What's a good OS for an iMac PowerPC G5?

[inigomontoya]

I am a sanitation engineer (trashman) and recently found a second generation iMac G5 at work in someone's trash. I've never worked with macs before but I was able to find out that the hard drive was bad. I have procured a spare and now it needs an os. I was saddened to find out that the last Ubuntu that supported PPC was 6.06. I've tried Debian and that works ok. I was wondering if anyone had any other recommendations. Thanks.

[zmjjmz]

Yellow Dog Linux is a possibility, and Fedora 9 has a PPC release.
IMO Debian is perfectly fine though.

[jcwmoore]

lucky find, well i have a iMac G4 and run ubuntu 8.04. it works great and i would recommend you give it a try, if you haven't already

http://cdimage.ubuntu.com/ports/releases/hardy/release/

[mips]

I was saddened to find out that the last Ubuntu that supported PPC was 6.06.

Not true. The last 'Official' Ubuntu PPC was 6.06. The port is still going and you can get the latest version for PPC.

See the post above for a link.

[I-75]

I am a sanitation engineer (trashman) and recently found a second generation iMac G5 at work in someone's trash. I've never worked with macs before but I was able to find out that the hard drive was bad. I have procured a spare and now it needs an os. I was saddened to find out that the last Ubuntu that supported PPC was 6.06. I've tried Debian and that works ok. I was wondering if anyone had any other recommendations. Thanks.


You might want to check E-Bay for Tiger OS X. It is a good OS, maybe you can dual boot Linux with it and have the best of both worlds. I think Tiger requires at least 512 MB Ram, the computer should use the common PC 100 RAM.

As I last recall Flash was not supported on Power PC Linux , but you might want to go try Gnash but I never got it to work. I decided to install OS X Tiger instead on my G3. Works good , looks like Linux in a way, simple and nice looking.

[inigomontoya]

lucky find, well i have a iMac G4 and run ubuntu 8.04. it works great and i would recommend you give it a try, if you haven't already

http://cdimage.ubuntu.com/ports/releases/hardy/release/

Thanks to you both. I was unaware that the port was still being updated. I guess I didn't dig deep enough.

[inigomontoya]

You might want to check E-Bay for Tiger OS X. It is a good OS, maybe you can dual boot Linux with it and have the best of both worlds. I think Tiger requires at least 512 MB Ram, the computer should use the common PC 100 RAM.

As I last recall Flash was not supported on Power PC Linux , but you might want to go try Gnash but I never got it to work. I decided to install OS X Tiger instead on my G3. Works good , looks like Linux in a way, simple and nice looking.

Thanks, I'll keep that in mind. The computer came with 1gb PC3200 memory so I think I'm good there. Really a nice find. Only 2 years old or so. This was one of the last ones before they switched to intel. Have you used Leopard? Is it worth the extra money?

[bashveank]

Thanks, I'll keep that in mind. The computer came with 1gb PC3200 memory so I think I'm good there. Really a nice find. Only 2 years old or so. This was one of the last ones before they switched to intel. Have you used Leopard? Is it worth the extra money?

I'm running Leopard on my G5 iMac and it does run faster than it did on Tiger, so I would say it is worth the extra money (although on eBay they're only a couple dollars apart....)

[chucky chuckaluck]

fun little linux distro chooser...

http://www.zegeniestudios.net/ldc/

[I-75]

Thanks, I'll keep that in mind. The computer came with 1gb PC3200 memory so I think I'm good there. Really a nice find. Only 2 years old or so. This was one of the last ones before they switched to intel. Have you used Leopard? Is it worth the extra money?

1 GB memory is fine and it might be expandable to 2 GB if you wanted. I never used Leopard...I wasn't sure if it would run on a G3 I Mac. I also have another G3 I Mac with Panther OS X on it too. Both are good machines for their era which dates back to 1999 -2001.

[regomodo]

Gentoo works on PPC (http://www.gentoo.org/doc/en/handbook/handbook-ppc.xml) hardware. However, i wouldn't bother trying unless you are willing to spend a while(read a week to 2) to get familiar with the install procedures of Gentoo.

[inigomontoya]

No one mentioned this yet. But OpenSUSE has a flavor for PPC. Is it any good in terms of up-to-date packages and stablility?

[zmjjmz]

No one mentioned this yet. But OpenSUSE has a flavor for PPC. Is it any good in terms of up-to-date packages and stablility?

OpenSuSE is stable and up to date, but it's sloooooowwwww.

[mips]

You could also try Debian, Gentoo, Arch, OpenBSD, FreeBSD, NetBSD

See these links for more options.
http://penguinppc.org/about/distributions.php
http://lowendmac.com/linux/index.shtml

[handy]

You could also try Debian, Gentoo, Arch, OpenBSD, FreeBSD, NetBSD

See these links for more options.
http://penguinppc.org/about/distributions.php
http://lowendmac.com/linux/index.shtml

Will Arch run on PowerPC CPU?

[mips]

Will Arch run on PowerPC CPU?

Yip, they have a PPC port although not widely publicised (why I have no idea).

http://www.archlinuxppc.org/
http://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/Category:PowerPC_(English)

There are even question on the Arch forums relating to it in the Arch64 & Other Architectures (http://bbs.archlinux.org/viewforum.php?id=35) section

[handy]

Yip, they have a PPC port although not widely publicised (why I have no idea).

http://www.archlinuxppc.org/
http://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/Category:PowerPC_(English)

There are even question on the Arch forums relating to it in the Arch64 & Other Architectures (http://bbs.archlinux.org/viewforum.php?id=35) section

It is strange that they don't publicize it. In the Arch Compared To Other Distros (http://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/Arch_Compared_To_Other_Distros) page they list other distro's supporting ppc, & not ever Arch!?

I wonder what our friend Misfit138 can tell us about that?

[mips]

It is strange that they don't publicize it.

I stumbled onto it by accident some time ago. Maybe it's not 100% where they want it to be or something like that before making it public. I actually don't have a clue to be honest.

Hopefully others can shed more light on this.

[stream303]

I've never heard of any success with the true last-model G5 iMac, the "Rev C" with both the ALS and isight camera.

So if Hardy PPC doesn't do it, check out Intrepid coming out in official release later this week! (check out that same "ports" directory - you won't find it available for "official" download on the normal repos.

[zmjjmz]

Wait, you can get Arch on the ppc?
I earnestly thought that the only architecture Arch supported was i686.

[d_skillz]

OpenSuSE is stable and up to date, but it's sloooooowwwww.

Yeah speed for that kinda PC is going to be tricky. It's either OSX or one of the flavours initially suggested.

[zmjjmz]

Arch + Blackbox would be really fast.