My PowerBook G4 is starting to feel it's age. Flash is atrociously slow, I can't seem to get Java 6 for PPC OS X at all. I've tooled around with PPC Linux live CDs now and again, so I thought I'd take the plunge and do a full install and see what PPC Linux on the Mac had to offer.


  I borrowed a Firewire backup drive and decided to give SuperDuper a shot at cloning my disk.  Plugged the drive in, followed the directions and let it run.  Took about 4 hours or so.  When I got back to the PowerBook the cloning had completed.  However, it was not bootable.  Granted, I didn't really do my homework when it comes to bootable drives for PPC OS X, so I can't fault SuperDuper for not warning me, but the Firewire drive was not formatted with an Apple Partition Map - and therefore was not bootable.  Slightly irritating, I fired up CCC and it promptly informed me of the partiton map issue, which I quickly corrected.  That cloning finished in the wee hours of the morning, but it was done by 5:00AM.

  Once I made sure I could boot of the backup drive, I went to work on installing YDL 6.1.  Since it's based on CentOS (Red Hat sans logos) , a distro I've used for servers, I knew I'd be fairly comfortable getting back in the saddle.  It installed rather quickly and I was able to get the Apple wireless Broadcom drivers working fairly easily.  All in all, a very painless Linux install.  Firefox was at 3.0.6 and GIMP was back at 2.2.  I mucked around with the E17 desktop for a while, but I eventually gave in and switched to GNOME (as I understand it, 6.2 gives XFCE, a desktop environment I'm very familiar with).  I won't say that there was anything wrong with YDL, but I missed OS X a lot.  It seems I've just grown accustomed to the shortcuts, reaction and behavior of Aqua since I've been away from Linux.

I'll still take Gnome/Xfce over Explorer for sure, but nothing feels quite as nice as OS X.  Windows 7 certainly has stolen enough features from OS X to make it feel more comfortable (Apple has done it's own share of "borrowing").  I just don't know that I can use desktop Linux when OS X is available.  I'd run Linux on a x86/x64 laptop for sure, Hackintosh is a little too kludgey for my tastes.  For now, Mac OS X gives me the least amount of "tiptoeing" - it works, and it works well.

  Granted I didn't give YDL a lot of time, but with everything I have loaded in OS X, I realized I just didn't have to time to customize and tweak a distro to get it to where I needed it to be production-wise.  I think if I still have the PowerBook for a few more years and Leopard is sorely outdated, the switch to PPC Linux will help prolong its usefulness, but for now, I can deal with Leopard PPC's quirks and ever so slight lagging behind the status-quo.

  Now I'm just waiting for CCC to finish cloning from the Firewire back to the internal drive...