Hello!
I recently stumbled upon an old Mac Mini G4. It had 10.4 Tiger on it, and it was pretty slow. So, I decided to try and install Linux on it. First, I needed to decide what distro to install.
There are three choices when it comes to PowerPC Linux: Debian, Adelie, and Gentoo.
Debian is pretty much a non-option, because it's an older version (9 Jessie) and all of the PowerPC repos for it have been removed. I'd have to compile everything from scratch, which defeats the point of Debian.
Adelie is an interesting binary distro. It has a focus on using musl (instead of glibc) and python3. It provides binary packages for PowerPC. This is probably the easiest option.
And then there's Gentoo. Gentoo is a source distro, which means that binary packages are not provided. Everything must be compiled from source. This gives Gentoo a lot of flexibility and optimization potential, but makes it very complex to install. This is the one I chose.
Next post I'll be describing the initial install process, and (spoilers) all of the problems that came with it.
Top comments (3)
I have a G5 that I might want to do this to later, so I'll be following!
Hey, I wrote the second part. It's available here. I hope it's useful to you!
Okay! Thank you!