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Ubuntu Linux On Your G3 Or Better Mac


dlaroe

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I was a long time Mac user before being going to Linux. You can read my self-involved rant on another forum.

I thought I'd give Macs, and more importantly MacOSX, another try so I found a cheap G4 to play with. Interestingly, it came with Ubuntu Linux instead of MacOSX.

Being a long time unix user, I'm used to its quirks when used for a desktop OS. I was suprised at the minimal command line stuff that was needed to make it the way I wanted.

I did a fresh install and it was pretty painless. Partitioning would take a little knowledge if you have a crowded harddrive but with even a smallish spare drive, Ubuntu requires 3GB of disk and 256MB of ram, just point it to a drive you have nothing on and let it go to town.

The weird thing is the installer asks you little else, its pretty much a desktop distribution and everything installed is geared to personal use but you can add just about anything you want down the road very easily.

There are a few quirks though.

The package installer and auto-update program, both very slick, sym-link the kernel to a place where the bootloader isn't looking. Removing "boot/" from the paths in the /etc/yaboot.conf file and running "sudo ybin -v" on the command line fixed it quick. Watch the output of that command to prove that Free software is priceless!

Edit: I though I'd show you what i was talking about:

"ybin: Blessing /dev/hda2 with Holy Penguin Pee..."

How cool is that, no stuffy corporate programmers here!

The flaw seems to be because the bootloader required for the Mac PowerPC software is different than the Intel bootloader. I had to grab the SMP kernel for my dual 500MHz G4 but most users would only be changing it for security updates.

The second issue was it wouldn't max out the screen resolution on my low end monitor. Since Ubuntu is Debian based you would type "sudo dpkg-reconfigure xserver-xorg" on the command line to run a graphical configuration tool.

This is the best resource I've found to resolve those nagging Mac specific issues. There isn't much difference between the PowerPC and Intel distributions but documentation tends to focus on the Intel version where they differ.

There are two things I've found that just don't work, Flash and power management.

Macromedia has no PowerPC Linux Flash player, there is a free version but it seems to be a work in progress, I might try it just to use Matt Burkett's awesome dryfire drill!

Power management just isn't done yet I guess, I haven't dorked around with it.

Ubuntu has a Live CD available that you can just boot from and try it out. If you have a G3 without a lot of ram you can try Xubuntu which is supposed to be very resource friendly requiring 128 MB of RAM or maybe even less.

Keep this in mind when the next major revision of MacOSX comes out that we'll have to pay for or you notice a low end G3 or better Mac lying around.

-Dale

Edited by dlaroe
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