linux on mac

davijordan · Post by **davijordan** » Sat Oct 20, 2007 9:22 am

I came in possession of an imac for my grandchild, so I did a net install of debian on it last night. Mp3's play out of the box, but videos are a challenge. Anyone have any suggestions where to look for help.
(apple challenged)

Wally Balljacker · Post by **Wally Balljacker** » Sat Oct 20, 2007 10:38 am

What do you mean by videos? Just apt-get install mplayer, and that will handle any format you throw at it.

snarkout · Post by **snarkout** » Sat Oct 20, 2007 11:17 am

Depending on which iMac he's talking about, the cpu/gpu may choke on most things - pre-G3 ppc chips are more or less in the same class as 386/486. I have an old toilet seat lappy that's the same way - it's awesome for kids since it's nearly bomb proof and has a handle to carry it by, but it's multimedia capabilities are crap.

Post by **dann** » Sat Oct 20, 2007 11:43 am

That was one of my biggest gripes about ppc linux - the multimedia support. While you can get some codecs and dvd support to work properly, a significant number do not work. I think quicktime would play but with no audio and wmv was hit or miss all together. Theora, ogg, xvid worked just fine.

Aside from gnash, don't expect to get flash working or working well. I don't think anyone ever came up with a workable solution to run adobe's flash player under ppc linux.

Wally Balljacker · Post by **Wally Balljacker** » Sat Oct 20, 2007 11:57 am

As a regular PPC Linux user, I can tell you all codecs that work under x86 Linux, including WMV, Quicktime, and DivX work just fine under PowerPC. Also, Gnash has come a long way, it now supports YouTube, as well as a great number of other websites with Flash content. Oh, and IBM offers a Java for their own Linux/POWER systems, which works fine on old Apple hardware.

snarkout · Post by **snarkout** » Sat Oct 20, 2007 12:23 pm

Wally Balljacker wrote:As a regular PPC Linux user, I can tell you all codecs that work under x86 Linux, including WMV, Quicktime, and DivX work just fine under PowerPC. Also, Gnash has come a long way, it now supports YouTube, as well as a great number of other websites with Flash content. Oh, and IBM offers a Java for their own Linux/POWER systems, which works fine on old Apple hardware.

Awesome - good to hear since I'm planning on retiring an old quicksilver here pretty soon. My point was that davidjordan's hardware was possibly the limiting factor.

davijordan · Post by **davijordan** » Sat Oct 20, 2007 7:59 pm

I appreciate all the help!! the system is a blue green g3. /proc/cpuinfo says it is a new world mac g3 740/750 at 333 mhz. gnome does not feel sluggish at all. I did a mplayer install as suggested. looks like I need to do some research to get he rest on line. I tried democracy player but it was slow as molasses and played it's own videos with sound but only did video for you tube. I tried to install anything that had anything to do with swf, bit I must be missing some kind of link.

update: I found gnash, but I need to find some packages. I will look at it later.

Wally Balljacker · Post by **Wally Balljacker** » Sat Oct 20, 2007 8:09 pm

davijordan wrote:I appreciate all the help!! the system is a blee green g3. /proc/cpuinfo says it is a new world mac g3 740/750 at 333 mhz. gnome does not feel sluggish at all. I did a mplayer install as suggested. looks like I need to do some research to get he rest on line. I tried democracy player but it was slow as mollasses and played it's own videos with sound but only did video for you tube. I tried to install anything that had anything to do with swf, bit I must be missing some kind of link.

Gnash is not available in Debian Etch, which is what I assume you're running. There is an older version in testing (Lenny), and the latest 0.8.1 release is in unstable.

http://packages.debian.org/sid/gnash
http://packages.debian.org/sid/mozilla-plugin-gnash

Tsuroerusu · Post by **Tsuroerusu** » Sat Oct 20, 2007 8:14 pm

dann wrote:That was one of my biggest gripes about ppc linux - the multimedia support. While you can get some codecs and dvd support to work properly, a significant number do not work. I think quicktime would play but with no audio and wmv was hit or miss all together. Theora, ogg, xvid worked just fine.

