I know that many distros of linux have been ported to the Power architecture, so I would like to hear if anyone out there who uses linux on their mac has any input into the situation.
I'm thinking of getting some old iMacs, the ones with all the cool colors and putting linux on them and trying that out. If anyone has tried that, I would sure like to hear about it!

I had a Macintosh Powerbook G3 (the Wallstreet model with 256MB or thereabouts) which I ran Yellowdog on. It worked really well but the main thing bothering me was that the touchpad only has one mouse button. Pressing different keys while pressing the single mouse button in order to simulate second and third buttons gets old real fast (and most desktop environments for Linux make heavy use of 2nd/3rd button clicking).

Check the Apple section of the Linux on laptops website and read up on a few installation walkthoughs before proceeding.


Håkan

I've tried out OpenBSD, NetBSD, YellowDog, Mandrake and Debian on Macs, mostly a G3 Lombard powerbook (amen brother hw-tph to the world of suck that is the 1-button mouse), and fiddled with an old 68k based iArcaic something and a G3 300-ish tower machine that I really didn't get to know.

Its just Linux on a machine that runs cooler, and well.... looks cooler. After installing basically every OS on everything with a chip that could run something I have to give a huge amount of credit to the YellowDog installer and package management. The critical upshot to Mac and OS-whatever was that with such a limited hardware catalog, its easy to build an installer for all seasons. Somehow YD made it easier than installing Apple's OSX. By far my most painless install to date, and a lot of fun to use... maybe a little heavy on the distro side configuring, but I'm jaded... I run Slackware normally.

Also, this question has been somewhat done to death, check the past posts. Really, not much has changed in the distros and their PPC support in the past few years. All the others just compile all their normal stuff for PPC, YellowDog meanwhile is made to run only on PPC from the ground up.

Cheers,

Finegan