Well hello, anyone tried ubuntu

[cburroughs]

Need to make a post, as I haven't got around to it.
Love the site, its a great place to get resolutions and idea's.
Working in London supporting Mac Creative department. Believe it or not, its "Classic support" but migration is on its way.
Today I've being looking into ubuntu Linux that claims to support the PowerPC (Apple iBook and Powerbook, G4 and G5) architectures. I'm downloading a Live CD to take a look. Has anyone tried it? I've messed with yellow dog but this is a new one to me....
It may get us out of a hole with certain issues we are experiencing with our legacy systems.

[symphonix]

I haven't used it myself, but have heard nothing but good reports from several people I know who do use it. The company I work for also uses it for a lot of its developers and power-users.

Of course, the advantage of using a Live-CD is you can try the software out and see what it is capable of without having to wipe out a hard drive and start from scratch. Just make sure you download a PowerPC version of the Live-CD.

[nixgeek]

As much as I love Ubuntu (I'm typing this on an HP laptop from work on which I installed Ubuntu 5.10), the live CD hasn't been very successful for me. Of course, your mileage may vary. I was doing this on an iMac G5 with the bluetooth keyboard and mouse. However, I have installed Ubuntu on older Macs that wouldn't run OS X, such as my old StarMax 4000. On this Mac, it took some work to get it working but once it was there it ran decently.

You should be able to run it fine on Macs starting with the Blue & White Power Mac G3, iBook G3 clamshell, PowerBook G3 Lombard, and iMac G3. Once you've used Synaptic (the graphical package manager for apt-get), you'll wonder how you did without it.

I'm curious though....why wouldn't you want to run OS X on those Macs? Are they not supported at all? Even if they can run 10.2, that should be fine to work with.

[cburroughs]

I'm curious though....why wouldn't you want to run OS X on those Macs? Are they not supported at all? Even if they can run 10.2, that should be fine to work with.[/quote]

Reason's down to money. We still run Classic as we have Creative, Interactive, PrePress & Photographic department and up until this year had over 100 users. That's a site license nightmare Quark, Photoshop, Illustrator, Office etc. We have a Hugh Image Database running Canto 4 on NT, WIN 2000 Servers running SFM. They just didn't see it 3 years ago we have to Migrate, they were told.But the Windows Microsoft IT directors just wanted to throw money at SAP until now..its becoming a pain for them ADS and all that jazz...
So they slimmed use down and now see them Mac boys may have more to offer than they first thought. Luckily me and my Boss have had OSX since the start so we can keep current. It's just embarrassing seeing the Creative's struggle on with there 9.2.1 Mac's.

So we are always looking at other things like Linux solutions that can help both platforms at a Open Source cost.

[nixgeek]

Consider that if your company would invest in OS X licenses, you would still be able to use the apps you use now in Classic. While you can use Mac-on-Linux with Linux/ppc, it's a matter of configuring it so that it works just like it did when you were using Mac OS 9. It would be a scenario similar to VirtualPC where the apps run in the operating system which is running on top of a virtual machine, completely seperate from the rest of the Linux environment. At least in Classic it's somewhat transparent.

The other thing to consider with Linux/ppc is that while the Linux/x86 platform is well supported, the Linux/ppc platform is somewhat behind its x86 counterpart. Currently, only some of the RADEON cards support hardware 3D through X11 and you'll miss some things like Flash and Java. These are things to consider when jumping to Linux on the Macs. Aside from that, it's still very useful.