Darwin Tips
One of the big obstacles to installing LinuxPPC has been repartitioning the hard drive. If you have been interested in experimenting with an XWindows system, you're in luck if you have the MacOS X Beta installed on your Mac. If you don't, you can instead use the open sourced Darwin 1.2 with the following instructions.
The recently released XFree 4.02 officially supports Darwin and the MacOS X Beta. After downloading the 61 meg distribution, run a simple Xinstall.sh terminal command, and a very sophisticated shell script installs and configures the Xserver package.
Because the MacOS X Aqua interface is also a 'windowing' system, you will have to exit it and log back in on the text console. It's easy. At the MultiUser Login Panel, type >console and the root password. You'll be dropped into the text console.
Follow the instructions at this site to set up some PATH variables. Then type startx to see the crappy twm window manager. Yuck!
The Ice Window Manager and AfterStep are also available for Darwin. I just downloaded AS and haven't installed it yet, but Ice installed easily and configures just like its Linux counterpart.
I have found Darwinfo.org to be the definitive site for info on X and Darwin. While there are not a lot of applications ported yet, the ability to install an X system without partitioning you hard disk for Linux makes it much easier to experiment and get your feet wet in this unix-type OS.
Because this Xserver runs under Darwin, it's easy to access all your Mac partitions (HFS and HFS+). If you have ethernet internet connection configured under MacOS X, the settings are use by XFree/Darwin. If someone gets around to porting Mac-on-Linux to Darwin, the MacOS X/Darwin platform will become a very interesting place to be! Without a restart, you could switch between Aqua and XFree, and have Classic MacOS emulation under both!
So if you find yourself with a few hours this holiday weekend and already have MacOS X Beta installed, give XFree 4 a try. It's very easy to install and will keep those brain cells active after that big holiday dinner!
