Mac and a DIstro -- your suggestions

winsnomore · 03-21-2005, 09:01 AM

I need to test some software on PowerPC Platform and I have never used a MAC.

Can anyone suggest ..
a) Which used MAC would be adequate for today's distro's ..

b) Which main stream distro's are able to run on those MAC platforms...

Needless to say, I don't want to spend a lot of money .. I could agument the machine with
a bigger hard disk if that's doable on a MAC platform.

Thanks

jtshaw · 03-21-2005, 09:08 AM

Get one of those Mac-Mini's. YellowDog and Gentoo both work VERY well on them and they are cheap cheap cheap. Only thing that isn't supported is Airport Extreme modules which is why I don't run Linux on my PowerBook 100% of the time...

EDIT:
I just wanted to be a bit more specific... Airport Extreme (aka Broadcom 54MB Wireless) won't work, nor will you be able to get hardware gfx acceleration on the 3D card. Reason being is ATI doesn't have a PPC version of there binary driver. Other then that, everything including sleep, cpu frequency switching, bluetooth, firewire, USB2.0, wired eithernet, ect is supported by the 2.6.11.5 linux kernel.

winsnomore · 03-21-2005, 10:00 AM

JTshaw .. thanks for the response ... I checked Mac-Mini's are in $600 range.
Mac G's are in $150 range .that's more like my range :-))

What's your opinion about that .. I am really looking for a compute platform .. no wirelss / grahpic accelration needs.

jtshaw · 03-21-2005, 10:42 AM

Mac G's? What exactly do you mean by that? Like old G3 machines? I've never run Linux on anything older then a G3 machine, and it ran fine on that. Anything with a G4 is also supported well. G5's are a bit tricky in some aspects but I suspect they are way out of your price range anyway.

winsnomore · 03-21-2005, 01:22 PM

Yes, I was looking at G3's they can be had for about $150 with small drives (< 10G). I figure one could always add disk or mount some space.
The speed is not that criticial,to check that he software runs on a PPC platform is.

Thanks for your suggesion .. would you say G3 machinesare eq. to PIII or PII ? ( I assume G4/5 are more like Pentium IV performance class).

jtshaw · 03-21-2005, 01:47 PM

They are probably about equivelent in speed. G3 had a pretty large speed range, as did the G4. I think the first "G4" was 380Mhz. and my laptop "G4" is 1.5Ghz... I put G4 in quotes because the 380Mhz. and the 1.5Ghz. are really only related in name only.

Just be warned, a lot of the older Mac's only had SCSI disks so upgraded them could be expensive.