Linux on PowerPC Macs has 2,055 members. This is an English-language user-to-user support group. Linux and BSD Unix are free, open source operating systems that have long been available on Apple Macintosh hardware but not nearly as widely deployed as the Mac OS.
One of my first computers was a Power Mac, and I remember thinking the little “PowerPC” badge was pretty cool, even before I really knew what it meant. For quite a while I was an Apple fan, my next computer was an iMac G3 SE, and then a Power Mac G5 970MP machine, which I was quite proud of.

Linux For Ppc G5
Linux Mac Ppc G5
G5 Mac Pro

While there are several builds of 'linux' or unix that could be run in certain Apple environs (hardware)

the names and conditions are detailed enough to consider further and in-depth study prior to being

fully (experimentally) committed to the installation and attempted use of any specific version.

I'm using iMac PowerPC G5 1.8 GHz, 1GB RAM, 160GB HDD, and 10.5.4 Leopard OS. Ubuntu-13.04-desktop-powerpc.iso Desktop image for Mac (PowerPC) and IBM-PPC (POWER5) computers. Oracle Java 7 on Linux PowerPC. Libdvdcss2 install-cs.sh not completing on PowerPC Mac (or other achitectures besides x86).

Ubuntu, Debian, Mint PPC, and others offer possibilities; and may require much more command-line

use to access their features than the graphic user interface of Mac OS X (or earlier OS 9).

While I've read about these differing systems and how they could be used in Apple architecture

I've not used any of them; but do have a sprinkling of Mac OS from early version 1985 on and

lesser so with 'windows' PC. Not sure, but there are several places to study the topic online and

you may find a good offline book to backup the internet to use with experimental versions.

Jan 6, 2019 9:01 AM

Your favorite operating system isn't only for x86

About PowerPC

The POWER architecture describes a family of RISC CPUs that arose out of a consortium of IBM, Apple, and Motorola. Within this chip family, higher-end POWER4 chips are used in various IBM mid-range machines (see Related topics for links to more information on IBM iSeries and pSeries hardware and software); at a personal computer, workstation, or workgroup-server level, the PowerPC branch of POWER chips are used in widely-used consumer machines from Apple Computer. Chips in the PowerPC family -- especially those from Motorola -- are also used in various embedded and specialized systems, including PCs from smaller manufacturers such as the phoenix-like current incarnation of Amiga.

The interrelations among various POWER architecture chips are similar to those in the x86 world -- for the most part, later generations of chips provide backward compatibility with earlier ones while also offering new and enhanced capabilities. Within the PowerPC family branch, five-year-old Apple machines used 601, 603, and 604 model chips. The current models have phased out the G3 but continue to use the similar G4, both 32-bit chips, running at various clock speeds; the recently introduced G5 is a 64-bit IBM chip that mostly adds some multimedia-specialized instructions to the POWER4 chip models.

The bottom line on all these chips, from a Linux developer's perspective, is that they all run Linux happily and well. For the PowerPC branch of the chips, excellent consumer-friendly distributions are available and offer commercial customer support. IBM also installs Linux for customers of its high-end POWER4 machines.

So you want to run Linux -- Why buy a PowerPC machine?

The 'default' systems for running Linux are unquestionably x86 machines. Whether based on CPUs from Intel, AMD, Cyrix, Transmeta, or smaller makers, the x86 architecture is well known and makes up the large majority of personal computers, workstations, and small servers. It is certainly safe to go with the majority.

For many Linux users, the best reason to buy a PowerPC machine will be, quite simply, the range of well engineered and reasonably priced machines available from Apple. Admittedly, the G4 lines -- bottom line -- do not quite keep up with comparably priced x86 machines in CPU power. The G4s do not lag that far behind, but they do a little. However, Apple makes some of the best laptops available from an ergonomic, aesthetic, battery-life, and weight perspective. All of those features are far more important to me, for a laptop, than raw number-crunching. On the desktop, the G4 models differentiate themselves mostly on an aesthetic or ergonomic perspective -- for example, in the compactness of Apple's cantilever-mounted flat-panel iMacs. All of Apple's machines, moreover, have a good reputation for durability and reliability -- including their rack mount servers, which are nice for clusters and server arrays.

At the high-end, Apple's G5 towers are comparable in speed to the fastest x86-derived CPUs and systems; in other words, the Intel Itanium and AMD Athlon64. Benchmarks among the three contenders are a mixed bag, but all three chips obtain quite similar performance (all are remarkably fast, and suitable for intensive number crunching applications). Moreover, on price, Apple's G5 towers seem to sell for less than comparably configured systems from x86 vendors such as Dell, Gateway, HP, and other well-known PC retailers (contrary to Apple's reputation for imposing a price premium). It is worth noting that Apple has contributed optimizations to GCC3+ that bring its generation of PPC object code to a quality similar to that of Intel's ICC or IBM's VisualAge C++ compilers for x86 (which are arguably better than GCC on x86).

At the end of the day, the differences between Linux/x86 and Linux/PPC are remarkably minimal. This article will cover a bit more detail on distributions below, but generally, on Linux/PPC you can use the same window managers, run the same utilities, host the same servers, and so on, as you might on any x86 box. Unless you look at the physical hardware -- or are a rare user with a need for precise performance characteristics of various operations (for example, your application is specially designed around particular vector extensions) -- you will not even know which architecture you are running Linux on. The screen will look exactly the same, most configuration files will contain the same settings, and the same bytes will go out over the wire.

So you own a Mac -- Why run Linux?

To a surprising degree, operating systems (other than those from the highly-proprietary Microsoft) have become commodities. What this means is that most vertical applications are a mere recompilation away from running equally well on Linux, FreeBSD, SunOS, Irix, AIX, or indeed on Mac OS X; in some cases even this step is not necessary, since ABIs (application binary interfaces) support foreign binaries.

If you bought an Apple machine in the last few years, it came preinstalled with a high-quality Unix-derived operating system called OS X. OS X has a kernel and collection of base utilities called Darwin, which is under a Free Software license and is derived (in part) from FreeBSD -- the only proprietary elements are in the GUI (Aqua) and in the collection of end-user and system-administration applications that come bundled with OS X. Even X11 (specifically XFree86, despite what the name implies) is supported on OS X, in either full-screen or rootless modes; 'rootless' here means that X11 applications run side-by-side with native Aqua ones. You can run Apache on OS X; you can run NcFTP server; you can even run GIMP or KOffice. Why bother installing Linux?

There are a number of scenarios where it makes more sense to run Linux on your Apple machine than to run OS X. A first situation -- one that will appeal much more to hobbyists than to corporate users -- is when the Mac in question is an older machine. OS X is either entirely unsupported, or at least quite sluggish, on older Macs: 603s, 604s, or even early G3s. Linux can be quite snappy on these older systems; and Linux is a lot more useful as a server, or in many cases even as a desktop, than is the Mac OS 9 (or earlier) that came with those older machines. Still, the hobbyist segment is fairly narrow, or at least does not need to look here for advice.

A more important situation where Linux is worthwhile as an operating system for G3, G4, or G5 machines from Apple is when you want to assure a uniform system/user interface across machines. Many enterprises, hosting companies, schools, or research facilities will have a mixture of x86 and PPC systems t

Linux For Ppc Mac G5