One of the nice things about Linux is that it’s not limited to one hardware platform. Mac users who want to give Linux a shot don’t have to run out and buy an x86 machine; they can simply put their Apple on double-duty.
One Linux distro for PowerPC machines is Yellow Dog Linux (YDL). Yellow Dog is a Red Hat-based distribution for the PPC architecture that has its own GUI installer and administration tools.
We installed YDL on an iMac DV with 256 MB of RAM. To install Yellow Dog on a Mac with only one hard disk, you’ll need to make a complete backup, reformat and reinstall your MacOS (if you want to keep it), and then install Yellow Dog. The entire process will take you at least two to three hours.
Installation
Thankfully, Yellow Dog had no problem with the Logitech mouse and Microsoft Natural keyboard attached to our Mac. The GUI installer is fairly intuitive, though Mac users will probably find it a bit more complicated than the MacOS install.
Yellow Dog comes with two software CDs and one CD of source code. It comes with most of the programs that you know and love on x86 Linux, though we were surprised to find that the default Home/Office install doesn’t include the GIMP.
However, since the GIMP wasn’t installed, we had a perfect excuse to try…
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