01.11.03
Linux for PowerPc
I’ve installed and am using “Daytona” the v2.4 Kernel of Linux for the PowerPC platform. I’m using “YellowDog Linux”, and I’ve installed it on my Blue & White G3. It took me about 4 hours to figure out everything in terms of getting to a usable desktop. The Hard Drive partitioning was pretty easy, since I still had some partitions open that I had anticipating using for OS X.
But the Video piece had me stumped until I remembered something. Each time I tried to boot after installing from the CD, The screen would hang. The Drive would continue to thrash, but nothing more would apear of the boot sequence. Suddenly I remembered that I had a second video card in the box, unused and as soon as I pulled it out, all was much better.
At least until I actually got into KDE and it was set up for a 1024×768 desktop, but the monitor was displaying only 800×600. Quite annoying. What would happen is that when the mouse cursor got close to the edge of the screen, the entire screen would shift over, like a viewport over a map. it took me a bit to find the ‘task/toolbar/panel’ that all the activation icons are on.
I’m now using Gnome. Maybe I’ll shift back to KDE later on.