mac linux

[stinkoman]

hey, is there a linux that works on macs? i havent installed yet, but my brother gave me an iMac, and its just BEGGING to be an iLinux instead.
also, is this harder or easier or the same as on a pc?

[jayd512]

Never owned a Mac of any kind, personally. But as far as compatibility I think you just need to look at the CPU architecture. Don't quote me just yet on this, but for a while wasn't that mostly PPC? (Now you got me curious... Time to Google)

[HROAdmin26]

Yes, any Linux will run on a Mac as long as the distro you install was compiled for the correct CPU architecture.

Mac's have been (in the past) PowerPC chips, but they are now a mix of PPC and Intel chips - and moving more towards Intel.

I know one distro used to be mainly geared towards Mac's and PPC => YellowDog Linux.

[Cabhan]

If you have an older Mac (that is, a PPC one), then as people are saying, you will need a PPC distro.

However, assuming that you have an Intel Mac, the main obstacle that you will come across is the bootloader format. I just Googled for "Intel Mac Linux" (no quotes), and there are many pages devoted to this very process. "Mactel-Linux", the very first hit, has a big tutorial dedicated to installing various distros on Macs:
HOWTO - Mactel-Linux

[leverknight1]

I had the origonal blue imac and the best distro i had on it before it just died on me was Ubuntu but that was back with version 5.06 so it should be alot better now and they will ship you disks for free. Although i dont think they ship ppc anymore IDK i just have Mac 10.5 on my mini and have debian as a backup.

[stinkoman]

I WANT T TAKE APART A MINI!!! but i probably never will -/ so ubuntu seems good? mines green if thats a gives it a time period, but i didnt see any intel chips inside, id guess ppc then