A Live Linux ISO for the Mac?

An anonymous reader asks: "My iBook is the strongest of my laptops, but it's not running my favorite OS. Knoppix and the various other live ISOs are nice for x86 machines, but (though OS X is nice, and I'm not disparaging it) it would be nice to have all the apps that come with KDE and GNOME, and to have them all available through a nice fluxbox or windowmaker desktop). I've seen smart people nearly cry trying to install Debian on their Macs, but then I've seen smart people nearly cry trying to install Debian in the first place. Knoppix has certainly made it easier to put Debian on x86 machines, but does such a thing exist for Macs? Mac OS X is a very pretty thing, and Apple has supported some great free software projects through it, it's just that on an older iBook (and older iMacs, even more so), a low-key GNU/Linux desktop moves more responsively, and has everything I need. If I could easily run a nice GNU system on them, old iMacs would be worth a lot more to me.".

I remember that one...

[douglasq]

It was a demo and you couldn't save a state. Once you quit, any changes you made were lost.

Re:Debian has come a long way.

[chasingporsches]

maybe on newer machines... but i had one hell of a hard time installing debian 3.0 on a powermac 5500/225. (yellowdog wasn't stable on this machine! maybe they should look into that? although i think it was a problem with BootX.) now, even though i got it loaded up, i still have to ssh in whenever i turn it on and reset the keycodes for the ADB keyboard... it is harder on older machines than new ones. i didn't have a problem on a powermac g4.

Re:OS X on a G3

[Davidge]

I recently bought an old G3 PowerBook (WallStreet) 233 (Series II) for my wife. It came with 64Mb of RAM and a 2Gb HDD, and seems to run OS X 10.1 quite well (all things considered).

I ran YellowDog 2.3 on it for a few days to see how it performed, and in general, it ran pretty well too.

OS X 10.2 however would not install (or maybe it would but after waiting over an hour and not getting past the first two dialogs, I gave up - I presume this was more to do with the pitiful amount of RAM more than anything else).

Define Smart Please

[tyrione]

If I can help an endearing woman watercolor artist/housewife, back in the late 1990's while working for Apple Enterprise Tech Support get Openstep 4.2 on a Toshiba Laptop with all the bells and whistles any 'smart' person with IT knowledge of hardware, device drivers and basic understandings of BIOS within the x86 realm should sure as hell know how to get Debian to install.

God how hard is it to download the disk images, burn them and boot off of CD? It's self explanatory.

And yes no distro seems to match even NeXTSTEP/Openstep's Installation process that now is part of OS X--that's a credit to the brilliance of the folks I as a peon was lucky to have bagels and cream cheese or playing foosball with (EOF Team were awesome players by the way)--but damn if you can't handle that for sure what hope is there for the general consumer to be able to install, outside of the RedHat world or SUSE world?

I'm trying to figure out what's stopping you from downloading the latest Trolltech source, compiling it for OS X and using OS X's xfree86's Quartz optimized X Server, then either compile KDE from source yourself by changing some of the configuration flags, or seeing if there are available packages already via Fink.

Re:If you want all the KDE and Gnome apps,

[The Herbaliser]

Compiling KDE from source took a little under two days on my really old ibook. That sounds hellish, but really isn't, because it just ran in the background and I noticed no noticeable slow-down (I wish my XP box at work could do that... it's so easy to bring it to its knees). It was also incredibly easy, largely thanks to finkcommander.

the integration between KDE and OSX is absolutely beautiful.

A live CD

[jbolden]

If a live CD came out that made installing linux as easy as installing MacOS X then it would draw some negative attention from Apple I think.

Why? Apple makes pretty close to 100% of their profits on hardware sales. Software is just a way to sell hardare. They have had no objections to the Unix crowd that likes the iBook/Linux combination. Linux customers are customers that pay them lots of money and then they don't even have to support. Its hard to see Apple's downside.