Which Linux On My Mac

J

jaredbkt

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I'd like to get a distro of Linux for my iMac G3 to play with. I want it to run along side with OS X so i can dual boot.

Does anyone have any suggestions? I've never done anything with Linux before. Should I buy YelloDog 3 which looks good, or use another? Thanks for any help.
 
Debian, Mandrake and Yellow Dog run all - there are others as well but those are the most common. Mandrake is maybe the easiest to install and to start with ... Yellow Dog the most "mac" and my fav would be Debian. You can see all of them described in www.linux.org - I'd go for Debian but at least of these 3 any will be a good choise. :)
 
I would go for Debian even if the procedure of an install is a bit quirky.

Once you got it up and running, you won't regret it. The packagemanager(s) will keep you in total control of what you install and upgrade.

RedHat dists tend to get pretty messy after time..

Good luck!
 
I have Yellow Dog Linux 2.3 running on my 7500/200 at home. And it is running on 2 iMacs here at my school. KDE is kind of slow on my 7500/200, but runs great on the G3 iMacs. Installing YDL was a lot easier than I thought. give YDL a try. :)
 
You know what I did? I got Apple's X11 and Fink Commander and downloaded KDE and it works fine! Total cost? Nish. But you really need a fast internet connection for this.
 
Comment from another newbie. Never used any UNIX, including linux, until a week ago. Started off with Mandrake 8.2; the GUI installer was nice, all seemed to go fine then I rebooted and problems began. Finally managed to boot, the system looks lean and mean, didn't feel any speed problems on my original ibook 300 mhz, 128/6gig but soon ran into trouble with the trackpad. Some processes behaved oddly too.
Went for ydl 2.3: the installer was a breeze, booted right away and the KDE GUI looks nice and feels resonable mac-like. But it was sooo slow. Apps took like forever to come up, and as I had trackpad trouble here too I finally gave up with linux for now and went for Mac OS X. This has given me a GUI that works and I can learn UNIX along the way. I plan to try X11 with it some time in the future.
If you know UNIX it is probably another matter. Then I would go for Mandrake as it seems fast. I don't know how YDL 3 compares to 2.3 but it has to bee MUCH improved on speed in my respect.

Regards

Anders
 
I have a G4 and I would like to run OSX in one partion and Mandrake 9.1 in another. Are there any good website that would be able to help me get this done? Not exactly sure where to start.

Thanks in advance
 
I use gentoo linux on both of my PC boxes. <www.gentoo.org>. First install is a bit of a bear on your network connection but upgrades after that are as smooth as silk. It worked much better for me than debian's apt.

rsync -update # update your list of the latest files

emerge world # rebuilds every application with a new release

emerge someprogram # install "someprogram" automatically satisfying dependencies.
 
I think the fastest easiest and with more support is Yellow Dog Linux and now there is version 3. It uses the same rpms as Red Hat Linux.
And also comes with webmin already installed.
 
I presently am using Yellow Dog. It installs well, but there are a few things that I do not care so much about: Yellow Dog is the Red Hat of the ppc GNU/Linux Distros; and so many things, such as the desktop tend to be what they think is best. Sure you can change it -- often with some difficulty.

On the other hand YD offers MOL in a simple setup so you can run Linux and have a Mac OS9 or OSX in a window at the same time. Near native speeds(?), well, I will say that it is not that much slower than native on a 500MHz G3.

Debian's package manger is better than RPM; but both get the job done.

YD is heavy on the KDE; Debian tends toward Gnome.

Debian supports the GPL more fervently than others, if that is important to you.

In short, you have to know why you are installing Linux. It can be a bear compared to the installation and use of OSX, but it the definitive open source solution. It is a better environment for hacking or just learning from the source (pun intended)

You will notice that I did not say much about Mandrake or SUSE. That was not an oversight. :p
 
I have a friend who is an uber-geek for linux and he swears by gentoo. He plans to get an Apple laptop for his next computer to install Gentoo (I'm still working on getting him to keep OSX around to try but I doubt he will)

Anyway, I imagine it's not easy to set up (he also likes slackware and compiling EVERYthing from source) but knowing him it's probably also the most customizable. Just thought you'd like to know that it gets thumbs up from one who likes to tinker, if you're into that kind of stuff.
 
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