[P1] New iBook Owner / iBook Hard drive partition

[Angus Wallace]

Hey Tyler,

There are (at least) three Linux distros that run on PowerPC (mac)
hardware. Yellow Dog Linux, Debian Linux and Gentoo linux (they're in
approximate order of ease of use). Linux runs on any mac processor
greater than a G3, and almost certainly has lower system requirements
than Panther.

If you're a bit of a newbie, I suggest you checkout Yellow Dog Linux.
It's based on Redhat, and although I haven't seen/used YDL I've been a
Redhat user for several years and consider it very good.

If you look on the YDL website (www.yellowdoglinux.com/) you'll find
step-by-step instructions about partitioning, etc.

To clear up a mistruth:
MacOSX is NOT linux, (not even technically  ;-), it's *based* on FreeBSD
which is *similar* to linux (both FreeBSD and Linux are Unix clones).
This might seem like splitting hairs, but OSX _could_not_ have been
built on Linux like it was built on FreeBSD because of differences in
licensing (see www.gnu.org).

I've only just got my ibook (3 days  8-), so I can't tell you how
intercompatible it is with Linux, but so far I'm very impressed with it.
If you want a more Linux-like experience, make sure you install the
developer tools that come with it (compiler, libraries, etc).

My impression, though, is that for some things Linux is better than
Panther (which is better than Linux in many), although this will be less
obvious if you use YDL. 
The way it is better is that it is easier to do low level configuration
in Linux (I think - this could be wrong), but YDL (if like Redhat) will
have made this less easy than other distros like Debian.

My advice would be to buy a cheap PC (perhaps a Pentium2) *gasp*, and
install Linux on there. Linux runs better on x86 (pc) hardware anyway,
because that's where most the work is done.

Hope this helps,
-Angus

-- 
Angus Wallace              o__     o__     o__     o__     o__     
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