Linux Magazine: Outside Intel: The Story of Linux on the PowerPC Chip

“Why would you want to run Linux on your Macintosh? If
you’re thinking about things from an operating system perspective,
you run Linux on the Mac to get Unix. From a hardware perspective,
you run Linux on the PowerPC to get RISC.”

“In late 1994, three years after Linus Torvalds unleashed his
first build of Linux, developer Gary Thomas began toying with the
idea of a PowerPC port. Initially, Thomas says he started the port
for ‘purely selfish’ reasons. ‘The best PCs of that day were 486
machines,’ he explains, ‘and the PowerMac was simply better and
faster.’ “

“It turned out that Apple had its own plans for Linux, and they
revolved around the Mach microkernel — the same kernel
architecture that is at the heart of Apple’s soon-to-be-released
Mac OS X. … This eventually came to be known as MkLinux. …
While MkLinux remains a starting point for thousands of new PowerPC
Linux users, Linux/PPC has become a more complete system. It runs
on a wider variety of PowerPC machines and is fast becoming the
standard Linux distribution for the PowerPC.”

“Most Intel-based Linux applications will run on PowerPC Linux
with a simple recompile, though not all code — programs that
depend on the little-endian nature of Intel programs, for example
— is easily ported.”

Complete
Story