Hello, I was doing some research in the mac os 9 / mac osx field to build up an archive of software and games (before their lost forever lol) and i couldnt help but notice a linux version of basilisk. So it got me thinking, what if i take a barebones linux distro, give it just enough drivers for networking, X11, etc. and have it run basilisk without a desktop manager, giving the distro an almost native mac os feeling on x86 architecture. I think ive heard of a distro similar to this but id like to give it a whirl on my own, and suggestions or comments in regards to this?

Sounds like it would be pretty neat.
There are similar projects, like Amithlon for Amiga(IIRC is on the FTP here),
There is also one for Atari ST, but I don't remember the name.
It sounds possible, I would love to see the results!

cool, now the only hard part is deciding what distro to use, seeing as how you only need roughly 256mb of ram and a p4 to max it out im thinking about using something knoppix/debian based. id like to steer clear of newer ubuntu based distros.

If the idea is to provide an OS X feel, then PearOS has you covered already. It's almost an exact Mac clone appearance-wise.

well what id like to do is run mac os 8.6/9.2 on x86 hardware using the linux kernel + X11, and basilisk. everything pre-built and ready to go outside of the box (eg live+installer), i dont want it to look like osx, i want it to be os9 (via emulation)

Ah. Well, that's a slightly taller order, but an interesting idea. Good luck.

There was talk once about the possibility of making a Knoppix CD that would be stripped of anything unneccesary, and you'd install it and you would be prompted, upon boot, with an emulated PPC mac upon which you could install any version of OS X up to 10.4. The intention was that you could run OS X on systems that couldn't be hackintoshed, such as anything with a pre-Pentium 4 processor, and most early AMD processors.

emulated via pearpc? is that project even around anymore? lol

Im goin to be using a stripped down version of Arch Linux, ill post some details on how this endeavour is going. The only thin im having trouble deciding is what kernel i should use. (2.4.X or 2.6.X) id like this 'distro' to be used on legacy hardware first.

Using an old version of the kernel has negligible effects on legacy hardware compatibility, and actually breaks compatibility with the new one.
Furthermore 2.4 and 2.6 branches are now maintaned by very few people, and you don't know how long 2.4 support will last.
To be honest, using old Linux kernel is a very bad idea.
Go for 3.x.
It's a really scalable kernel, even the newer versions can run on pretty much everything.
It's up to you to make it run well on the target platform, for example compiling it without unnecessary modules.

I have heard of many of these types of distros Pear, Macbuntu, OX X Like, Mac KDE and it just goes on. Most of them i Seen are based on Suse as you can just use susestudio. You must know linux pretty good if you are going to use arch. I could not even use Gentoo.

Have you considered SLAX? It's very modular, you can even make a custom .iso on their site. Similarly to SUSE Studio, but you can strip it down even further.

Hm? Arch is not as hard to use as Gentoo, it's pretty much on same level as Slackware and similar distros.

Since this got bumped, CrunchBang will run on low specs..:)

Have Fun!

Any linux distro will work.
Many distros are currently based off of Debian, but you could even create your own out of LFS or out of Gentoo or Arch.
Gentoo or Arch allow you to build your own system.
You could use Ubuntu Minimal (I don't know if they still distribute it though.)

As for complication, Arch and Gentoo are about the same. The only difference is for Gentoo you have to compile /everything/ yourself. Arch provides i686 compiled binaries.

Keep in mind that Basilisk II will only emulate a Motorola 68k based Macintosh (Mac Classic or Mac II). So anything newer than MacOS 8.1 won't run.

As has been mentioned earlier, PearPC is the only available solution to emulate PowerPC based Macs (except Mac-on-Linux if you run PPC Linux).

You might want to have a look at Tiny Core Linux as a bare bones Linux distro:
http://tinycorelinux.net/