Ubuntu and an old PowerBook
My brother-in-law had an old PowerBook G4 laying around. He said it had a bad hard drive and it was just collecting dust. He sent it to me to mess around with as I figured I could at least make it usable.
Specs:
- 12″ PowerBook G4 1.33 GHz
- 256 MB RAM
- 80 GB Hard Drive
I was able to replace the Hard Drive rather easily by following the instructions at iFixit. I wanted to do a compare of speeds of doing normal tasks so I tried to install Leopard, but after the DVD spinning for a few hours I learned that the minimum requirements for Leopard is 512 MB RAM.
I downloaded the PowerPC Port of Ubuntu Desktop 8.04 LTS and burned it to a DVD. I put it in the DVD drive and rebooted (as there was nothing on the Hard Drive I didn’t even have to force it to boot from the optical drive). It came up with the live image (basically running the OS off of the DVD Drive) but when I went to install it was painfully slow. I figured I just didn’t have enough memory for the OS and the installation program (256 MB is not much memory at all). I did find that there is an alternate image which has a text based installer so I downloaded that and repeated the process.
The PowerBook came up clean with the text installer. I accepted all the defaults and let it rip. It took a little over an hour for the install and the Mac came up with Ubuntu. The wireless card wasn’t working so I used the physical network and did a full update using the included update manager. After the update, the wireless card worked (I’m assuming it was an updated driver module in the kernel).
I’ve been playing with it for a few days. My only real complaint is that I seem to be stuck in 8 or 16-bit color mode (the desktop image has a series of concentric rings). I can’t really tell when browsing the web and images and videos look full color to me. However, I’ve been browsing the Web, watching YouTube videos, and editing documents in OpenOffice Write and have been pleasently pleased with the speed. If anyone knows how to get it into 24-bit color mode drop me a note.
