Seeing the thread on PPC Debian installation on the Pegasos reminded me to post notice of this.
I'd bought a Symbios Sym8952U SCSI controller hoping to use it in my Powermac under MorphOS. I knew it didn't have a Mac BIOS, but I hoped the drivers would allow it to work once the system booted from the ATA controller.
Well, it probably won't work under MorphOS, but surprisingly enough it works under Ubuntu. Can't boot from it, but the drive can be partitioned, formatted, and mounted.
My Soundblaster Live card works too.

Its got me thinking of a triple booting system (MorphOS, OSX, and, Ubuntu) or just a dual boot (with MorphOS and Ubuntu).

[ Edited by Jim on 2010/9/23 21:07 ]

> Its got me thinking of a triple booting system (MorphOS, OSX, and, Ubuntu)
> or just a dual boot (with MorphOS and Ubuntu).

While I have a Mac mini and thus no PCI/AGP slots I have made up my mind on the matter of dual or triple booting. Right now I'm dual booting MorphOS and Leopard and have spared the installation of Linux because there's still enough support for Leopard by both Apple and 3rd party developers. As I'm aware that as soon as Snow Leopard's successor is out most support for Leopard will be dropped like hot potato I plan to replace Leopard by a Linux distribution after that. Which distribution exactly will depend on what then-recent Power Architecture compatible distributions I will be able to choose from. In case Ubuntu will be still available for Power Architecture I'll go for it I guess.

PPC Ubuntu has dropped to a community supported product, but so far its up to date (at ver. 10.04).
I tried to load Debian, but the DVD's I've burned haven't booted correctly.
So far, I'm really pleased with the driver support under Ubuntu. I really didn't expect the Symbios controller to work. I'm going to try to locate a DXR3 card (at one time I had two) and see if that works.

"As I'm aware that as soon as Snow Leopard's successor is out most support for Leopard will be dropped like hot potato"
I really doubt that, at least from Apple's side. They still care about Tiger in some cases even (check latest Safari), latest security update (and probably the last one) for Tiger was in 2009. When it comes to Linux, just wait for the next Debian release :).

> PPC Ubuntu has dropped to a community supported product

I know, starting with release 7.04.

> but so far its up to date (at ver. 10.04).

Yes, and 10.10 will also come for PPC apparently:

http://cdimage.ubuntu.com/ports/daily-live/current/
http://cdimage.ubuntu.com/ports/daily/current/

>> as soon as Snow Leopard's successor is out most support for
>> Leopard will be dropped like hot potato

> I really doubt that, at least from Apple's side. They still care about Tiger in some
> cases even (check latest Safari), latest security update (and probably the last one)
> for Tiger was in 2009.

Thanks for clarification. That's better support by Apple than I had thought (at least regarding Safari). Going by your 2009 figure, it seems I was right at least for security updates (Snow Leopard was released in 2009 as well), and security updates for Leopard will most probably stop during 2011. But it's really more the 3rd party support which concerns me. As far as I have witnessed, most 3rd party developers only support the most recent main version and the one before, i.e. Snow Leopard and Leopard right now. Tiger is already out of the loop, and that's what I think will happen to Leopard as soon as Snow Leopard's successor is released.

> When it comes to Linux, just wait for the next Debian release :).

I think that "Debian for dummies" aka Ubuntu is generally better suited for a Linux n00b like me ;-) Also, Debian 6.0 release is expected for 2010 still, which for my liking would be way too early to switch :-)

Well, software which i use usually works with Tiger, but those are multiplatform programs. When it comes to Mac OS X specific ones sitiuation is worse of course, some require Snow Leopard even - but that's not really important - people who would like to use the latest Mac OS X should buy a Mac with an Intel CPU anyway :).

Quote:

That definately reflects my experience. Debian often requires more experience and the occassional use of command lines. It's been a long time since I've had to resort to a command line interpreter. I remember my earlier experiences with Minix and OS9. Like Unix, the command lines can get pretty complex and if you make one small mistake horrible things can happen.
At least when you flubbed up an MS-DOS command line you usual just got an obtuse error code.

I'll get back to looking at Debian when I'm comfortable with Ubuntu (which is happening more rapidly than I expected).

I am impressed with PPC Linux in general. I find it somewhat easier than OSX (coming from a non-Apple background). The lack of a good Flash implementation under PPC linux is frustrating (but no worse than in the Amiga universe). And good media codecs are less common (than in commercial OS'). But, overall these OS' have improved greatly since the last time I looked at them.

The wide availability of drivers is nice and since I'm used to dealing with the occassional bug in software packages I haven't been too discouraged by some of the flaky packages I've downloaded (because some of them are quite good).

Also, I'd swear that my Powermac is more responsive under Ubuntu than under OSX.

> The lack of a good Flash implementation under PPC linux is frustrating

I think that both Gnash and Lightspark are coming along nicely. On the other hand, I'm looking forward to the demise of Flash courtesy of HTML5 :-)

> but no worse than in the Amiga universe

Fab already hinted at the idea regarding OWB to replace Swfdec by Lightspark:

https://morph.zone/modules/newbb_plus/viewtopic.php?topic_id=7225&forum=3&post_id=74999#74999

Right now, far too many web pages use Flash. In it's current state, Gnash doesn't work very well (I haven't examined Lightspark).
The availability of HTML5 is no guarantee that Adobe's product is going to disappear and it would be nice to have a similar level of compatibility (with web pages that use Flash) that I have with OSX and Windows.

> The availability of HTML5 is no guarantee that Adobe's product is going to
> disappear and it would be nice to have a similar level of compatibility (with
> web pages that use Flash) that I have with OSX and Windows.

There may be a solution coming (for Firefox browsers for now):

http://blog.mozilla.org/research/2012/11/12/introducing-the-shumway-open-swf-runtime-project/
http://mozilla.github.com/shumway/
https://github.com/mozilla/shumway/wiki