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From: Priam on 5 Jan 2010 20:13
On 01/05/2010 02:29 AM, Geoffrey S. Mendelson wrote:

> Warren Oates wrote:
>
>> Have you ever installed Linux on an older PPC Mac? Which Macs? What
>> Linux do you recommend for this?
>
>
> If it's a "new world" Mac, then either UBUNTU or YellowDog. UBUNTU is a
> reduced system that is designed to replace Windows, it's very similar
> and it's difficult to do things that are not part of "the package".

The alternative you suggest is certainly valid, but I've never heard
that Ubuntu is a "reduced system" or about "the package". Many distros
may one day replace Windows and are no more complicated.

Ubuntu's user friendlyness is often hyped without reason. The fact that
you have only user passwords instead of root/users passwords doesn't
change much in real life. Material recognition is at least as good in
other main distributions. Of course, if you compare Ubuntu to Slackware,
Arch or LinuxFromScratch for user firendlyness, it's another story.

OTOH, news for computer security is not very good for the year to come.
According to McAfee:

"New operating systems, social networking sites, and the emergence of
the HTML 5 Web markup language will give hackers and malware designers
even more opportunities to ply their crooked trade in 2010, according to
security software vendor McAfee.

"In its "2010 Threat Predictions" report, McAfee (NYSE: MFE) researchers
said that Adobe's Acrobat Reader and Flash applications will surpass
Microsoft's Office applications as the code of choice for cyber
criminals next year."

Of course, McAfee is always alarmist: it's better for their business.
But there's much truth in what they say here and, though Firefox is
patched very fast whenever a security flaw is found and is far safer
than Internet Explorer, browsers are with streaming media, one of the
main concerns."

You'll certainly be safer with Ubuntu than with OS X, but why not also
try Fedora? Security Enhanced Linux (SELinux), which was developed with
the NSA, and is offered by default in Fedora, could prove to be an
advantage these days.

> For the average end user, it's pretty good. It's no longer officially
> supported on PPC Macs, but is supported by the "user community"

I couldn't find anything about this, though a search on site:ubuntu.com
"power pc" doesn't bring you to a PPC download page whereas a search on
fedora "power pc" offers the download page as the first link:

http://fedoraproject.org/en/get-fedora-ppc

> For the more sophistocated user, YellowDog is a much "richer" system

In what is it "richer"?

> which
> includes some support if you buy it (instead of just downloading it).

$60 for 6 months! You better need it. Otherwise it is also available
free for download.

> Neither will really help the original poster of the question because IMHO
> a 500mHz G3 computer is just not fast enough to fully enjoy the videos and
> other flash animation of the Disney web site.

If, by "fully enjoy" you mean "full screen", you're certainly right.

> I would run Tiger on it, because I think it would be better suited for the
> hardware, but if you want something free (as in no price), go with UBUNTU
> or YellowDog.

The main argument is not that it's free as in free beer, but free as in
freedom but, since the Apple tax is already paid, if Tiger is available,
it might be an alternative. The software offered won't be as new, but
might be lighter.
From: Geoffrey S. Mendelson on 6 Jan 2010 00:44
Priam wrote:
> The alternative you suggest is certainly valid, but I've never heard
> that Ubuntu is a "reduced system" or about "the package". Many distros
> may one day replace Windows and are no more complicated.

Obviously you have never used it. Ubuntu uses GNOME instead of KDE, which
makes it smaller, but provides less function. There is a KDE version of
UBUNTU or you can add it to the regular system, but then it becomes
bigger slower, etc.

As for "the package", UBUNTU has a way of doing things which is different than
any other distro, including DEBIAN on which it is based. Becuase of that
you are stuck without cetain features, which sometimes render things useless.

As examples, DVD decoding. That's a simple package install and is left off
for legal reasons, but on the other side are things that they just don't think
need to be installed, such as ssh tunneling for netatalk (secure apple
file sharing), which is needed for Leopard and up, and secure or authorized
email delivery with sendmail.

They grudgingly include sendmail, and a broken version of netatalk, but you
have to recompile them to get them to work.

Some things just don't exist, for example, when I wanted to install as simple
ASTERISK PBX, they have been "discussing" which version and how to implement
it for 4 years now.

There are Asterisk packages available, but everyone I spoke to said they were
so out of date, that they were useless.

Another thing is that for the last 4 years you can not connect to an UBUNTU
system via X-Windows from a Mac and use the keyboard. It's a problem
with GNOME and keyboard definitions. There have been work arounds, but
now they don't work. Yes I can use VNC, which I do, but it is not the
same thing.

None of this affects the new and simple user, you can with a short download
(1 CD image), install UBUNTU and be surfing the web, reading email, or
doing "office" type applications.




