Macintosh
All Power Macintosh before the G5 are 32-bit PowerPC; the G5 is the
first 64-bit Macintosh. Information about very old
(pre-PCI) Macs can be found at the NuBus Linux project; all others
are PCI-based and contain other common hardware like AGP. USB, ATAPI (IDE), and
IEEE1394 (Firewire). Aside from PCI/NuBus, the other major hardware division is
"New World", meaning iMac and later, and "Old World", meaning
pre-iMac.
A variety of well-known Linux distributions run on Macs, including
Debian, Fedora, Gentoo, Mandrake, SUSE, and Yellow Dog. See the complete list for your favorites.
Old World Macs must use either BootX (which
requires a bootable Mac OS installation) or quik (which must deal with the buggy firmware
of that era).
New World Macs use the yaboot bootloader.
New World Macs use the yaboot bootloader.
Altivec is a feature of G4 and G5 CPUs that can process certain types of
data very quickly. Some Linux programs, such as DVD players like
mplayer,
ogle,
and xine, can use Altivec to accelerate
data streaming.
Developers wishing to exploit Altivec should consult the Altivec Development Page.
Developers wishing to exploit Altivec should consult the Altivec Development Page.
Like Sun servers and IBM pSeries, Macs use Open Firmware, also known as
IEEE1275. Old World Macs tend to have very buggy firmware implementations,
while New World Macs are much better (which facilitates booting Linux
directly from firmware). A good amount of OF documentation can be found in
the NetBSD macppc
FAQ.
New World Open Firmware can boot from the network, which is very convenient for development and testing new kernels.
New World Open Firmware can boot from the network, which is very convenient for development and testing new kernels.
Macintosh do not use the DOS partition map scheme typical of PCs, so
well-known tools such as fdisk, sfdisk, and cfdisk will render your disk
unbootable (the real issue is that your firmware must understand your
partition layout, and Apple's firmware only understands Apples partition
map). Instead, Apple defined its
own partition format.
To manipulate an Apple partition map, you need a tool that understands it. Currently only pdisk and GNU parted do. (pdisk is called mac-fdisk by Debian and Gentoo, because they like to be different.) pdisk is unmaintained, and GNU parted is much more user-friendly.
To manipulate an Apple partition map, you need a tool that understands it. Currently only pdisk and GNU parted do. (pdisk is called mac-fdisk by Debian and Gentoo, because they like to be different.) pdisk is unmaintained, and GNU parted is much more user-friendly.
Last modified: 09 February 2006