Greeting Linux UG

Sean picasso@madflower.com
Thu, 15 Mar 2001 03:11:01 -0500 (EST)


On Sun, 18 Mar 2001, Daniel R . Kilbourne wrote:

> In my experience (granted, it is limited), LinuxPPC is pretty cool,
> especially if you are looking for a workstation. It has (IMHO) the
> best, smoothest installer of ANY operating system (but ofcourse they
> had to make it easy, it is for Mac users after all :P )

I'll second this. It was definately one of the easiest Installs I have
ever done especially if you wanted a dual boot system. I will note  
LinuxPPC is being developed for non-apple machines from IBM, Mercury and
TiVo as well as Apple hardware and there is a _lot_ of cross-platform work
and information sharing between the Darwin/MacOS X, xBSD, and LinuxPPC
camps. 

Some notes:
-make the first partition of the drive a MacOS bootable partition. 
It can be a small cut down version, I think mine is minimal on a roughly
100 meg partition. This protects you if you accidently screw up your PRAM
settings. You can reset them them and you end up in the MacOS. 
And actually I believe Drive Setup in System 8.6+ will actually format
your drive as Linux partitions for you. 

-Make sure the dist you are installing supports that particular model. I
know that about a year ago there were some problems with platinum support
actually being incorporated into the kernel. I don't know whether those
actually got folded back into the main kernel or not. I do know I had
LinuxPPC up and running on a 7200/75 about 3 years ago. It will work,
but you might have to replace the kernel right off the bat. 

-I personally like the YellowDog dist for LinuxPPC, but I am a bit partial
since they do some really kickass stuff with blacklab linux with the
Mercury boxes and LinuxPPC.com reorganized into a non-profit and they
might have a better desktop dist now. They both use the RPM for their
package manager and are both loosely a RedHat system. 

-Video settings in the MacOS are stored in PRAM and LinuxPPC uses those
so if you change screen resolutions in the MacOS it will change the Linux
ones as well. 

-Be careful burning the disk image it is a dual format HFS/ISO bootable
image.