[NTLUG:Discuss] Best distro for a Mac G5 tower with lots of ram

[Rick Cook]

On Sunday 09 August 2009 17:58:53 Ralph Green wrote:
> Howdy,
>   I forgot to add that he has 16 GB of ram and so he needs a 64 bit
> version of Linux.  At least, on an x86 architecture, that much ram
> would drive you to a 64 bit version.  Is that true on a PPC machine?
> Good day,
> Ralph
>

My 1 Ghz Dual G4 is still happily running (well, with KDE 4.2.4 and 512 Mb RAM, maybe it's more like walking) Debian unstable powerpc 32-bit 
version. In the course of its lifetime, it has had Yellow Dog, Kubuntu, SUSE and Debian installed and running. In the pre-KDE 3.x days, if you 
pulled down a KDE powerpc package from Debian, there is a high probability that it was compiled on my machine.

Since I haven't had an appropriate machine, I haven't tried any 64-bit flavors of powerpc. If I was going to start somewhere in that world, I would 
probably try openSUSE and/or Debian.

You can get an older "minimal install CD" that is unsupported by Canonical for Ubuntu at:

http://ports.ubuntu.com/dists/hardy-updates/main/installer-powerpc/current/images/powerpc64/netboot/mini.iso


Good Luck,

Rick