So what does everyone think about this idea? I was originally going to try an Ubuntu distro on it, but instead thought this might be fun. Is the most recent Darwin OS even still available? And would it even work? Thanks for the input and for any advice!
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Darwin OS on 12" iBook G4 1.33GHz, 512MB RAM, 40GB HDD?
- Thread starter RedCroissant
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Don't bother. I think the latest release of Darwin for PowerPC is the same version used in Leopard. Plus, there's barely any support - you'd be better off with Leopard since that has the same base/core as the latest PowerPC Darwin release.
Leopard, Lubuntu or Debian LXDE would be a much better choice (and probably Tiger too) .
Leopard, Lubuntu or Debian LXDE would be a much better choice (and probably Tiger too) .
But since leopard is based on and added to Darwin, wouldn't Darwin OS run better than leopard on a machine with only 512MB RAM? The reason I am really doing this is just to have a little fun with an iBook that I am no longer using at all since I moved to the 14".
Well, since you've moved on to a 14" it wouldn't hurt to try it out then. The PowerPC releases are still around on the Darwin 'site, I think.
I actually wanted to try this out but it looked like there wasn't much support on the older releases and the newer releases didn't support PowerPC.
Edit:
Check out PureDarwin, I think it has a version corresponding to 10.5.8 for download.
I was wrong about the support, it actually seems to have quite a bit. MacPorts, GNU-Darwin, Fink, Homebrew, RPM, pkgsrc and Portage - which I think are software-repositories - and then there's also separate applications you might be able to find too.
There's also PureDarwin nano which is supposed to be a more minimalistic release of PureDarwin.
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I guess, but what are you going to do with it? Darwin is just a command line. You could have the same performance by booting OS X into command line only mode.
Darwin is not an OS, it is a kernel. PureDarwin has a pretty BSD-like stack running on top of it, so most open-source games that work on BSD should work on PureDarwin. With X and SDL, most games should be compatible - even the proprietary R300 graphics drivers work - so there's decent hardware acceleration.
I should add that the project is not yet mature and YMMV.
I should add that the project is not yet mature and YMMV.
I'm not much of a gamer at all except for consoles(but I don't have one anymore). So gaming capabilities of a machine are pretty much irrelevant for my purposes.