I am going to be retiring my aging Dell notebook and buying a new iMac. Now that all Macs use Intel chips, would any distro that is x86 compatible be useable on a Mac, or would I be looking for a ia64 compatible distro?

Mac OS is Unix based so technically any Linux oe win32 OS would work

The Intel Macs use standard x86_64 compatible Intel chips. You should be able to run any Linux supporting x86_64 on these with Parallels or similar. I don't know about direct installs as macs use EFI instead of the traditional BIOS, but some Googling should help you,

The only distribution that I know that has support for installation on the Intel Macs out of the box at the moment is Fedora Core 6. Unless you are comfortable in a multilib environment, having both x86 and x86_64 libraries, I suggest you use a x86 architecture distribution.

I don't think this is relevant. When you install Linux, you are replacing the Mac OS.

Sorry, Pixellany, I was trying to point out that techically, any x86 OS works on a x86 CPU architecture.

As any x86_64 system would on an 64 bit processor.

Hence it was relevant in the fashion that since Apple computers abandonned the PowerPC platform for Intel CPU'S any x86 OS would then be made to function on such a computer.

Because you do know that a few monts ago you could not install Windows on a MAC or Linux for that mather, unless you hacked in a PPC based Linux like "Yellow Dog Linux".

Since Mac OS is UNIX based it can be made to accomodate any of these paltforms, as Linux could also, and it was, because now Mac OS works on Intel.

This was my point and it has nothing to do at all with the fact of replacing an OS for another.

I should have been clearer in my statement because it was intended to answer the main question of the thread which was: "would any distro that is x86 compatible be useable on a Mac"

...And I think it did.

Thanks for making me answer properly.