Ubuntu Linux on Powerbook G4
2006-08-11 18:18:35
I got sick of how slow my old powerbook (800MHz) G4 was running Mac OS X (Tiger). I wiped out the disk and installed Ubuntu 6.06. It seems to be just working. Sound, graphics, battery management and wireless network all seem to work out of the box. Unfortunately, it doesn't come pre configured with essentials like emacs or tcsh, so I have to add those.
Seems to boot a lot faster, to start!
Update:
Some bad things: sleep/suspend don't seem to actually work; the fan is still going while it's "asleep."
WPA2 encryption is known not to work, apparently, a big/little endian thing in the base driver.
There is no nvidia driver for PPC, only i386.
I'll stick with it for a few weeks to see if the no sleep/no WPA are showstoppers.