Slackintosh

[Calum]

i've heard of yellow dog and mandrake on macintosh, but a newcomer is Slackintosh, it's a community evolved version of slackware for the macintosh platform. i don't own a mac but i want one simply to try out these linuces on it.

has anybody tried slackintosh? it looks promising so i think.

[Laukev7]

SuSE, Gentoo and Debian also have PPC versions. They're about just the same as their x86 counterparts, except that the PPC port of SuSE Linux is a few versions behind. The only difference you will notice is the performance, which might satisfy your curiosity on how the G4/G5 compares to Intel or AMD processors. But the results might still be biased, even though the OSes are the same, because Linux is optimised for the x86.

There are, however, many small OSes which are PPC specific. And, of course, you have Mac OS X and Amiga OS 4.

[ August 20, 2003: Message edited by: Laukev 7.5 ]

[ravuya]

Keep in mind that 64-bit stuff for the G5 is nowhere near finalized yet; expect it to be bolted down in the next couple of months (keep this in mind in case you want to buy a G5 for Linux; although IBM is committed to Linux it always takes time for their code to make it into mainstream distribution, time you could spend saving up or waiting for prices to drop).

What I have heard is that PPC versions of Linux are much slower than their x86 counterparts due to an utter and complete lack of knowledgable coders. This will hopefully change as IBM starts throwing thugs at the problem of getting their high-end PowerPC-based systems running at peak efficiency with Linux.

I haven't yet gone to PowerPC Linux, but once my 604 starts throwing rods again it will probably be my last reinstall of 8.1 and then I'm right onto Debian.

[Calum]

well i am thinking of getting one of those budget apple laptops as a second computer so me and my better half can get on the computer at the same time, and to be honest if it has the latest OSX then i might not need a linux on there.