i have heard of there being probems running linuxppc on new macs, but on the 8600 in runs perfectly (well close to). The buggiest thing that i ran accross was messing in the open firmware (my 8600 had old firmware), but bootx came along and i never had to deal with that again. With bootx a person doesn't have to worry about their video hardware (unless you want optimal performance) or lilo or any dual booting issues. I agree there are a few bugs in the installation the /dev/cdrom being one that i came accross, but they are easy to fix, and i have heard that they have fixed most of those problems in the Q3 release. I have found it more difficult installing on i386 arch because you have to worry about hardware being compatable, whereas the mac platform is much more simple, seeing as they never got overly big into clonning. (I wonder how hard it is to run linuxppc on one of the mac clones?) anyways, after spending forever trying to get debian to install on a RAID system, i am inclined to think that i386 is much more difficult to install on. Another thing that i thought was easier about the linuxppc installer was that you don't have to configure everything at install time, unlike debian, which is a bonus for beginners who want a system up now, and will worry about configuring it later as they learn more about linux (as i myself was when is started with linux). then again i like the way debian configures their networking better than red har (and linuxppc). I also like dselect and apt-get much more than xli.pl (the buggy upgrade/install program for linuxppc). So i guess each platform has their bonuses. I think debian is great, but i wouldn't recomend it to a beginner. Maybe a beginner should think about buying a pre-installed system, then things woud be getting closer to the ease of use of a win box. For someone wanting a truly easy UNIX system, maby they may want to wait for MacOSX consumer, comming soon (hopefully).
evan
