A Mac User's Guide to Linux

[yellowdog-general@lists.terrasoftsolutions.com]

Dear list-friends

Clint asked:

> Does anyone have any hints or anecdotes to share about the migration
> from the Macintosh environment (either the classic OS or Mac OS X) to
> Linux (especially, but not limited to Yellow Dog Linux)?

Here's my little story. The bottom line, is that I would suggest
to warn the potential migrator that they may be in for
"an interesting and time-consuming, but possibly ultimately
very rewarding time".

I have been a true Mac lover for many many many years.
Presently I have a white G3 iBook 2USB
[the one with the motherboard problem. My apple DIED
on the first slide of a public scientific talk,
six months ago. In the ensuing mess the hard disk got wiped
clean by an apple-care mechanic who didn't understand yaboot,
and I haven't put ydl back yet. But that's another story].

At home we also have an intel machine since my children and wife
claim that it is necessary for their school work and certain
games and so on ....

I was enthusiastic when Mac OSX came along and quickly got into Fink and
into the command line and running X11 and mac's windows interleaved.
Also, two years ago, I finally got around to setting up
the horrible windoze machine at home as a dual boot system,
Redhat 8 and then 9. I have some familiarity with UNIX going back years.
By now the home PC also boots Fedora Core 1 and 2... and from
time to time, other linux's (mandrake, lindows, knoppix, jamd,
college linux .. have all briefly been there).

So about a year ago I was finally ready to turn my iBook into a
triple boot yellowdog linux/OS 9/OS X machine, basically "just
because it's there" and my personal goal was to give a scientific
talk (powerpoint-like slides) to a data-projector, from my iBook,
UNDER LINUX.

With my familiarity with Redhat I found the installation more or less
routine BUT I immediately had problems with recognising the monitor
[actually I had done the installation "too" fast, not taking enough
notice what was going on, like I CAN do with redhat/fedora/knoppix].
Later I was astounded that I had to recompile my kernel just to
mount hfsplus. And... I never worked out how to set up the thing
to do a talk with a data-projector. I can have the data-projector
as monitor, or the built-in screen as monitor, but not both.
Moreover when I shut the lid it does not go to sleep...

Moral of the story: linux ppc has a rather small user base. This
list and other resources are FANTASTIC and the people you meet here
every bit (or even more) helpful as the people you meet on similar
redhat of other i386 linux places. But the small user base means
that linux is just not as user-ready on ppc as it is on i386.
And potential new users ought to be warned about this.

Since I liked yellowdog so much I also have it now
on an ancient 6500/275; it is great; but the only way to
get the Sonnet L2/G3 working is when someone is going to
spend a LOT of time getting deep into BootX. I had even more of
the typical monitor problems and network card problems on this
machine, as on the iBook. MUCH more problems than on a typical
intel linux install, these days.

I'm not complaining! I'm just not sure I would actually recommend
the average happy Mac user to migrate, at all.
I would recommend anyone with a mac and any geekish side
to their character and a lot of spare time, to give it a try:
it's a wave of the future and it is such great fun to ride
it a little way. But they should be forewarned that it could be
a rather bumpy ride.

I must say that yum has completely revolutionized the linux experience,
also in plain vanilla Redhat and Fedora. I hope Matthias Saou reads
this and notes my enormous gratitude for what he and others have done!
[and while I'm on that, could we please also have aMSN on yellowdog?]

Richard