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Linux + PowerMac G4 = ?

T

timco

Member
Has anyone got any experiences of using Linux with an Apple Mac G4? I am going to buy a new G4-667Mhz (one of the recently announced new models) and would like to run Linux on it like I do with my PC.

Any constructive comments (i.e. no Mac v PC flame wars) would be welcomed...
 
I've run it on some of the older 400Mhz G4 towers and on some G3s (including laptops). It runs ok, but getting X going was always the most challenging things. The 1 button mouse isn't so nice in X and the tiny buttons on the keyboard were a PITA. Other than that it runs ok and is pretty decent in speed. I have Debian on a Motorola PPC box right now, but it is more PC standard than a Apple one.
 
Thanks for that, BOFH.

Presumably the most difficult thing to get to work is X, the rest of the stuff I'd imagine works fine (e.g. compilers, shells, etc, etc). I'll have a look at my current CVS of XFree86 4.0.2 and see if there's any info in the help files.

There seem to be three distros that I can see - LinuxPPC, Suse 7 PPC and Debian. Anyone got any suggestions as to which is best?
 
I've tried LinuxPPC on a G3 450, and X windows was pretty slow. Didn't realize how slow until I put RedHat on my P3 500 system. Runs OK though, locks up occasionally (depending on how much use it gets) - more than i386 RedHat. I have a kensinton 2 button mouse, and was able to set the right button, and middle button (by pressing both right and left at the same time) by editing the /etc/rc.d/rc.local to include this:
mousemode 3 -1
mousemode 3 4
Very useful.
 
as for the distro, I've tried SuSe, yellowdog, and PPC, and I'd go with PPC since it seems to get updated the most frequently.
 
I personally like the Debian way of doing things vs LinuxPPC. The apt-get install way is really nice way of doing it and Debian is much easier to go upgrading between versions with.

FYI - there is also YellowDog Linux for PPC and I think TurboLinux has a PPC version
 
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