[plug] iBook question

[James Devenish]

In message <200405042151.32079.mousematt at webace.com.au>
on Tue, May 04, 2004 at 09:51:31PM +0800, Matthew Prouse wrote:
> It is an Apple G3 iBook, 366Mhz with 192MB of RAM. It's running OS 9.1
> - although I found a copy of OS X 10.2 OEM in the same cupboard (we
> once had Mac laptops for graphics/media work). It claims it will
> install on this machine - and I will probably give it a try...My
> question is: does anyone who has, or did have, one run Linux on them
> at all?

I know there are definitely one or two people on this list who have
looked into this, or something very similar to it, and may be able to
assist. But something that comes to my mind immediately is that Linux
and BSDs might not support all the hardware (e.g. modem, sleep/wake,
blah). In that case, a better POSIX-type OS might be Apple's own Darwin
(which is mostly open source, but happens to include Apple's
closed-source drivers) or more likely OpenDarwin (again, principally
open source but includes the binary-only drivers). However, I personally
couldn't imagine going back to Darwin 6, upon which the most recently
OpenDarwin release is based (Apple's up to Darwin 7). For the same
reason, I couldn't imagine using OS X 10.2 as opposed to 10.3.3.
Actually, I /can/ imagine it, and I like 10.3.3 so much more as both a
user and developer, which is why I don't fancy the idea. YMMV.