Archive of UserLand's first discussion group, started October 5, 1998.
Re: Which Linux for MacOS?
Author: C.M. Connelly Posted: 5/14/1999; 10:47:39 AM Topic: Which Linux for MacOS? Msg #: 6231 (In response to 6215) Prev/Next: 6230 / 6232
If you have a NuBus machine, you _must_ get MkLinux -- other distributions don't support non-PCI machines.My take, from looking at the LinuxPPC, Yellow Dog, and TurboLinux distributions is that LinuxPPC is probably the most mature (it's based on the standard Red Hat distribution). Yellow Dog seems pretty stripped down (there are packages missing from their standard distribution that I would have thought would have been included), but they have a nice logo and pretty binders and shirts. TurboLinux has been around for a while, and runs on other platforms (i386) and has support for other languages (Chinese). I don't know anyone who runs it, though, and I haven't heard much about it that makes me understand why people would choose TurboLinux over another distribution.
Definitely check out the FAQ-O-Matic <http://www.dartmouth.edu/~jonh/lppc-serve/cache/1.html>, the Web sites for the various distributions (<http://www.linuxppc.com/> (and <http://www.linuxppc.org/>), <http://www.yellowdoglinux.com>, and <http://www.turbolinux.com/>), and especially <http://slashdot.org/>, for the latest news on most everything Linux.
If you can wait (or help), there's also a PPC port of Debian Linux (<http://www.debian.org/>), probably the purest of all Linux distributions.
As far as Darwin is concerned, it's good for Apple from a licensing standpoint (Darwin, being *BSD-based, is under the BSD license rather than the GPL, which means that Apple can preserve (or protect) its investment more easily), a historical standpoint (*BSD has been around for a long time and has had most of the bugs beaten out of it), and from a technological standpoint (Mach is still great technology). Apple is warming to the idea of open source software slowly, but they are warming. With Darwin, they've released source (and now binaries) which could allow Mac OS X Server (and thus, Mac OS X) to be ported to older machines (like my own PowerCenter 132) as well as Intel machines. They still need to be a bit more forthcoming with some of the details about how the older hardware works for things to really get going.
(And, as long as I'm mentioning *BSD, NetBSD (<http://www.netbsd.org/> and OpenBSD (<http://www.openbsd.org/>) also have ports to the PPC architecture underway.)
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