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Linux Distro, Older Macs? Would you be interested / help?

Submitted by Macinjosh on August 27, 2008 - 4:14pm. PowerPC Macs

Hey all:

I've (still) been kicking around the idea of a distro for older Macs, my B&W @ 300 being a primary candidate. It would be a purely recreational project, not "officially" a distribution, as such. To facilitate greater ease of use (and a good place for me to get really deep into things,) I am thinking Xubuntu, stripped as bare-metal as possible, without losing functionality.

I have no name for the project at this time. I don't want to use something that would irk Apple (Mac,) the PowerPC folk (would they really be touchy about it? Presumably less so than Apple...)

If you want to suggest, well anything, feel free. Ultimately it would be great if it was DSL, for PPC, but that's not the direction I plan on taking with it. Have considered going off of Slackintosh though.

Just note that in suggesting names, what have you, I may in fact use what you suggested, so be prepared for that.

Artwork, custom apps, if you have a skill, and would help, leave a message to that effect.

Applefritter Linux? Just wondering that out loud, I WOULDNT use it without due permission.

-- Macinjosh

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Jon's picture

The current crop of Linux dis

Submitted by Jon on August 27, 2008 - 7:10pm.

The current crop of Linux distros lack a few key parts that the x86 crowd takes for granted, like a functional Flash, and media codecs. On the whole your project should be fairly easy to pull off. I've got Ubuntu PPC on my B&W 400 and it runs ok. The biggest issue is the Old World vs New World split. Functionality for NW machines is fairly easy and straight forward, but OW needs the kernel and initrd on the MacOS partition. One major innovation that would help the OW machines is adding to the boot loader the ability to read EXT partitions for those so we don't need to manually track kernel updates and keep them in sync between partitions and such. A better bootloader for OW would make giving them support in more modern distros MUCH easier. THe bootloader issue is why most distros only "support" NW machines for PPC in general.

EDIT: Of course as soon as I post, I remember EMiLe. Anyone who wants to bring easier Linux to older Macs and has some good coding skills should help the project out.

» I am not in this world to live up to other people's expectations, nor do I feel that the world must live up to mine. - Fritz Perls

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