Ubuntu on PPC

Michael Dale

I decided to give Linux a shot again. I’ve never been a huge fan. Personally I feel much happier with BSD, but UNI runs Fedora Core 3 on most of the FIT computers so I felt I should give it a try again.

This time I didn’t feel like screwing around with installing Linux on my Athlon so I downloaded the live boot disc of Ubuntu version 5.04 for PPC (PowerPC) and booted it on my 12” 1.2GHz iBook.

To boot off a cdrom on the mac you need to hold down “c” as the system boots.

So anyway I’ve been using Ubuntu on my iBook for about 30 minutes and I thought I’d get down my first thoughts (I’ll probably write something more in detail later).

The system booted fairly quickly (remembering this is off a CD) and the first thing I noticed when Gnome (the default window manager for Ubuntu) appeared was that the mouse moved really quickly! Now when I say really quickly, I mean normal speed. Mac users take things slowly, so it was fast for ME!

Anyway the first test was network connectivity through the wireless card. Now I wasn’t really expecting it to work, considering it is a mac and all. Well it didn’t; no wireless. Aww. There is a good post about why it doesn't work here.

So I plugged in a network cable and turned on my network card and picked up an address via DHCP. Fired up firefox, working internet. Easy.

I then loaded “Music Player” and the first thing I noticed was that it seemed to support the iPod. So I plugged in my apple formatted iPod via firewire. Well it worked. The drive mounted and I could read all my music and files. Cool.

Only problem was that there is no MP3 support built in (or AAC for that mater). Oh well, not that hard to install.

apt-get couldn’t find some PPC binaries towards the end of the install but that didn’t really seem to break anything. MP3s now work, although the sound is really soft (and it is turned up to maximum).

I then decided to put the thing to sleep. The iBook quite happily went to sleep. So I went off to dinner. When I came back the laptop was still sleeping (good thing) so I opened it, bad idea. I got a blast of sound through the speakers, it didn’t stop. I quickly reset it (and no I didn't need to take the exploding iBattery out). Pity. There is a bit of information about it here

So I restarted back into Ubuntu to have a last play.

It is a bit hard to work with one button in Ubuntu; probably could bind the keys to something else, haven’t really looked.

Also the laptop seems to be working pretty hard. The fan does come on, which doesn’t happen much at all in OS X.

A part from those issues, it is fairly usable. The system runs really fast. I’m impressed. Video seems to work okay (the iBook has an ATi Radeon 9200, ATi aren’t known for their great linux support). I haven’t tried any 3D a part from the screen saver.

So final thoughts?

Would I use it?

No, not just yet. Lack of wireless and sleep support really make it hard to use for what I do. But saying that, I am impressed with the system. I wasn’t expecting much out of a mac version of linux, but it runs fine.

Hopefully in the future we’ll see better support for the mac hardware.

If I had an older mac that couldn’t run OS X then I’d probably seriously look at Ubuntu.

I think I could get to like Ubuntu, no wait I already like it. I’ll defiantly look at putting it on my PC which should have better support for everything.

Now there are probably ways around the problems I had, but I didn’t look all that hard into it. I did notice that the update system showed a new kernel version (not much use on a live CD) which might fix some stuff. But at the moment I’ll have to leave it.