[Mike S.]

I've got a 6500 with a G3-L2 upgrade (otherwise it's stock save for a PCI ethernet card and upgraded RAM) and nothing I've done over the last year has resulted in a stable computing experience using OS 9 so I want to give Linux a try.

I've done a good deal of reading on the subject and successfully installed it once about three years ago but suffice to say it didn't go well. Linux has come a long way since then, however and I think it'll work this time.

Enough story telling, on to the question.

I'd like to know which Linux distro I should go with, on the one hand I'm considering YellowDog Linux since it was put together specifically for Macs but information regarding apps on their site makes it sound like very few Linux apps are actually available that will run under it.

On the other hand, I've heard only good things about Mandrake Linux as far as being great for new Linux users. It's supposed to install easily and be a bit smarter about working out dependencies when installing packages.

My concern is that while Mandrake has a PowerPC build they're centered on x86 so will the installation/configuration experience be as robust on Apple's hardware? Does it offer to use BootX on this old world machine or will it only "support" yaboot and new world hardware?

Does Mandrake have a good selection of PowerPC compiled binaries available through their package management system or will I have to compile everything? I'm mostly interested in Internet and audio/video.

Will Linux recognize and use my G3-L2 or will I be stuck with a 603e with no L2 cache?

XFree86, does it support AA text on install now or will I have to install the hack I read about a while ago?

I appreciate any answers/adivce you can provide me with as I didn't get any information at my usual Mac board.

Eventually, I'll get a new Mac and run OS X but until then I need to get away from OS 9 because the lock-ups are driving me nuts.

Thank you,

[Secret Vampire]

In no particular order:
I don't know about the G3 upgrade, but I guess it'll work, Amiga PPC cards are supported, and they're easily as much of a hack as putting a CPU in the cache slot

I have absolutely no clue about antialiasing in X

So, onto Distribution choices.

I"m a Debian freak, it's advantages, for me, are that it doesn't have the easy stuff masking me from the internals, and I can run it in a vastly stripped down config. so I'm probably not the best person to be giving advice.

Anyway, from your point of view, it has a huge quantity of binaries, the current PPC distro ships on 7 CDs, but the installation procedure is not for the faint hearted.

I'm not too keen on Mandrake, but it is easy to set up, I'd be surprised if it only worked with new world machines... The setup should be just as robust on PPC, there isn't that much different between the two once you've dealt with partitioning and boot setup, it's just another Linux system.
I'd suggest though, that you go with YDL, IIRC both that and Mandrake are RPM based, so packages should be compatible between the two. Part of the beauty of Linux is that regardless of which distribution you use, all software written for Linux will work with it, though in the likely event that a PPC binary isn't available you'll have to compile, it isn't that hard.

The best thing to do is to experiment with different distributions till you find one that suits, it does depend also on wether you want to run Linux or learn Unix, if it's the latter then you'll be better off with something more old-skool like Debian or slackware, whereas the former is better facilitated by Mandrake, and probably YDL (I haven't used it, but a friend swears by it for PPC, though he likes Slackware/Debian too...)

I hope this serves to clarify more than it confuses...

[Mike S.]

In three forums you're the only person to reply so thank you.

I looked into Debian (the $5 CDs are appealing) but what part of it is would be a major pain exactly?

Once it's installed and running is it more difficult to maintain? Does the installer not configure the X environment or something? I know it uses apt rather than RPM.

The install only happens once (hopefully!) so I could probably deal with that. I seem to recall the old LinuxPPC 99 distro having a non X based installer (I tried to do it network) and I got that working with the help of a calculator for the drive partitioning