Has anyone ran Debian on PPC? I know that Gentoo and FreeBSD also have a PPC release as well as YDL (though I'm not interested too much with YDL).

With Snow Leopard coming out soon Apple will be saying farewell to PPC architecture. I want to remove OS X Tiger and install a flavor of Linux that I can continue to obtain updates and optimize the laptop's performance.

The preview version of Snow Leopard only run on Intel processors (which is hardly a surprise), but Apple has made no mention of the final version's compatibility.

I really doubt Apple is going to drop support for G4+ processors anytime soon. Do you know how many of those machines are still deployed in the field? The G5's especially, dropping support for them would essentially be like pulling the plug on half of the music and film industry's hardware. G5's were still being sold in 2006 (and was actually Apple's highest tier hardware, the Intel Mac's were below it performance wise), and are still covered under AppleCare warranty. They have to support them.

Not to talk you out of putting Linux on the machine. But the chances of there being zero support for PPC in 10.6 is extremely low.

My brother gave me his old iBook G4 which by Apple's hardware utilities was hosed and supposedly needed a hard drive replacement.

I popped in a Gentoo live cd and found I was able to reformat the hard drive, partition it and write data to it. This gave me hope.

I downloaded a Debian Lenny installer CD for PPC since Debian is my choice flavor of Linux. All went well in the installation, and the Lenny installer pretty much set everything up in good order.

For example:
The graphics and keyboard were fine with the new install without any tweaking required. The wifi card is fine, and the installer found the proper firmware and driver for it.

Some issues:
Audio took some tweaking. A little googling got me up and running there.

I found I could not eject the cdrom, nor could I read audio cd's. I have not tried to resolve this yet, but some googling has led me to the impression that this is not completely broken. I think some tweaking will get the cdrom working properly.

Otherwise I am very pleased with Debian Lenny on ppc. I was at first a little leary of the open source software for flash and java support, but have found it is able to handle an acceptable amount of content. I can do YouTube and MySpace on the ppc Debian machine. Some flash applications are a little buggy or lacking features. It will only get better with time.

All in all I have been quite pleased with the outcome "out of the box".