Anyone here have any experience to share? At $5000 a pop I'm concerned about making the wisest choice...

Personally, I'd stick with Mac OS X on a powerbook. Unless there is something you really need that simply will not work under Mac OS X. Daniel

Oliver Jones wrote:

Anyone here used Linux on PowerPC systems? Ie, Macs. I'm tossing up whether to buy a PowerBook G4 17" vs a Dell Latitude D800 15.4". The Powerbook is only ~$900 more and has a bigger screen. And considering my business partners experience with his D800 I'm worried about stability/reliability. I've been an x86 user since the dawn of time but after using my Mothers iBook for a while I've come to appreciate the simplicity, reliability and attractiveness of Apple gear. From what I read on the net Linux PPC (Yellow Dog etc) is quite good. Not that much different from RedHat and such. I've been a long time RH/Fedora user so I'm most familiar with RPM based distros. And from what I can tell Mac-on-Linux is very good at running a virtual MacOS system (for iTunes or whatever).

Anyone here have any experience to share? At $5000 a pop I'm concerned about making the wisest choice...

I've run Debian and YellowDog on iMacs (and experimented with Mandrake and CRUX). Debian on PPC is exactly the same as it is x86 and i was very happy with it. YellowDog is heavily based on RedHat's releases (FC2 for YellowDog 4.0 iirc), so much so that in some places they forgot to do s/RedHat/YellowDog/. Most of the packages i wanted to install were available from the freshrpm.net yum repository. YellowDog was better at setting up X than Debian, though i've never had much luck with getting Debian to setup X for me. Mac-on-Linux runs Mac OS X very well. I had problems with it not keeping up with the sound, but a machine faster than my iMac should fix that. If you're not trying to do obscure things like install to a diskless machine with only a x86 server (i did manage that eventually), the only slightly challenging thing is the partition setup (since it's the only thing different from x86 Linux). Partition your disk with Mac OS X first if you're going to run Mac OS X, creating one partition to later split into root, swap etc for Linux. Don't install the Mac OS 9 drivers for the disk unless you really have to, they create extra partitions and that can quickly get you over Linux's 15 partition per disk limit. As a long time Linux user, i found Mac OS X annoying in many places. Mostly being dependant on Apple for updates to security holes and not being about to replace the versions of open source software it ships with, due to lack of a proper package management system. The yearly full price OS upgrades (with the old version quickly being desupported) and the constant pushing of the .mac service soon go tiring too. Running Linux made me in control of my computer again.