Which distro?

Many people will wonder which distribution (or distro) they should install on any computer. This is particularly true of installing it on a Mac as there are several drivers and such that tend to be included in one distribution but not another.

I've installed Ubuntu because it's the one that seemed to have the better overall support for the Linux on Mac community. This doesn't mean that you can't run Fedora, Suse, Debian or anything else. It only means that if the driver you require for the video card (for example) isn't available directly in the repository, you'll have to manually download and install it.

One of the limiting factors may be how old or new your Mac is. If it's still using a PPC chip, then you'll have to stick to one of the distributions that provides that architecture. If however you're on a new machine, you may find that not all the hardware is fully supported "out-of-the-box" and will need a lot of tweaking.

You use to have to enable a BIOS emulation (using Bootcamp) to prepare the partition where you were going to install the OS.

Now it seems you can boot off the CD and install directly.

I've preferred leaving my OS X partition after resizing, in part because Apple releases firmware updates and such that are only installable through OS X. (That I know of.)

I must admit I boot into OS X only once every month or two, having gone for 3 months without booting into Leopard.

So in the end which distribution should you use? Well that's really up to you. Every distro has it's good things and bad. It's mainly personal taste. Which distros have you installed? Have you tried more than one and what were your results? I'd like to hear from others about this.

-P