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Mac-optimized Linux Distro

W

Wildy

macrumors 6502
Original poster
Jan 25, 2011
323
1
PowerPCMacMan said:
And what is your opinion on FreeBSD? I would think BSD flavors of UNIX would be similar in design and use compared to Darwin.
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FreeBSD is really nice - OSX is actually using a FreeBSD userspace. I actualy prefer FreeBSD to various Linux distros because I feel the design is much more logical and there isn't a ton of custom/non-conventional abstraction layers sitting on top. The downside is that desktop hardware support is nowhere near as good as Linux - but as a server OS it is wonderful. I am using FreeBSD as the base for a little project of mine and find it incredibly easy to work with.

ihuman:D said:
What about Chromium OS? It's an open-sourced version of Chrome OS. Chrome OS can run on ARM well but it can run on traditional PCs well too. And it being open-source we could configure it to be more desktop friendly than netbook friendly and be based more on your machine than on the web. It's supposed to be lightweight enough aswell.
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Chromium OS is all based atop the Chromium browser which, alas, will not run on PowerPC (and it's unlikely we'll see it running any time soon). The reason being the V8 JavaScript engine contains an awful lot of x86 optimizations to make it faster, which makes the task of porting it to PowerPC a lot more difficult.
 
I

ihuman:D

macrumors 6502a
Jul 11, 2012
925
1
Ireland
Wildy said:
FreeBSD is really nice - OSX is actually using a FreeBSD userspace. I actualy prefer FreeBSD to various Linux distros because I feel the design is much more logical and there isn't a ton of custom/non-conventional abstraction layers sitting on top. The downside is that desktop hardware support is nowhere near as good as Linux - but as a server OS it is wonderful. I am using FreeBSD as the base for a little project of mine and find it incredibly easy to work with.


Chromium OS is all based atop the Chromium browser which, alas, will not run on PowerPC (and it's unlikely we'll see it running any time soon). The reason being the V8 JavaScript engine contains an awful lot of x86 optimizations to make it faster, which makes the task of porting it to PowerPC a lot more difficult.
Click to expand...

Oh yeah... I forgot about that. I wonder what it uses on ARM then?
 
W

Wildy

macrumors 6502
Original poster
Jan 25, 2011
323
1
Oh neat, I missed that part. I imagine it shares a lot of code with their Android port of Chrome.
 
P

pcfast

macrumors member
Mar 22, 2013
71
0
Lubuntu, FreeBSD, MintPPC

From what I can tell reading this the 3 best Linux distro for PPC Macs are:

Lubuntu
FreeBSD
MintPPC

It seems to me Lubuntu and MintPPC are much more user-friendly distros though.

 
PowerPCMacMan

PowerPCMacMan

macrumors 6502a
Jul 17, 2012
800
1
PowerPC land
I like FreeBSD the best as its similar to Darwin and BSD Unix is as close as you will get to true UNIX. Linux, while nice is a dialect and or different form of Unix that is plain weird to me.. I always would run BSD on my PC's back in the day. I give Linus Torvalds credit though.

Linux is good, but BSD is better. My only concern is how do I control the fans on my PowerMac G5 Quad and also prevent the processors from overheating when using FreeBSD and or Linux? Mac OS X Leopard has code in it to prevent the fans from revving up.

pcfast said:
From what I can tell reading this the 3 best Linux distro for PPC Macs are:

Lubuntu
FreeBSD
MintPPC

It seems to me Lubuntu and MintPPC are much more user-friendly distros though.

Click to expand...
 
Last edited:
MisterKeeks

MisterKeeks

macrumors 68000
Nov 15, 2012
1,833
28
PowerPCMacMan said:
I like FreeBSD the best as its similar to Darwin and BSD Unix is as close as you will get to true UNIX. Linux, while nice is a dialect and or different form of Unix that is plain weird to me.. I always would run BSD on my PC's back in the day. I give Linus Torvalds credit though.

Linux is good, but BSD is better. My only concern is how do I control the fans on my PowerMac G5 Quad and also prevent the processors from overheating when using FreeBSD and or Linux? Mac OS X Leopard has code in it to prevent the fans from revving up.
Click to expand...

Is there an issue with the fans?

Since the Darwin kernel is open source, I believe that someone has put the information needed into FreeBSD.
 
crewkid89

crewkid89

macrumors regular
Jun 16, 2011
242
24
United States
I know Zen can be a bit of a touchy subject around here, but his blog has some great information about Lubuntu and making it work on PowerPC Macs. The Ubuntu docs for 12.04 and 12.10 are also pretty good.

Back to the original idea of the thread, I would be thrilled to have a Crunchbang port for PowerPC. We have gotten left out on the light distros. Yellowdog for Mac is long gone and most of the other lightweight distros are x86 or ARM only. We need a good *box distro like Crunchbang. I am not nearly enough of a Unix Guru to be porting much stuff myself, but I would be happy to help with testing and poking around with config files if anyone has a need for some help.
 
S

skinniezinho

macrumors 65816
Jan 1, 2009
1,084
91
Portugal
leman said:
To be honest, I fail to see the practical point. Why would you go to such extent to support a dead architecture? The last PPC mac was sold in 2006 - that is almost 7 years ago! Intel CPUs offer superior performance at dramatically reduced power consumption. I am afraid that by the time your distro is up and running in a more or less stable state, there will be simply almost no PowerPC Macs left...
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ResPublica said:
Although I could see this as an interesting project, I don't really see how your distribution would make a big difference with what we have now with Tiger and Leopard. Tiger is a fast OS with relatively good compatibility. Wouldn't it make more sense to make good applications for the operating systems we already have? They already have relatively good support and ease of use.

However your ideas seem like they should be applied on x86-Linux. Ease of use could still be a lot better. I have never understood why they make these complex systems of packages for app installation when they could make it as easy as Mac OS X; I want to be able to put my apps in the folder I want.
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if all people had that opinion distros like puppy linux, dsl and many other never had seen day of light.
I guess it is important to preserve old machines useful

theos911 said:
Go for it! The PPC world needs more people going, doing, porting, and coding.
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Go go go!
 
S

skinniezinho

macrumors 65816
Jan 1, 2009
1,084
91
Portugal
GermanyChris said:
If someone makes a decent modern Linux distro I'll buy one tomorrow..I need an MDD or DC G5 anyway.
Click to expand...

What are your complaint about the current ones?
I never tried on my powermac g4 (maybe I will try on the g5 since I have spare HDD now).
But on my Thinkpad X230 I am running arch linux and found it to be really awesome (appart from the install :p )
 
GermanyChris

GermanyChris

macrumors 601
Jul 3, 2011
4,185
5
Here
skinniezinho said:
What are your complaint about the current ones?
I never tried on my powermac g4 (maybe I will try on the g5 since I have spare HDD now).
But on my Thinkpad X230 I am running arch linux and found it to be really awesome (appart from the install :p )
Click to expand...

They're behind, x86 distro's have everything you need securely Pwer distros's not so much...
 
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