725520) Homepage
    my ibook g3 700MHz dual-boots with gentoo linux.

    I put up a page with all the hard parts of the install [desertsol.com]

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