OSNews

Thom: The airport extreme works on Linux, just not super easily yet [1]. I was browsing OSNews earlier today on my friends ibook. Dapper is very nice provided you change the orange theme to Clearlooks. Very good article also btw.

[1] http://pinguin.uni-psych.gwdg.de/~ihrke/wiki/index.php/Installing_U...

Edited 2006-03-12 21:04

I think Macs are actually a pretty good bet for people who want to run Linux. Since there are only a few well-known configurations, they tend to be well-tested, and things are more likely to work without the surprises you can encounter on random PC configurations.

Sleep has actually been supported for a few months now. I dual boot Gentoo and OS X on my machine (I always grab the latest beta vanilla kernels and distributions don't always use the latest kernel so you may not have known about it). Yea sound can be tricky to get working at first. Airport extreme is not supported but I have a prism2 usb wireless nic so I can use linux-wlan-ng. Thermal support for fans and every works nicely. Overall, linux on pre G5s works great! I've got the radeon 9200 in my iBook so accelerated 2D works but not 3D

Now as far as G5s go - no thermal support, no audio support, etc.

Isn't there an OSX tool that allows linux to run from the same partition in a virtual environment in OSX? Sometimes i like to test tools on linux but don't want to reboot.

Maybe the latest version of Qemu (Q) runs decently when running PowerPC code on PowerPC machine?

Anyone got experience with this?

For "Mactel" users, another good reason to put a copy of Linux on your machine is because you can use VMWare running under Linux to get a copy of Windows running.

http://www.osxbook.com/book/bonus/misc/vmware/

Given that the only other alternative at the moment is QEmu, it's an interesting route to take.

I haven't the disk space. 9MB is barely enough for what's on it now.

But, this was a great article. Once I have another Mac, I will probably put Linux on this one, precisely because of this article. Thanks :-)

Hey guys, I'm posting this from my iBook running Linux---wireless is functioning. In other words, the airport drivers work. The only slight downside is that I had to *cough* disable WEP.

Luckily I live just south of nowhere...

Update: And it survived a suspend/recover cycle! Yay!

Edited 2006-03-12 22:34

Excellent article. Every day linux is improving to a point that the only reason someone should not be on it today is if they have a very specific application that they cannot otherwise run. Even then, vmware and similar software often solves the issue.

I believe that a dual OS X-Linux computer is much more useful and complete than a Windows-Linux dual-boot. I also think that you will eventually, in about 5-7 years, see Apple ship Linux pre-installed on their hardware. Apple cares about shipping hardware, lots of it, and once the Linux desktop reaches the Zen-like state for which it is heading, Apple would be foolish not to deliver their hardware to anyone who wants it.

I tried the same release as Thom, and screen brightness keys only work in the console, but not X. It also thought I was running off the battery the entire time, though I had the adapter plugged in.

Definitely nowhere close to usable in its current state. :-)

I have to give credit where it is deserved and this article deserves good credit. It isn't too deep but to the point. And was very informative. Thanks for Ilustrating how Mactels can be great with Linux.

People like your article. I like it too. I used to run YellowDog on my old mac. I enjoyed it. It is pretty cool that linux is keeping up with the Apple hardware and able to boot and run cleanly.

I am actually thinking how cool it will be when KDE 4 comes out... The desktop will rival the finish of Mac OS X for sure...

Has anyone tried pb g4 12"? It probably has different videocard. I am especially interested, if dual view works (having an independent external LCD), as I'm quite used to it. Does Apple's external bluetooth keyboard work?

I'm really looking forward to get rid of OS X and get back to Linux, but I have had no time for playing and experimenting, since this notebook is my primary work computer.

...and I was amazed at how snappy it was compared to Mac OS X. And this was running it off the live CD! It made me wonder whether the G4 was that slow at all. Everything worked except for wireless. I didn't try suspend because I usually have my iBook plugged in at all times.

I must say though that'd I'd never install Linux over Mac OS X. Firstly, there was no accelerated graphics so moving a window around was blurry. I found the other mouse keys being mapped to the function keys to be annoying. A better key map would be Ctrl+Click for the right button and Cmd+Click for the middle button.

