It was a very short test, that ultimately ended without any experience in the Linux operating system. I will stay with Mac OS X 10.4 Tiger and Mac OS X Server 10.4 Tiger until Linux is fully support on my test bench platform. This does not include the niceties of having a multi-billion dollar company further developing the OS and bundling excellent applications for free like iTunes, iDVD, iCal, and GarageBand. In my analysis, even though the operating system originates as open source, your ability to install and support that OS may make the initial “free” license very expensive. If compared to a full blown Mac OS X Server 10.4 Tiger model, then Linux would make a financial difference ($430 each license for 10 client Mac OS X Server). Mac OS X 10.4 Tiger costs at retail around $115 on an individual license, and just $180 for a five seat license (just $36 a seat) for a family. In either case, the machine can quite comfortably run an older version of Mac OS X that supports PPC processors (at the time of this writing, all that leaves out is the latest release, OS X 10.6 Snow Leopard, which drops. This makes Linux very price prohibitive to even attempt to run on my test bench. A PowerPC Mac with a 1 GHz processor either has a factory-installed G4 processor or has a G3 upgrade card installed. I do not believe the latest crop of dual 2.3 GHz is supported at all through the GNU GPL, and only through Terra Soft Solutions paid subscriptions to Linux, currently priced at $30 with no manual, or $60 with a manual but without support, and finally $90 with 60 days support, can it install at all. As of today, neither audio nor Mac-on-Linux work. On Intel white boxes, the structure of the chipset is well understood and documented, however on the Apple Power Mac G5, Linux cannot be fully implemented and has many gaps in service.
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