A quick heads up for those who may be interested.

 

After my G4 laptop (museum piece) had a large cough and required brain surgery, i needed to install a new OS, so i'd thought i'd give Debian 5 (Lenny) PPC a try.

 

Works a treat, 'out of the box', so to speak.

No PPC RT kernel but sound, vid, etc, all installed and ran without any tweaks or workarounds.

 

The new LXDE Desktop Environment is rather special, particularly for my old laptop, and its meagre 512mb ram, and quite a bit more responsive than heavier offerings. (I ran both Kubuntu, and Ubuntu on the LT before this using KDE and Gnome respectively)

 

The kernel is 2.6.26-1, and midi works fine.

 

 

I'd be interested to know if Debian 5 works well on 32 or 64 bit PCs, and if there's an RT option.

 

 

The only apps that won't install are Denemo, and Musescore, at the moment. (Denemo can't find my fluidsynth or Sndfile libs which is no doubt user error, and Musescore keeps giving me a T1 key error/RTC timer error, and won't play at all, but it's been doing that on my Linux PPC for a while.)

Thumbs up to the Debian team. Based only on my brief personal observation, i reckon they've done well.

 

"Out of the box."

 

Alex.

Parchment Studios (It started as a joke...)