Author Topic: best PPC distro?  (Read 453 times)

bigmuddy

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best PPC distro?
« on: 7 June 2002, 22:44 »
Hi,  I've been lurking for a while and have enjoyed the forums. I'm mulling over installing Linux on my PowerMac 7500 for kicks. What's  the consensus on the best distro these days? This has probably been covered before, but I can't find it.
Thanks.

psyjax

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best PPC distro?
« Reply #1 on: 7 June 2002, 23:22 »
quote:
Originally posted by steve:
Hi,  I've been lurking for a while and have enjoyed the forums. I'm mulling over installing Linux on my PowerMac 7500 for kicks. What's  the consensus on the best distro these days? This has probably been covered before, but I can't find it.
Thanks.



Your best choice will be YDL,

http://www.yellowdoglinux.com/

Your going to need more than a gig HD. My bro installd it on a standard 7500 and he needed to install a 64MB RAM chip and an extra HD.

Not only that, but since it is an old world machine, you have to start linux thrugh OS9. From what I hear the linux itself runs well, but if you want to put GNOME or KDE on it, it will be very slow.

I would suggest buying a used first or second generation iMac off of eBay. They are going pretty cheep and you can deffinetly put YDL on them right and good.

There is also Mandrake and Debian for the MacOS. The Mandrake Mac distro has a bit more overhead than YDL and I found it to be a simpler install, tho not as well documented.

Again, I would go with an old iMac for a truely functional desktop linux machine.

YDL, and Mandrake are both good distros. Check them out and take your pick. YDL seems to be updated and supported more however.
Psyjax! I RULEZZZZ!!! HAR HAR HAR

ravuya

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best PPC distro?
« Reply #2 on: 8 June 2002, 02:07 »
LinuxPPC is kind of trashy, and I haven't had a lot of experience using MkLinux, but I do hear YDL is the best PPC distribution out there.

However, if you don't want to use Linux, NetBSD has a Mac-PPC and Mac-68k port available.

I understand that for older macs ('020 and below without the PMMU required to run other UNIX/Linux distros) you can obtain a package called MacMinix which allows you to run Andrew S. Tannenbaum's Minix 1.5 off of a virtual partition in a window on your desktop -- a good way to learn UNIX command-line skills.