Gentoo PPC LiveCD

Travis Roy travis at scootz.net
Tue Jun 10 06:38:12 EDT 2003


I got both the KDE and the Gnome one last night to try them out on my
powerbook and G3 tower. Overall they're okay, they're good to get a feel for
linux on a Mac they do have some shortcomings but most of that is probably
because I'm spoiled by how well the Knoppix LiveCD works.

Both boot just fine when you hold down the "c" key at bootup, neither boot
into a GUI like the Knoppix CD. They also don't have XFree setup so you have
to run this Xeasyconf and then run startx, then start kde or gnome from
there.

On the powerbook I couldn't get the airport card to work and that was a bit
of a bummer. A Linksys card works fine, but not the internal airport card.
On my G3 tower I had an odd problem, I could get the interface up and I
could get a lease from the dhcp server, but it was missing a script or
something and wouldn't configure the interface. Manually setting everything
with static settings worked however.

Mac-On-Linux wouldn't work for me and I'm not sure why. I would run th
config for it then run startmol and I'd get a nice white screen and the
whole system would just lock right up. To bad too, MoL was one of the things
I really wanted to try out. The Gnome CD was missing a lot of applications
that I wanted to try out like Gaim, Evolution, Abiword, FreeCIV. Also, some
things wouldn't run at all. On the KDE disk there was a mr. potato head
thing and that wouldn't run due to lack of a graphics sets, some games were
missing sound files, other programs just didn't work at all and seg faulted.

Finally, I've noticed this in just about every PPC version of XFree I've
ever tried (LinuxPPC, YellowDog, Debian for PPC) the default mouse
sensitivity is WAY to high, I know it's easy enough to change, but jeeze,
you move the thing just a mm and your pointer flys across the screen and
that is very annoying on a powerbook with a touchpad.




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