Submitted by “Slackintosh was a little-known PPC port of Slackware Linux which after some years of development was put on indefinite hiatus. Adrian Ulrich has recently restarted the project and is again providing (together with Marco Bonetti) a Slackware distribution for Apple (and non-Apple) RISC-powered hardware. We contacted him for a short interview to ask him what happened, what is his role and what is the distribution’s status.”
I just installed Debian over OS X on my iMac G4. It’s a little rough around the edges, but it’s much faster than my 5+ year old OS X installation.
Hardly surprising as 5 years ago OS X was much slower than it is today.
There are only AmigaONE, Pegasos II, Efika and Sam440EP “Samantha” as non-Apple RISC powered hardware that are on the market and available for the common user, and not for industrial purposes only…
Those are all “PowerPC”. RISC includes a number of architectures: ARM processors are RISC for example.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/RISC
Don’t forget Power.
http://www-03.ibm.com/systems/ca/en/intellistation/power/index.html
This is available to the common user, and while very expensive, it’s not much different in price to a tricked out powermac
Just being a little behind Debian and Gentoo, Slackware must be about the third most ported full-featured Linux distribution. There are ports available for AMD64, Alpha, SPARC, ARM, S/390 and with Slackintosh to PPC as well. I have a private port of Slackware 12.0 to MIPS and SPARC and there could be many others to all kinds of different architectures.
Edited 2007-09-20 12:27 UTC
Since Ubuntu announced they won’t support PowerPC it’s good to heard about other distributions compiled for this great architecture.