[CS-FSLUG] More Testing Linux on Mac: Debian
Ed Hurst
ehurst at asisaid.com
Fri Oct 17 09:49:09 CDT 2008
There were enough glitches on the SUSE for PPC installation I went
exploring for something else. In my research, I joined the YDL forums, and
even wrote to their mailing list. I was surpised to discover the majority
of them are using PS3s, some oddball RISC systems, and precious few
late-model PPC Macs. Almost nobody had significant experience with Macs in
general, as all of those were pretty much noobies to Linux.
Having had a hassle with Ubuntu, and seeing the complaints other had about
it (two eMacs of older vintage and several iMacs), I looked at Fedora and
then Debian. From what I could discern, vanilla Debian was actually rather
good about responding to comments from the field and incorporating the
information.
Comparison: SUSE's YaST could not in any wise handle the partitioning. It
had to be done manually with pdisk. In particular, YaST could not create
the proper bootstrap partition for yaboot and the OpenFirmware "BIOS" on
Macs. With pdisk, I inadvertantly managed to create some free space and
could not remove it or merge it once it was made. Debian's text installer
cleaned it all up automatically. I ended up opting for a complete
retooling of the partitions, but Debian did it without any input from me
except to say "okay."
The applications are, of course, somewhat older in Etch. But they work far
more consistently among those I've tested. My only complaint was I
downloaded and burned an ISO for the KDE installer, and somehow ended up
with a netinstall and GNOME. I'm not complaining, but it was unexpected.
It's not perfect, but it works a lot better, so far. I would note Debian's
xorg configuration was far closer to the reality of my hardware than
SUSE's. I'm guessing it recognized the hardware signature better. The
result showed specific configuration details hammered out by others posted
from trials in the past year.
A particular bone of contention with SUSE was SaX insisting on removing my
improvements if I ran it for any reason whatsoever. There were serious
quirks with keyboard recognition and assigning of keys, as noted by
previous posts asking for help. I ran into even more trouble later. Most
disheartening was the inability to burn any ISO without errors, regardless
of speed and other settings, using K3B. I'm guessing the driver for the
Sony CRX315E isn't up to par for some reason.
For now, I'm going to say this is a keeper.
--
Ed Hurst
------------
Associate Editor, Open for Business: http://ofb.biz/
Applied Bible - http://ed.asisaid.com/index.html
Kiln of the Soul - http://soulkiln.blogspot.com/
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