[Tfug] iMac G3

[Curtis Cooper]

Hi,

I've had a fair amount of experience with Linux Mandrake 8.0 PPC, which I 
installed onto my blueberry iMac (350 MHz).

The Mandrake installer worked beautifully and installed the operating system 
without incident.  It works fine, though it doesn't run X programs that 
quickly, particularly KDE-based apps (e.g., slow loading times, slow 
rendering of graphics, no hardware OpenGL support).  Also, and I hate to say 
this to people who are mostly Linux fans, but I've had the computer lock 
up on me before (i.e., O.S. stops responding to input and a manual 
reboot is required without a clean unmount, a problem which can potentially 
damage one or more of the disk partitions).  It has happened enough times 
to be worth  mentioning, considering that my Redhat 7.2 Pentium 4 PC 
at work has never crashed since Linux was installed.  

As far as the speed issue in KDE is concerned, I guess the G3 CPU is simply 
not that fast, probably  comparable to the original Celerons w/128 K 
cache, which is pretty out-of-date by today's standards.  Also, it's 
probably true that the original release of Linux Mandrake 8 PPC is not 
very well optimized for the G3 architecture.  The Mandrake website 
claims that their newest release, version 8.2 PPC, has better G3 
optimization, which might very well increase your mileage.  

So, you'll be able to get it working, though not necessarily without any 
stability issues, but I definitely found myself craving for more CPU 
power when using the computer as my primary console or a computational 
workhorse.  As a web server or for use in other less CPU intensive 
tasks, though, an iMac with Linux is a great option.  But as I said, 
Mandrake 8.2 PPC may have fixed the above complaints.

Cheers,
Curtis