Mandrake 10.1 PPC quick overview

7 Comments

1. 2004-11-19 11:53 pm

   Anonymous

   Well I gave it a shot, but it didn’t want to boot on my new imac. I guess g5’s aren’t supported yet or something.
2. 2004-11-20 12:33 pm

   Anonymous

   If you bought an Apple machine in the last few years, it came preinstalled with a high-quality Unix-derived operating system called OS X. OS X has a kernel and collection of base utilities called Darwin, which is under a Free Software license and is derived (in part) from FreeBSD — the only proprietary elements are in the GUI (Aqua) and in the collection of end-user and system-administration applications that come bundled with OS X. Even X11 (specifically XFree86, despite what the name implies) is supported on OS X, in either full-screen or rootless modes; “rootless” here means that X11 applications run side-by-side with native Aqua ones. You can run Apache on OS X; you can run NcFTP server; you can even run GIMP or KOffice. Why bother installing Linux?

   anyway here is my second two cent:

   Despite Mandrake’s advantages, my ultimate reason for preferring Yellow Dog is its package management system. Yellow Dog seems to be something of a hybrid system: it uses RPMs during installation, but it also installs apt-get for later updates to the system. I have not looked at the internals of the setup, but I could type apt-get install OpenOffice at one line, and have every dependency resolved correctly, the whole 350 megabytes (after expansion) of files downloaded, and the links added to my KDE menu without restarting X11. After wasting many hours wrestling with RPM dependencies, this was a marvel to behold. Of course, I’ve been spoiled by using fink under Mac OS X, which does the same thing (and is based on apt-get).
3. 2004-11-20 1:22 pm

   Anonymous

   Mandrakelinux 10.1 PPC uses URPMI, like every other Mandrake distribution. Like yum and apt-get, urpmi automagically resolves dependencies and installs extra packages. It can even install src-rpms.

   For those who are wanting to add extra RPM repositories, surf to http://easyurpmi.zarb.org and add the cooker PPC repositories.

   I like Yellowdog and have bought it in the past, but given that I run Mandrake on everything else, I am very happy to run it on my indigo clamshell. That’s the beauty of FOSS, choice.
4. 2004-11-20 3:50 pm

   Anonymous

   I’ll tell you why to bother installing Linux on a power Mac,

   because OS X keeps crashing and wont support my floppy drive, (not that it is all that big of a deal) on my AIO 400 MHz G3. However Yellow Dog 3.0 works perfectly, but is dated, due to Yellow Dog dropping support for Old world Macs. I want to try it as soon as possible, but am waiting to see some more reviews first. If OS X would run on this machine, as Apple states that it will, I would be perfectly happy with it instead.
5. 2004-11-20 5:26 pm

   Anonymous

   I think they’re sorta-kinda supported, but to be honest that’s not what the MDK PPC project is shooting for; it’s aiming more at the slightly older Mac market, machines you might not want to run OS X on. For G5’s you’d probably be better off with YDL, but AFAIK even that doesn’t support all the hardware yet.
6. 2004-11-20 8:10 pm

   Anonymous

   anyone know if it works in pearpc ?

   how well ?

   i tried debian-ppc, umbuntu and crashed …
7. 2004-11-21 12:42 pm

   Anonymous

   Obviously, there is a point in saying that on OS X-capable machines there’s eventually no need to run native PPC Linux (and to dual-boot, thus).

   The main problem is, rather, that GNU/Linux-like OS X distrbutions like Fink and DarwinPorts aren’t yet so up-to-date with some of their most interesting binaries: a situation similar to the Cygwin-based KDE and GNOME offerings on Windows, for example, which are still rather experimental, and not with the latest versions, yet.

   The only other viable alternative is to run a recent Linux distro (such as Fedora, etc.) as a virtual machine on VPC or QEMU: this is also a problematic approach, as there are currently no VPC virtual machine additions for Linux (or BSD, etc.) and QEMU is still at an early stage, with no really evolved GUI frontend, yet. Not to talk about speed concerns, of course. (And there are also kernel problems with Fedora Core 3 on VPC, BTW, resulting in an unrecoverable processor error at startup.)

   Native KDE (Qt) and GNOME (GTK+) are even further away, from an usability point of view, at the present stage: it will be very interesting when the Qt/Mac KDE developer will have some time to update the native OS X KDE implementation, anyway.

   All this will improve with time, of course: probably, OS X 10.4/Tiger (and the maturing Fink and DarwinPorts, and even Gentoo) will be much more natively compatible with the vast majority of free and open source software – hopefully…