Looking for a Linux distro that will work well with PPC?

Question

I'm going to giving an old imac g3 (one of the huge colorful TV looking things) to a neighbor kid for kwanzukahramadasoltimas, but I want to put some kind of Linux in it. Can anybody recommend a distro that will work well with a g3 imac? Will Ubuntu ppc actually run on w

Answer 1

I found a website with PPC Distros. I'm not entirely sure if they'll work with your iMac, but you can try :]



http://penguinppc.org/about/distributions.php

Answer 2

I believe that the (relatively few) Linux distros that were available for the PowerPC architecture have stopped being maintained due to Apple's transition to Intel processors. I suppose you could look at this as an upside, though: even the most recent PPC version of, say, Ubuntu, is probably a couple years old, making it more likely to run smoothly on one of the old iMacs. It certainly wouldn't hurt to give it a shot — it is free, after all :)

Answer 3

Linux is WELL supported on the Power PC. Linus Torvalds himself had a mac book for a couple of years he was using to direct kernel development on, and I do believe it was a PPC Mac Book.



I suspect Ubuntu, or more truthfully Kubuntu or Xubuntu should run on your ppc. I'm writing this on a 10-year-old pentium-mmx notebook so I have experience playing with it on old hardware. It's a close derivative of Debian, which is one of the best distributions for old hardware. Ubuntu itself uses the GNOME desktop, which is the most memory intensive of all the desktops. Kubuntu uses KDE which is much easier and as full of features, and XFCE also has a lot of features but it is radically different from any desktop you have ever experienced. Nevertheless it is the desktop which uses the least memory. If you have at least 640K and preferably more, you might try Ubuntu but the other two are still recommended as they should be faster.



I haven't used the page I'm linking to in sources but you might find it helpful.



Oh. I forgot about Yellow Dog Linux. If you or he want to pay for support... ;-)

Answer 4

yellow dog made some distros for it. there are a few ubuntu ppc distros, but frankly speaking, they run much better on faster machines. They do work, though.