Ubuntu's really nice. I just find that Mac OS X's much nicer

That's what I'm writing this from. Previously it had OSX on it (horribly slow), and then OS9 (faster, but terrible in terms of memory management, stability, etc.) So finally I got to putting a copy of debian sarge on it, and it seemed alright. I didn't think it would be able to handle anything too heavy, so I just kept fluxbox et al on it as window managers.

Anyhow, yesterday I decided to give KDE (3.3) on it for a whirl, to see how well this old machine could hold up with it. Wow... Sure, it's not the equivalent of the latest greatest athlon or whatever, but it's performance is actually quite tolerable. I don't know if this is due to excellent PPC support in the linux kernel, debian devs doing a fine job, or that the PPC cpu arch is itself actually pretty good. Maybe a combination of all of the above.

So, for anyone with one of these possibly collecting dust in the closet, smack a copy of debian (or X distro that has full PPC support) and give it a try. You might be surprised at the extra life you can get out of it.

to the casual user mac os x should be enough like linux it's virus free,stable and it can be commaned line driven and it's also UNIX based.

I bought my iBook 12" two years ago and started tinkering with linux the day after I bought it: http://malmostoso.altervista.org

After a bit of struggle with YDL I switched to Debian and never looked back. OSX occupies a small partition on my drive and Debian is my main OS (as on every other machine I use *ahem*).

A couple of side notes:
1) Mac-On-Linux, last time I checked did not support Tiger. That is, if you still run panther you'll be able to "boot" it at native speed in linux: I generally launched it to use Office.Mac and it ran just fine. Tiger support should be near, but unfortunately MOL had a very slow development lately.
2) All that Thom said is perfectly valid for ATi based macs. Unfortunately nVidia based machines (i.e. PowerBooks G4) are not that well supported.
That said, they can have suspend-to-disk (first google link: http://www.ncc.up.pt/~rvr/kh/kh.html)
3) As someone stated, G5 macs are not 100% under control, especially in Power Management issues (i.e. fans on iMac G5).
4) MacMinis work apart from sound. There are some unofficial patches: http://groups.google.com/group/linux.kernel/browse_frm/thread/a3015...
5) Before people start asking: no, there is no Flash plugin support, nor win32 mplayer codecs. Java support is provided by IBM: http://www-128.ibm.com/developerworks/eserver/library/l-pow-LoPJDKF...
If you use Opera you can have Java support in browser using this JVM, as there is no plugin provided. Opera uses the JVM libs directly and does not rely on the .so plugin.

Hope this helps someone!

Edited 2006-03-13 08:23

Has the poster recommending Mac-on-Mac really tried it?

The documentation specifically states that Linux doesn't really work at the moment. The fact that there have been no updates in the last 8 months would seem to indicate it's a dead project.

So far as I know, there is no 'virtualization' solution to run Linux (or MacOS) on Mac.

I struggled with this also when I wanted to dual boot after getting my OSX set up "just so".

But I discovered Mike Bombich's Carbon Copy Cloner (using my friend Google), which makes a nice copy of your hard drive. So I was able to hook up a Firewire external hard drive, then do the following:

1. clone my internal to the firewire drive.
2. switch the startup disk to the firewire drive.
3. reboot from the external drive
4. repartition the internal with space for Linux
5. clone the external back to the smaller internal partition
6. switch startup back to internal
7. reboot again from the internal
8. install Linux.

This question bug me since one month: Switch to GNU/Linux OS or not on my powerbook (and mac mini?) . I tried many distributions : Ubuntu, Yellow Dog, ArchlinuxPPC and Gentoo .

This weekend I take the time to make a table of comparaison between Mac OSX and GNU/Linux OS. here is the result :

http://bchesneau.info/articles/2006/03/13/macosx-or-linux-what-to-c...

what linux should I start with on my PPC Mac? I have a first gen Mac Mini.

Unless you have a really good reason to dual boot OS X and Linux, pick one and stick with it. Switching back and fort smacks of fanboy idolatry and gadgetry.

And suddenly it dawns on me...

So this is why everyone likes Ubuntu!