I need Red Hat linux on my Mac and it will need to talk to Windows system(s) running under Parallels. Is Fedora for Mac (PPC) running in Mac OS any better than Fedora for x86 (Intel) running under Parallels? In other words, am I better off running Fedora PPC natively so to speak, in a Mac OS X window as compared to running the Intel x86 version inside Parallels for Mac? I would assume that the PPC version would perform better because it's not running under yet another emulation layer, but would networking the Windows system(s) running under Parallels be easier if linux is running under it, too? Also I assume Fedora is the "free" Red Hat version that people speak of? Sorry about the dumb questions. I am not new to unix, it's just been a realllllly long time. Thanks much!
If your Mac is capable of running Parallels then it's an Intel Mac. Parallels doesn't run an "emulation" in the sense of translating CPU byte codes, it only translates hardware interfaces to behave like the ones the guest OS expects to find. The CPU code runs pretty well at native speed. Any PPC distribution you find would be running in Rosetta on an Intel Mac, if it would run at all, and that *is* an emulation in the full sense of the word - every CPU operation has to be translated from PPC to Intel. So PPC software doesn't run "natively" on an Intel Mac. Fedora is, indeed, the free version of Red Hat.
