[Cialug] Lightweight linux for video on imac g4

[Paul Gray]

On 03/28/2011 06:42 PM, Mathew Phillips wrote:
> I recently acquired an imac g4.
>
> 1 ghz ppc
> 512 mb RAM
> dvd drive
> 17" screen
>
> What distro would you guys recommend that's lightweight enough to play
> dvd's and stream tv without hogging up all the cpu on the OS itself?

The most lightweight, most-supported (IMO) distribution for PPC these 
days is Debian.  Do a stock install and add to it the usual suspects 
(ssh rsync vim & less).  Augment that with xfce4 which will pull down 
just the requisite components to get you up and running with "startx". 
It'll be very responsive.  There are a lot of video/multimedia streaming 
options for the PPC platform, too.

I run Debian+xfce4 on all of my PPC-based Efika boards, which are 
considerably less powerful than your G4.

-- 
Paul Gray                                         -o)
314 East Gym, Dept. of Computer Science           /\\
University of Northern Iowa                      _\_V
  Message void if penguin violated ...  Don't mess with the penguin
  No one says, "Hey, I can't read that ASCII attachment ya sent me."