Well, I’ve been off-the-air for most of the past couple days while installing a new Linux distribution on my laptop.
I decided to nuke my OS9 partition, because I didn’t care to ever run any OS9 software, and then I had a spare partition. What to do with it? Well, install Gentoo! Built the system all the way from a stage 1 tarball optimized heavily for a G4 system, with altivec optimizations. Whee.
Gentoo is very nifty, and very much fun. It’s not exactly meant for the average Linux user, but it amused me greatly. It took so long to get Linux operational due to requiring quite a few small re-configurations to get everything to build properly. Always remember, when you are root, the lightest touch commands obedience. A heavy hand just gets your system more upset.
And on that note, I was up late last night rebuilding Digital Routes’ qmail services to work properly. Got almost finished and suddenly I was unable to contact DR and the MOO. Waited a couple hours, hacked Mozilla PPC binaries into working by building a small compatibility libstdc++ shard library, and then got a couple hours of sleep. Woke up in the morning to finish the job a few hours later.
I’ve gotta say, it’s really tough for me to decide between using Linux and OSX on my laptop as a primary OS. OSX has a few things going for it, namely the ‘it just works’ factor. Also, some of the commercial software is useful, like Office v.X … but then again, in Linux, there is OpenOffice. Hm… in OS X there is EV Nova. That’s tough to beat.
And on the other side of the field is Linux, which runs way faster. Why faster? No, it’s not because it’s G4 optimized, although that may help a bit. It’s because it is just BlackBox and X, no funkyrific Quartz and Display PDF. This means that it is not as pretty, and it has way uglier fonts, but it is faster. And Gentoo’s ‘emerge’ to let me build software like apt-get lets you install software is very fun… but, OSX has fink. Maybe, if fink worked in Jaguar properly, this would help OSX’s side. 
OSX has power management which -just-works-. Linux has a lot more configuration. Linux is Open Source, though. So when I can’t hack Mail.app to do something, I’ll be wishing I was running Linux. On the other hand, when I can’t get a second display to auto-detect, I’ll be wishing I was running OSX. The compromise is to keep both, but it’s frustrating to not be able to access both at the same time. Oooh… that reminds me… OSX can run under Linux with Mac-on-Linux. Maybe I should give that a try.