>I have to agree with Chuck here. If you are adamant on using the 2400, I
>personally have installed LinuxPPC on it, and it worked fine. It wasn't
>too messy of an install, but it wasn't my first install by any means,
>and it will be non-standard. (which isn't necessarily a problem, it just
>makes it more complicated to get help, set up a network card, etc.)
I really don't agree. There are a few tricks to getting Linux running
on the 2400, but it's tricky because it's a notebook, not because
it's a Mac. It's even worse getting everything working on a
similar-era (or even current) Intel notebook. In fact the 2400 works
particularly smoothly among the Linux or FreeBSD running notebooks
I've used: you have the incredibly useful external SCSI, no IRQ
messes to solve (PCMCIA network support is actually particularly
easy), a touchpad that works well and can be configured easily, and a
good keyboard input abstraction layer to remap keys and emulate
second and third pointer buttons if you don't want to use an external
mouse. About the only major addition I'd like to see is a
kernel-level driver for the CT65550 video chipset (which is also very
common in PC notebooks of this vintage), and that may already be in
the 2.4.x kernel. And I think a beginner coming from the Mac OS will
actually like the BootX GUI method of getting into Linux, compared to
using yaboot or directly from Open Firmware (as is necessary on some
New World Macs).
There is certainly merit to the suggestion that you'd do well to get
experience setting up a couple of regular PC desktops before diving
in to the 2400, but if you're going to buy a cheap PC for the primary
purpose of learning Unix then you may as well install FreeBSD on it
instead of Linux - it's cleaner and easier to configure, much closer
to Mac OS 10, and generally a better ground-up framework for learning
the broad concepts that will help with other Unices and OS concepts
in general. But once you've run Unix for a while on another box, I'll
bet you find yourself wanting to get some form running on your 2400
as well. ;)
And if you really can afford a new computer for this, you might do
better to just buy an iBook and run Mac OS 10. Otherwise the 2400 is
a decent Linux platform, particularly if you install one of the
easier distributions with a nice recent kernel so there's less - or
probably no - patching required). I've never run Mandrake (I tend
toward Debian), but they did just release a 2.4 based PPC CD set I
find interesting.
--
Marc Sira | [EMAIL PROTECTED]
"If you can't play with words, what good are they?"
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