Q As someone who dislikes bloatware, eye-candy, and other such stuff that clogs and hogs a computer's hardware, I have been considering refurbishing an old computer to run Linux with a lightweight WM. The trouble is, the computer I hope to use (an old machine from work) is an Apple Mac. I know that Linux, BSD, etc have been ported to many CPUs, including the PowerPC, but I don't know if there is anything special about Apple hardware that allows only Mac OS to run on them. Can Linux run on Apple Mac G4 PCI Graphics hardware with 400 MHz PowerPC and 768 MB RAM?
A Apple PPC hardware is can definitely run Linux - I ran it on a 1GHz iBook G4 for almost three years, until the hardware failed. With a 400MHz CPU, you'll want something lightweight, but that appears to be your objective anyway. There aren't many distros for PowerPC, but all of them are intended for use on Apple hardware. The main choices are: Yellow Dog Linux (www.yellowdoglinux.com) which is derived from Fedora, Debian (www.debian.org) which runs on just about anything, and Ubuntu. Ubuntu no longer officially support PowerPC but PPC versions are available in the ports directories of their download servers.
Your best choice for this would be Xubuntu, which uses the Xfce desktop and is available from http://cdimage. ubuntu.com/xubuntu/ports/releases/gutsy/release. While Xfce is significantly lighter than the likes of KDE and Gnome, it may not fulfil your idea of a truly lightweight WM. However, Ubuntu and Debian in particular have plenty of alternatives available, so you can go as minimalist as you like, whether you want the function of FluxBox (www.fluxbox.org) or IceWM (www.icewm.org) or the true minimalism of Ratpoison (www.nongnu.org/ratpoison) or EvilWM (http://evilwm.sourceforge.net).