A friend of mine is telling me that i shouldent put linux on my iBook, he is saying that it will "kill your battery and cause head slaps" Is there any truth to this? ~Tyler > > 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