Linux distro's on mac

[altivec 2003]

Hi, I have recently been fed up with several problems that I have been having after running norton optimiser. It takes forever to put the comp to sleep. Also, after installing some themes, the buttons in the brushed metal apps have dissapeared :(. I have decided to reformat and reinstall jaguar, and since i have to partition anyway I was thinking about setting up linux on my computer. I had done this on my older computer running 9 but I have not yet tried any dual boot setups with osX and linux. Help is requested :) I'd also like a recommendation as to what distrobution of linux i should use. Thanks (in advance) :)

[mac15]

For ultimate compatibility for mac, you can't go past Mandrake Linux 9.1

http://www.mandrakelinux.com/en/9.1/91ppc.php3

you can MOL, mac on linux, so you can run OSX in a window at full damn speed! :) haha have fun

[MacManiac1224]

You can use Yellow Dog linux, it is specifically designed for the Mac architecture, and it has MOL also, it is pretty good from what I hear:
http://www.yellowdoglinux.com/ydl_home.shtml

[Mblazened]

I wouldn't really recommend using defrag utilities anyways. You never know what they're doing to your files. Best to backup your data, initialize and then restore.

[altivec 2003]

Thanks a ton for the responses, but I am am still wondering how a dual boot is set up on os X.

[Kwyjibo]

i think you need a seperate parition for it to work correctly but i'm not 100% onthat.

[bousozoku]

It seems as though Mandrake is the only company keeping their x86 and PPC versions in sync with each other. They're at version 9.1 now.

SuSE is at 7.3 on Mac, but 8.2 on x86.

Red Hat is at 9.0 and while they don't produce a PPC version, Yellow Dog Linux v3.0 is based on v 8.0.

Debian has both. Are they synchronised?

On the other hand, did anyone notice that Darwin has been updated to v6.5 this week? That has the latest 10.2.5 compatible pieces in it.

[ewinemiller]

Originally posted by mac15
For ultimate compatibility for mac, you can't go past Mandrake Linux 9.1

http://www.mandrakelinux.com/en/9.1/91ppc.php3

you can MOL, mac on linux, so you can run OSX in a window at full damn speed! :) haha have fun

I wouldn't say ultimate compatibility. I tried to install it on my stock dual 800mhz quicksilver, not a particularly unusual machine by any stretch of the imagination. The graphical installer died immediately, and the text installer died on the 3rd CD. Oh, well I guess I'll try yellow dog when it's opened up at the end of the month.

[bousozoku]

Originally posted by ewinemiller
I wouldn't say ultimate compatibility. I tried to install it on my stock dual 800mhz quicksilver, not a particularly unusual machine by any stretch of the imagination. The graphical installer died immediately, and the text installer died on the 3rd CD. Oh, well I guess I'll try yellow dog when it's opened up at the end of the month.

I have one of those machines as well. What did Apple do with the configuration that was so wrong? I see all sorts of problems that focus on the machine. Links CE and Warcraft III also don't work properly on the machine. It's scary, but at least, I got a good price.

[ewinemiller]

Originally posted by ewinemiller
Oh, well I guess I'll try yellow dog when it's opened up at the end of the month.

Well just tried Yellow Dog, at first everything looked good, recognized my video card, actually got the graphical installer, told it to use the unpartitioned space on my slave drive, looked at the partition table, everything looked good. The install died in the middle of the 3rd CD and took all the data on my master drive with it. I lost everything and am rebuilding as I type this, thankfully the last back up was only a month ago so I lost very little, but I still kick myself for not doing a fresh back up before trying something like this.

[Snowy_River]

I'm kind of curious why you want to install a dual boot set up. When I first got my iBook, I did that. But I quickly determined that I could do almost everything that I wanted to do under Linux under MacOS X. Especially now, with such things as Apple's X11 port, and the KDE port, I don't see the need for it. Most Linux software isn't available as binaries for PPC Linux, and so it has to be built anyway. And if you have Fink installed, you can build most Linux software for X11 under MacOS X. So, why have the separate partition?

[ewinemiller]

Originally posted by Snowy_River
I'm kind of curious why you want to install a dual boot set up.

Mostly academic curiosity, no real need. I figure it can't hurt in a tight job market to be at least familiar with the platform if I find myself out of work. I've got a few PCs I could drop Linux on, but always figured that a PPC oriented one would be easier to get going since there is a lot less variation in the platform. However, from what I've seen that doesn't seem to be the case. I've tried handful of distros on a plain vanilla machine and nothing even makes it through the install.

[guitargeek]

I've tried handful of distros on a plain vanilla machine and nothing even makes it through the install.


What distros and what machine?

I've installed all kinds of distros on various computers, maybe I could help?

I've only had one failed install, and that was with Lycoris. I tried it a bunch of times, and each time the install seemed to go well, but would fail to boot. I chuck it up to Lycoris being a crappy distro :D

[ewinemiller]

Originally posted by guitargeek
What distros and what machine?

I've installed all kinds of distros on various computers, maybe I could help?

I've only had one failed install, and that was with Lycoris. I tried it a bunch of times, and each time the install seemed to go well, but would fail to boot. I chuck it up to Lycoris being a crappy distro :D

I appreciate the offer, but I think I'll confine the experiments for now to Virtual PC or VMWare and keep it off the real box.

To answer the question I've got a dual 800 quicksilver, pretty straightforward machine. Mandrake 8.something failed, can't remember why, may have been on boot up. 9.1 dies when you put in the last CD. YDL 2.3 won't even get started, 3.0 died on the last CD. Debian, I gave up on that one because I don't really want to know exactly how many sectors I'm allocating to my swap partition. At one point in time I was going to experiment on an old bondi blue. I got either Mandrake 8.x or YDL up and running can't remember which, but the screen position was goofed up. The left 50 pixels or so were chopped off and I couldn't figure out how to adjust it, so I sold it.

[kenkooler]

You should repartition the drive with the installer cd of Mandrake Linux, create Linux / and swap partitions, another one for OS 9 and one more for OS X.

[MacManiac1224]

I imagine that Yellow Dog is the best linux uner mac, but you could try Mandrake, I have mandrake for PC, and it works great. From what I hear though, Yellow Dog is the best for Mac.

[Snowy_River]

Originally posted by ewinemiller
Mostly academic curiosity, no real need. I figure it can't hurt in a tight job market to be at least familiar with the platform if I find myself out of work. I've got a few PCs I could drop Linux on, but always figured that a PPC oriented one would be easier to get going since there is a lot less variation in the platform. However, from what I've seen that doesn't seem to be the case. I've tried handful of distros on a plain vanilla machine and nothing even makes it through the install.

I'd highly recommend just playing in OS X. Get a few unix apps that have source code that can be compiled and run under X11 on OS X. Play around with X11 itself. Get a Linux book and see how much carries over to how OS X works under the hood. You might be surprised, and you'll gain the familiarity that you're looking for.

(I actually heard of someone that took Aqua off of their OS X machine, and used KDE running in XDarwin as their GUI. Don't ask me why they did this, but they did.)