> Ubuntu's user friendlyness is often hyped without reason. The fact that
> you have only user passwords instead of root/users passwords doesn't
> change much in real life. Material recognition is at least as good in
> other main distributions. Of course, if you compare Ubuntu to Slackware,
> Arch or LinuxFromScratch for user firendlyness, it's another story.
>

I have not used Slackware since 1995, when I was given it on floppies and then
bought a CD-ROM with 4 different versions of Linux, and a couple of versions
of BSD on it.

>> Neither will really help the original poster of the question because IMHO
>> a 500mHz G3 computer is just not fast enough to fully enjoy the videos and
>> other flash animation of the Disney web site.
>
> If, by "fully enjoy" you mean "full screen", you're certainly right.


No I mean at all. Using a similar system (384k 667mHz G4) powerbook, I can't
watch any modern videos via a web browser. Since the Disney and similar
sites are all about flash videos, it makes it very frustrating.

BTW many of them will play if I download them first, close the web browser
and watch them in small screen mode with VLC. But that kind of defeats the
concept.

> The main argument is not that it's free as in free beer, but free as in
> freedom but, since the Apple tax is already paid, if Tiger is available,
> it might be an alternative. The software offered won't be as new, but
> might be lighter.

Yes.

Geoff.

--
Geoffrey S. Mendelson, Jerusalem, Israel gsm(a)mendelson.com N3OWJ/4X1GM
New word I coined 12/13/09, "Sub-Wikipedia" adj, describing knowledge or
understanding, as in he has a sub-wikipedia understanding of the situation.
i.e possessing less facts or information than can be found in the Wikipedia.
From: Priam on 6 Jan 2010 01:31
On 01/06/2010 12:44 AM, Geoffrey S. Mendelson wrote:
> Priam wrote:

>> The alternative you suggest is certainly valid, but I've never heard
>> that Ubuntu is a "reduced system" or about "the package". Many distros
>> may one day replace Windows and are no more complicated.
>
> Obviously you have never used it. Ubuntu uses GNOME instead of KDE, which
> makes it smaller, but provides less function.

??? I've used both KDE and GNOME. I now use GNOME because I don't like
KDE 4. Can you tell me what "functions" KDE provides that GNOME doesn't.

> There is a KDE version of
> UBUNTU or you can add it to the regular system, but then it becomes
> bigger slower, etc.

???

> As for "the package", UBUNTU has a way of doing things which is different than
> any other distro, including DEBIAN on which it is based. Becuase of that
> you are stuck without cetain features, which sometimes render things useless.

Really?

> As examples, DVD decoding. That's a simple package install and is left off
> for legal reasons, but on the other side are things that they just don't think
> need to be installed, such as ssh tunneling for netatalk (secure apple
> file sharing), which is needed for Leopard and up, and secure or authorized
> email delivery with sendmail.

http://packages.ubuntu.com/karmic/netatalk

Maybe it's not provided for Macs, I hav eno idea. In such a case, I'd
suggest selling crappy Mac hardware and, for teh same price, getting a
decent PC.

> They grudgingly include sendmail, and a broken version of netatalk, but you
> have to recompile them to get them to work.

Really? It's supposed to be pretty much the same as Debian's

> Some things just don't exist, for example, when I wanted to install as simple
> ASTERISK PBX, they have been "discussing" which version and how to implement
> it for 4 years now.

I suggest you get a real PC. Everything that works on Debian will work
on Ubuntu. I unfortunately can't comment on how Macs work with Ubuntu.
Maybe what you say is pure bullshit, maybe it's not. But I find it very
surprizign. If what you sayy was true, how could Yellow Dog sell its
version for Mac at $60?

> None of this affects the new and simple user, you can with a short download
> (1 CD image), install UBUNTU and be surfing the web, reading email, or
> doing "office" type applications.

The OP is talking about a G3. What are you figuring he does?

>>> Neither will really help the original poster of the question because IMHO
>>> a 500mHz G3 computer is just not fast enough to fully enjoy the videos and
>>> other flash animation of the Disney web site.
>>
>> If, by "fully enjoy" you mean "full screen", you're certainly right.
>
>
> No I mean at all. Using a similar system (384k 667mHz G4) powerbook, I can't
> watch any modern videos via a web browser. Since the Disney and similar
> sites are all about flash videos, it makes it very frustrating.

I suppose you mean a 384MB, not k :) You're certainly not preaching in
favour of Mac hardware. I used to watch Windows media full screen with a
850MHz Celeron CPU and an old ATI 256 MB card. I could watch youtube
videos normal size.
From: Geoffrey S. Mendelson on 6 Jan 2010 02:14
Priam wrote:

> ??? I've used both KDE and GNOME. I now use GNOME because I don't like
> KDE 4. Can you tell me what "functions" KDE provides that GNOME doesn't.

There are lots of packages that run under KDE and not GNOME. You can look
them up if you are interested. You can install and run them under GNOME,
but the result is that the KDE libraries, etc are installed and running
on your system, although the user interface is GNOME.

