Mandrakelinux 10.1 for PowerPC systems has been released: 10.1/PPC has many new and updated programs, some new features, and probably also a few new bugs, so something interesting for everyone.
Mandrakelinux 10.1 PPC Edition Released
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YOU’RE KIDDING.
THIS IS AWESOME.
oh man, i can’t wait to get home and install it..
I’m with you 100% this is great news.
Lombard POWER
Very nice. I am a huge fan of Mandrake, I am not however fortunate enough to own a Macintosh (or any other PPC machine for that matter), thus I’ve never tried the Mdk-PPC release.
Could someone point me to some screenshots & info about Mandrake PPC? I truly would like to see and compare the diffrences. I have seen Yellowdog Linux at a freind’s house who has a PowerBook, and I was quite impressed.
</2 cents>
MDK PPC looks basically identical to MDK x86. The MDK architecture ports aim to be as close as possible to each other. The real issues come with supporting the idiosyncracies of Mac hardware.
Unfortunately this is a volunteer release, and not an official one, so there is probably more potential for bugs than a regular Mandrake PPC release.
mandrake does make a great product, and i encourage you to try for yourself mdk on ppc.. or even ydl on ppc. an old g3 runs (250mhz) runs suprisingly quick with linux running on it. and if you cut down the gui, running fluxbox (or other cut down window managers) it’s very quick, and powerful.
a friend of mind has ydl on his g4, and it’s a beautiful desktop computer.
i can’t find any screenshots for you, but like adamw says.. it’s probably much like the x86 version.
after reading about the new mdk ppc.. i’m less likely to install it. the package support probably won’t be that great, it’ll be less stable (definately) than the previous 9.1 official release.. and less stable than the x86 version of 10. ydl might be more promising that mdk…
but, i cannot say for sure. i should try it.
In my experience, the various architecture distros differ as little as possible from the usual x86 distro. Why?:
1. Why put work into changing the structure/appearance except when used as a differentiator, which will, undoubtedly, be minor.
2. The main changes will be invisible, i.e. support for variations in architectures and implementations, which in the mac case is usually lack of docs(or binary drivers, or how a description of how a component is integrated into the system architecture). In other cases it will be lack of packages which for a variety of reasons: endianess support, assembly subroutines, etc. do not support non-x86 architectures. (e.g. hw modems in ibooks & powerbooks don’t always seem to be properly reset. the base control code looks ok, which would tend to imply to me something about power management is not getting properly reset, and AFAIK there are no real docs for that at a low level. Soft modems(and GPUs) lack any or good proprietary(or OSS) driver support. Sound support tends to be iffy as well.)
In light of this, someone who has tried it, leave some feedback, esp wrt x86 and other ppc distros as far as mac hw support goes if you are able to.
I hope that the problems with the Radeon video cards (which affected the 9.1 release) are now solved. On an upgraded Power Mac G4 AGP, with a Radeon 9000 card, I was never able to make Mandrakelinux PPC work, which was quite disappointing at the time: we’ll see with this new 10.1 version – if it really works it would be great!…
It’s been more than a year, there should be some thing done about supporting G5. YDL has 64-bit Linux out already when would Mandrake.