Wiping Gutsy for Dapper on G3 iBook

[Caraibes]

I had 2 CD's, Gutsy and Dapper alternate PPC install.

I tried both on my G3 iBook. Dapper worked fine, so I wiped it for Gutsy.

Gutsy is such an amazing pile of bugs for PPC, that I just give up and go back to Dapper, until I find a better idea.

I might try Fedora 8, when it comes out...

Life gets tough for PPC...

FYI a couple of weeks ago, I performed a Debian netinst, but there was a major display problem, stuck at 800x600 with the screen reduced at a 1/3 of its size, and no sound...

-Has any of you try Yellow Dog ?
-Would you recommend it for a G3 iBook ?

[Alex Carter]

I've tried YDL on a iMac G4, but not latest, without E17.
YDL surely gives a support but I found it's worse than Ubuntu 6.06 at that moment. Maybe today it worth trying...
There was couple of things that made me completely wipe out ydl from my hard drive, and I started to dislike rpm-based distros suddenly :-$, while I had to use some of them because of LSB.
Ubuntu felt like fresh breeze after that old dog.
Again, maybe now YDL is better... But it costs money, AFAIR... so I can't see the sense to even try it.
Regards, A.C.

[bodycoach2]

Is it getting to the point were FreeBSD is a better option?

[Alex Carter]

Is it getting to the point were FreeBSD is a better option?
Or OpenBSD, which I have chosen =)
BTW, is there any PPC port of FreeBSD? I saw one but it definitely wasn't the latest version...

[Tommy]

Here's one place to look for linux variants (not BSD):

http://penguinppc.org/about/distributions.php

This list obviously has some distros on it that are marginal or dying, but (for example) I have some friends who swear by Gentoo and last I looked it still had very active PowerPC support. HOWEVER, my PowerPC boxes are "oldworld" and looking down the list the only one listed is... Vine ... which I hadn't heard of before!

[Alex Carter]

Gentoo is worth trying only if you can spare fast machine to do cross-compiling. Compiling on a old-world mac would be painful.
There isn't many distros to choose from, but some of them are strong, such as: Debian, Gentoo, Fedora, openSUSE. And *buntu still has community support, of course.
And why bother keeping 'oldworld' mac if you can spend less than 250$ for a decent 'NewWorld' machine? It's the price of iBook G3 800MHz or PMac G4 867MHz on Ebay, took as an example.

[Tommy]

And why bother keeping 'oldworld' mac if you can spend less than 250$ for a decent 'NewWorld' machine? It's the price of iBook G3 800MHz or PMac G4 867MHz on Ebay, took as an example.

obviously any of us still tinkering with oldworlds aren't doing it for the money, unless our time is worth essentially $0/hour...

For me it's partly stubbornness -- the machines still WORK after all, and why clutter the landfill with them if you can still use them?

My PowerMac 9600 is a cool LOOKING box, but it has stubbornly refused attempts at linux... however my PowerBook Wallstreet runs Dapper as well or better than it ran Mac OS 9.

[Calash]

Gentoo is worth trying only if you can spare fast machine to do cross-compiling. Compiling on a old-world mac would be painful.... .

Trust me...it is. I have been emerging KDE since late Friday.


Going to have to Google this Cross-compiling stuff :)

I am finding I have learned a lot while building Gentoo on my Clamshell. There is a lot of waiting, but I am learning alot too ;)

[Alex Carter]

For me it's partly stubbornness -- the machines still WORK after all, and why clutter the landfill with them if you can still use them?

Oh, I understand the feeling when something that not supposed to work anymore still works and works flawlessly =)
Used to do it many times with my old mac boxes. I just thought that the oldworld machine is the one that needs to get work done. Something misguided me in that way, sorry. =)

[Alex Carter]

Going to have to Google this Cross-compiling stuff :)

You can set the ARCH flag or whatever it is to the powerpc while using gentoo on a powerful machine, something like Core 2 Duo or Athlon X2 should be enough to feel difference =)
And after all there are precompiled packages for Gentoo, as far as I know.