Yellow Dog Linux! Think the latest version is 3 point something or other as I use YDL 2.1 and find it is generally faster than Panther. Yellow Dog is based on RedHat but written around a Motorola processor instead of an Intel. Most variants of Linux for the PC are based on Redhat, Debian or Caldera, but Red Hat is especially popular, except that RedHat 10 is now named Fedora.
Although you want to avoid commercial distro's, these are ones that tend to be used by big business, and therefore have some kind of credence. Many companies were frightened of adopting Linux, because they believed the lie that anything outside Microsoft was 'experimental'. Today many Co's use Linux, IBM, HP and Dell also ship PC's with Linux on. If you are on a tight budget and want a Unix operating system, then I can recommend Yellow Dog Linux as it is half the price of Panther. I initially had it on my iMac as a Unix stop gap until I could afford Panther, but am loading it on my older PPC 7200. Are there advantages to using Yellow Dog Linux over say Panther? Yes and no! Panther is bloatusware compared with Linux as it needs faster recent processors, more harddrive space, and 256MB RAM minimum. Yellow Dog is generally faster than Mac OS X, can give a new lease of life to your older pre-G3 machines, plus you can run a Graphical User Interfave (GUI) with just 64MB RAM! I have seen Yellow Dog run on a work mate's G4 and generally it runs a little slower than Mac OS 9, but noticeably faster than Mac OS X. Mac OS X has plenty of applications avaialble, whereas Linux is lacking apps in some areas, notably Music or Pro Audio recording, MIDI Sequencing. A lot of Linux apps are experimental, and continually under development, but generally Yellow Dog apps are stable. The Open Source world write some great apps for both Macs and Linux/Unix, the classic alternative to MicroSlops Office is OpenOffice/Star Office that comes fre (well $10 for the CD ROM from the shop) and it gives me about 90% the functionality of MS Office and is comaptible with Word, Excel and PowerPoint file formats. OpenOffice/Star Office have their own XML format to save files in that are less than half the size of their Microsoft counterparts, so it won't surprise you that MicroSlop are copying them as the new releases of MS Office will also now save files in theis more efficient XML format! It does depend what you intend to use Linux for, but there are plenty of Office suites like Star Office/Open Office Koffice etc, you have a choice of using the two main Window Managers (Linux equivalents of Finder in Panther) like KDE (Kool Development/Desktop Environment) and GNOME, BlackBox (lite weight and very fast but with support for KDE apps) etc. Remember Linux is just the cut down Unix kernel developed by Linus Torvalds of Finland, all the other stuff you see like KDE, GNOME, Applications and Utilities are not part of Linux per se!! You are given the option of Dual booting between your Mac OS and Yellow Dog. Linux is closer to the look and feel of Unix than Mac OS X, since in Mac OS X most of the Unix stuff is hidden away from you. Panther, Jaguar etc are effectively a souped up Mac GUI front end over a BSD Unix engine. Linux has a dock/taskbar too, so you can launch your fave apps. You can also emulate Mac OS classic behaviour, KDE, Unix and even Microslop Jokedows. All Operating Systems (Oses) have vulnerabilities, but Unix based Oses are generally more stable and resilient to hacking than Jokedows. I had Mac OS 9.0 crash 4 times in a year, Mac OS 9.1 crash 3 times in 2 weeks, but have yet to have Yellow Dog hang (I did reboot Panther when the network hung but that was me panicing before I found the Forced Quit option). I have only ever seen a Unix server go down TWICE in my 16 years in the IT industry, one was to upgrade the server, the other was a hard drive failure!! Neither outage was due to failures within Unix itself!! Linux actually has the potential to be more vulnerable than Windows, as developers focus on getting things to work rather than security, but in practice it is far more stable and much harder to crack out of the box than any flavour of Jokedows. Many people are warry of Linux after reading about Microsoft's Steve Baulmer's recent presentation 'demonstrating' how much more stable Windows XP was than Linux, but he omitted to tell the audience that he was comparing the 2003 version of Windows XP against an obselete 1999 version 6.0 of Redhat Linux, not a 2003 Linux version to give a truer like for like comparison!!! Windows XP comes with 5 of it's software ports coded to be fuly open, hence the recent blaster virus exploitation of these vulnerabilities, whereas in Unix, Linux and Mac OS X these ports are all bolted shut! When Jokedows crashes it often takes down the operating system with it, whereas if an app hangs in Unix/Linux, this would not take out the OS as well. Hope this helps you see that Linux is a valid option for the Mac. YDL will fly on your QuickSilver! I can only envy you! Best Regards Pete "To mess up a Mac OS X box, you need to work at it; to mess up your Windows box, you just need to work on it." -----Original Message----- From: G-List [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] On Behalf Of jon salenger Sent: Wednesday, 23 June 2004 7:07 AM To: G-List Subject: Newbie help Hi, I'm a brand-newbie who is looking to install linux on my 867 mHz quicksilver. Haven't even chosen a distribution yet. I'd like to avoid RedHat and other, more commercial, distributions, but I'm not sure which flavor to use, since I've never actually used any of them. I don't mind a learning curve if I'm able to find out what I need online/at the library. Any recommendations? Also, I wouldn't mind taking a CC class or something, if someone recommends that I take one first. Thanks much, jon -- G-List is sponsored by <http://lowendmac.com/> and... 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