I have a Mac mini with G4 PowerPC processor, which I have run Fedora on in the past, and I have had all the multimedia support I'd ever need.

These days I try to use as little non-free software as possible, and I am down to just Java and my machines' BIOSes, and I don't find that I am missing any codec support. FFmpeg has gotten really really good, their reverse engineered support of WMV works great, and in general not a single problem. This of course trancends to PowerPC.

Dann, I don't know when you last tried GNU/linux on PowerPC, or what distribution you tried, but whatever the case was I think you might have missed something. I remember running Fedora Core 5 on my Mac mini and being perfectly happy about the multimedia support.

allix · Post by **allix** » Sun Oct 21, 2007 7:16 am

Tsuroerusu wrote: These days I try to use as little non-free software as possible, and I am down to just Java and my machines' BIOSes,

What a lier

you use SpinRite and play propriety game consoles

Tsuroerusu · Post by **Tsuroerusu** » Sun Oct 21, 2007 7:40 am

allix wrote:
Tsuroerusu wrote: These days I try to use as little non-free software as possible, and I am down to just Java and my machines' BIOSes,
What a lier you use SpinRite and play propriety game consoles

Well, I was talking about what software I have installed on my Personal Computer. But yeah you're right I do use SpinRite from time to time, I don't really care about all it's supposed "advanced recovery features", like they're advertised, the main thing I use it for it to prevent data rot as the entire disk gets read and written, and any correctable errors will get scrubbed out. And yeah I do own some game consoles.
The thing to me, the main reason I insist on free software is mostly because of privacy concerns. This day in age with more and more government surveillance (A recent anti-terrorism bill introduced in Denmark allows the police, without a court order, to monitor any telecommunications traffic they desire), proprietary software to me, is a serious security threat. Call me paranoid if you want, I don't care.
I use some custom iptables configurations on my WRT54GL router to isolate my consoles from my main network, so they are not threat, because they can't even see what other things I may be doing.

Wally Balljacker · Post by **Wally Balljacker** » Sun Oct 21, 2007 8:27 am

allix wrote:
Tsuroerusu wrote: These days I try to use as little non-free software as possible, and I am down to just Java and my machines' BIOSes,
What a lier you use SpinRite and play propriety game consoles

NINTENDO = ENEMY OF YOUR FREEDOM

allix · Post by **allix** » Sun Oct 21, 2007 9:53 am

Tsuroerusu wrote: Well, I was talking about what software I have installed on my Personal Computer. But yeah you're right I do use SpinRite from time to time, I don't really care about all it's supposed "advanced recovery features", like they're advertised, the main thing I use it for it to prevent data rot as the entire disk gets read and written, and any correctable errors will get scrubbed out. And yeah I do own some game consoles.

In that case is BartPE , BootCD and winPE ok to use according to your law ?

Tsuroerusu · Post by **Tsuroerusu** » Sun Oct 21, 2007 10:14 am

allix wrote:
Tsuroerusu wrote: Well, I was talking about what software I have installed on my Personal Computer. But yeah you're right I do use SpinRite from time to time, I don't really care about all it's supposed "advanced recovery features", like they're advertised, the main thing I use it for it to prevent data rot as the entire disk gets read and written, and any correctable errors will get scrubbed out. And yeah I do own some game consoles.
In that case is BartPE , BootCD and winPE ok to use according to your law ?

I would personally refuse to use them, but that is just me personally. And oh, if you use your store bought Windows XP license to make a Windows LiveCD you're violating Microsoft's license.

davijordan · Post by **davijordan** » Sun Oct 21, 2007 11:17 am

Just a side thought....

"The United States Supreme Court refused to hear a case between a programmer and his former employer. What makes this news is the fact that the court is letting stand the rulings of the lower courts: Essentially if someone owns a physical copy of software, then they are allowed to modify the code as part of their regular use, no matter what other agreements are in place."

http://yro.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=05/11/08/210259