Re: Why

[Ethan Benson <erbenson@alaska.net>]

On 3/12/99 Evan Moore wrote:

> if your ever look at buying a new computer to put linux on you may look at
> buying an apple. the LinuxPPC group has declared their distribution to be the
> easiest to install version of linux. I installed it on my PowerMac 8600
> with no problems.

I would have to disagree with this...

LinuxPPC uses the same installer Redhat uses, recently they made a X 
based installer but it was quite broken to begin with and fails far 
to often.  (X based installers will always be unreliable IMO just 
because of the wildly differing video hardware)

after linuxppc is installed you must be quite an expert to fix 
everything that is broken out of the box.  (this is from R5, YMMV I 
don't know if they have fixed everything yet or not)

examples:
/dev/cdrom -> /dev/cdrom
missing .h files even with all *-devel packages installed, this makes 
compiling much of anything impossible.
like emacs?  Segmentation Fault
shutdown -r now  Kernel Panic
and so on.

the last time i saw so many seg faults on a un*x OS was when i tried 
running netbsd on a 68LC040 which lacks a math emulator...

some of the problems are not really the fault of linuxppc, but just a 
symptom of the *development* status of the entire PPC port of 
GNU/Linux. The kernel is still very unstable on all of the newer 
machines, some older macs will have better results, but the newer 
ones are quite unstable.  (note that I have never had a kernel panic 
on the i386 arch, so random panics when doing unremarkable things I 
consider to be `very unstable' this ain't windows where a crash here 
and there for no reason is ok)

as far as I am concerned I tell people that running GNU/Linux on PPC 
is analogous to running the development kernels, it may work but do 
not expect it to be stable  or usable.

I still have not tried Debian for PPC yet, I hope that it has made a 
stable distribution, and I am at least confident that Debian will not 
release their PPC version into the stable tree until its really 
stable and usable, unlike linuxppc I am sorry to say.

this is not a flame to linuxppc or the people working on it, its a 
very good start, but I cannot say it compares at all to stable i386 
based distros, it still needs a lot of work.  I just take issue with 
the idea that its currently a usable system to anyone but the most 
determined hacker.

note my experience is on a `blueg3' which are of the newer variety of 
macs and have many more problems with PPC Linux then the older 
variety do. but when you go out and buy a new mac you get machines 
newer then mine and even less functional with linux then mine.

Ethan