[P1] New iBook Owner / iBook Hard drive partition

[Tyler Krehbiel]

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