Monday, June 23, 2008

Linux on PPC

I am getting my hands on a ibook G4 with the view of testing all distributions made for PPC and see which one works out of the box.

My criteria will be as follows: -

1. I do not care if it's a KDE or a Gnome distro
2. Full hardware recognition. It's not as if there are millions of specs to look for, so if a distro is poor on the graphics card or the wifi card recognition, it gets the boot automatically.
3. Dual boot. I will be keeping a copy of OS X on the drive, so the linux installer must recognise the OS X partition and give me dual boot option on re-booting
4. Full multimedia support. I could not care less about the whole codec issue, I just want everything to work straight out of the box.
5. Speed. If I have to wait 12 minutes for the box to boot....
6. I want a graphical interface for updates and additions which is simple and easy
7. And finally, I DO NOT want to touch the command line. As linux is supposed to be ready for the masses (so I read everywhere), everything should be "point & click". As for point 2 above, non compliance means an automatic red card.

I plan to review the 32 bits distros listed on penguinppc for the next 6 weeks or so, until the end of July, and will do a league table to finish? Now this is going to be fun (my girlfriend of 4 years thinks I am crazy and is thinking of calling my mother to see if this is normal behaviour....). I really like Techie Moe's rants, so I guess it will be more in line which that kind of piece of writing than a proper linux.com review.

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