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August 11, 2006
Ubuntu Linux on Powerbook G4
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.
Posted by billo at August 11, 2006 04:18 PM
Comments
It's working out OK so far. I'm using it right now.
The lack of sleep on it is still bugging me, but it boots fast enough that I'm getting by.
Posted by: billo at August 17, 2006 09:20 AM
How's that working out for you? Still a happy camper? Ubuntu (or Xubuntu, in my case) has renewed the life of my PowerBook G3 ("Wallstreet" edition). I really enjoy using the distro.
Posted by: Harold J. Johnson at August 17, 2006 01:06 AM