My favorite is K3B, a CD/DVD burning untility, but there are lots of other ones.


>
>> There is a KDE version of
>> UBUNTU or you can add it to the regular system, but then it becomes
>> bigger slower, etc.
>
> ???

Bigger, as in more disk space and more RAM needed, slower because it's bigger
and has more overhead.



>> As for "the package", UBUNTU has a way of doing things which is different than
>> any other distro, including DEBIAN on which it is based. Becuase of that
>> you are stuck without cetain features, which sometimes render things useless.
>
> Really?

Really.

>
>> As examples, DVD decoding. That's a simple package install and is left off
>> for legal reasons, but on the other side are things that they just don't think
>> need to be installed, such as ssh tunneling for netatalk (secure apple
>> file sharing), which is needed for Leopard and up, and secure or authorized
>> email delivery with sendmail.
>
> http://packages.ubuntu.com/karmic/netatalk

Read it carefully. Try it with Leopard. Have fun. :-)


> Maybe it's not provided for Macs, I hav eno idea. In such a case, I'd
> suggest selling crappy Mac hardware and, for teh same price, getting a
> decent PC.

Irrelevant, the discussion is what to do with an already owned Mac.


>> They grudgingly include sendmail, and a broken version of netatalk, but you
>> have to recompile them to get them to work.
>
> Really? It's supposed to be pretty much the same as Debian's

That's the difference between UBUNU and Debian. The UBUNTU packages are
based upon Debian, but the configuration options are different.

>
> I suggest you get a real PC. Everything that works on Debian will work
> on Ubuntu. I unfortunately can't comment on how Macs work with Ubuntu.
> Maybe what you say is pure bullshit, maybe it's not. But I find it very
> surprizign. If what you sayy was true, how could Yellow Dog sell its
> version for Mac at $60?

It's a version of RedHat, based upon KDE and not with the requirements
of UBUNTU. UBUNTU as a group, shuns programs that are not GPL licensed,
except when they have to. For example OpenOffice.Org. If they did not
include it, no one would use their system.

YellowDog sells their distro to a different market. They sell it to people
who are willing to pay for support. They also do a PS/3 distro which if
you live in a place they are not taxed to death, gives you one heck of
system for very little money.

> The OP is talking about a G3. What are you figuring he does?

Watch DVD's and use the Disney.com website to be specific. His six year
old son is not interested in email, office apps, or reading the various
political sites that proliferate the web.


> I suppose you mean a 384MB, not k :) You're certainly not preaching in
> favour of Mac hardware. I used to watch Windows media full screen with a
> 850MHz Celeron CPU and an old ATI 256 MB card. I could watch youtube
> videos normal size.

I expect that a similar Mac would be fine. I'm not preaching at all, I
was just answering a question about what would be an appropriate operating
system for the specific hardware and usage.

This is comp.sys.mac.system after all, not comp.sys.mac.advocacy, or
comp.sys.mac.haters.

I answered the Linux question because someone whom I respect asked it.
It's a legitimate question, I just don't think it's going to answer the
needs of the child in the first place. Since this is a worldwide group
archived "forever", it's possible someone else may read this later and
it's IMHO much better to answer the question with a proper answer and
not just "no, it won't do the job either".

BTW, I doubt that you would be able to decode H.264 or other similarly
compressed YouTube videos, especially the "hi-def" ones that are
starting to take over the site on that celeron.

Geoff.

--
Geoffrey S. Mendelson, Jerusalem, Israel gsm(a)mendelson.com N3OWJ/4X1GM
New word I coined 12/13/09, "Sub-Wikipedia" adj, describing knowledge or
understanding, as in he has a sub-wikipedia understanding of the situation.
i.e possessing less facts or information than can be found in the Wikipedia.
From: Priam on 6 Jan 2010 11:00
On 01/06/2010 02:14 AM, Geoffrey S. Mendelson wrote:
> Priam wrote:
>
>> ??? I've used both KDE and GNOME. I now use GNOME because I don't like
>> KDE 4. Can you tell me what "functions" KDE provides that GNOME doesn't.
>
> There are lots of packages that run under KDE and not GNOME. You can look
> them up if you are interested.

:) :) :)

You can install and run them under GNOME,
> but the result is that the KDE libraries, etc are installed and running
> on your system, although the user interface is GNOME.
>
> My favorite is K3B, a CD/DVD burning untility, but there are lots of other ones.

So, you complain that GNOME, which uses the GTK+ tookit, cannot run KDE
exclusive applications such as K3B? Does KDE, which uses the QT toolkit,
run Brasero, also a DVD burning utility, but for GNOME?

So why do you say that GNOME misses anything? If you want to run the
GIMP with KDE, you'll have to install the GTK+ libraries, that's it,
that's all. It will be done automatically when you install the GIMP.

Sorry, man. You really don't have the slightest hint on what you're
talking about.
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