I am looking at buying a new powerbook G4 the 12" model with nvidia graphics. and i am wondering about its linux compat, i tried a search but only found info on the G4's with ati graphics, i need to know if suse will run well on it, and will the nvidia go 5200 be supported on a mac? and do all programs you run on a powerpc port of linux have to compiled for it? i have very limited experience with ppc linux any advice is appreciated.

Whilst I don't have a Mac, I have come across some of the hardware used in them in other machines, so my experience is listed below.

1) Wireless - support for the Broadcom chips which I believe are used is very new (basically as of December 2005 - x86/x86-64 types have been able to use ndiswrapper, an option not open to PowerPC Mac's) and highly experimental (but it does work). Some distributions are shipping kernels with support for Broadcom wireless chips (bcm43xx).

2) nVidia - Outside of properietary binary x86 and x86-64 drivers from nVidia, I believe there is no support for 3D on these cards for the Mac. At least with an ATi chip there are experimental 3D drivers for the 9200 and above series of cards with the latest version of X.Org if you want hardware 3D.

3) Programs - Yes, they will have to be compiled for the PowerPC architechture. Some distributions are better at this than others in terms of packages available, but in some cases you may have to build your own, as third party binaries may not always be built for PowerPC.

Hopefully a Mac user will swing by here to give you some more pointers.

apple just released a MacBook, intel based laptop. If you've got that kinda cash, that's the way I'd go. As far as I know, ther has been no reviews released about installing linux on it though....