Linux on Mac G3?

[Armitage]

Ok, I'll bite the bullet on the color. 😀
It'll be hard sitting down next to that thing every day, but beyond that, what's your opinion of Linux on a Mac?

I'm taking a new job. The company will get me a nice, shiny new 1GHz P3 for my windows machine, e-mail, office etc. What a waste!

Anyway, my real job is analysis & number crunching on Linux & unix boxen (an Alpha cluster and an O2K 😀), so I really want/need a Linux box at my desk.

They are offering a surplus 350MHz Mac G3 or some surplus x86 stuff that I haven't seen yet. I am free to load Linux on it, but I know next to nothing about Macs and even less about Linux on Macs.

So, general impressions of Linux on Mac?
What distributions are available?
Compatibility or stability issues? (I know I'll have to recompile stuff from x86)
It has a USB keyboard & mouse. Can you use a real 3 button mouse instead of that stupid round thing?
Anything else I should know?
Thanks

 

[FOBSIDE]

funny you should ask this. i did an install on a G3 yesterday. i used Mandrake-PPC and from what i saw, not much different from the regular Mandrake install I did a while back. There is also Suse-PPC. YellowDog is pretty good I hear. the G3 i was installing on at work had a two button USB mouse and it worked fine so im guessing 3 buttons should be support.

 

[ddiccico]

I've tried several, and (IMO) yellow dog seems to be the best. Debian, mandrake and linuxppc are all pretty good from what I hear.

I used YDL on an iBook 500, and it was fast (much faster than OS X), and stable. I've also used RH on a P3 500 and duron 750, and truthfully the PPC versions seem slower. Not much though. Yes you can use a 3 button mouse.