Best Flavor of Linux for Mac?

T

tk4two1

Professional Crastinator
I have a PowerComputing Powerbase 200Mhz 603e with 112 Mb RAM that I want to put Linux on. What would be the easiest and best flavor of Linux to run on this machine?
 
I forget: is that PCI or NuBus-based?

You may not have a choice. Of the many, many (that is to say, 3 or 4) flavors of Linux for Macs, most of them only run on certain hardware types. I think MkLinux is for PowerPC NuBus computers. There's some linux with '68' in its name: guess what processor that's for.

For "modern" computers, which yours may be, I think people like something called Yellow Dog Linux, and I thought there was another thing called Black Lab Linux. Dunno what's up with the dog names.

-Rob
 
It's a PCI machine...

I think I'll give SUSE a try, see how she likes to run on the ol' beast.
 
Yellow Dog is pretty easy to install once you actually get the drive partitioned and the bootloader installed. Disk Druid wouldn't work on a drive with Mac partitions, so I was stuck with an outdated version of fdisk. Guess how many times I screwed up the partition addresses. :)

And I think Black Lab Linux is some variation of Yellow Dog that's intended for use in parallel processing clusters.
 
Have used Mandrake 8.1 and 8.2 (version 9 is out now) on Apple and Intel (its also compiled for other platforms). Whats good about Mandrake is its installation and packaging, its a no-brainer, with lots of stuff included.

www.mandrake.com


Its a very active site with lots of information. Its a free download, or was.
 
Debian is easier to maintain, although some find it harder to initially install.

Failing that, try cherry.

Actually you ought to give NetBSD PPC a try.

PS: I'm running OS X on my PowerCenter. You could run Darwin too.
 
I've got YellowDog on my Umax S900/233,
and it has done me fine as a learning linux
environment and dev web server.

Only trouble I had was with my twinturbo
video card (the notorious 8mb one).
 
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