KDE, GNOME and older Power Macs

[David Wadson]

On Wednesday, October 20, 2004, at 06:55  PM, Rick Thomas wrote:

>
> On Oct 19, 2004, at 10:19 AM, Jim Hart wrote:
>
>> You could, instead, use Debian PPC...
>
> You really should take a serious look at Debian, 
> <http://www.debian.org/>.

I've got a copy of Woody on CD from my earlier attempts this year at 
getting Linux running. I was having a rough time getting those old CD 
drives to read the Yellow Dog distro without errors. Debian for some 
reason seemed to work much better. Eventually I  was able to get YDL 
installing and have now moved to installing via NFS avoid any CD 
headaches now. I haven't touched Debian since that time though. I was 
sticking with YDL because it's RedHat based and so most of the 
information and HOWTOs I was reading were geared towards that rather 
than Debian.

> YDL 3.0.1 most has not gotten any security updates since the folks at 
> Terrasoft started working on 4.0, and I don't expect the future to be 
> any different.  Maybe more important, the versions available from YDL 
> of OpenOffice.org, Evolution, Mozilla, whatever are woefully out of 
> date.  The Debian folks do a much better job of keeping up with 
> security updates, and there is a a new release with the latest apps 
> coming very soon that *will* support OldWorld PowerPC Macs.

I'm not adverse to compiling newer version from source. That's almost 
preferable to having to learn yet another operating system. I've 
already got Mac OS, OS X, OS X Server, Windows, and YDL Linux that I'm 
trying to keep straight, let alone HTML, Perl, PHP, AppleScript, SQL, 
Awk, Sed, Bash, etc. My ignorance of GUI interfaces on Linux is showing 
itself as I didn't realize that there were options other than Gnome and 
KDE. I think my preference will be to try out a different window 
manager that doesn't have as much bloat.


Dave