Ubuntu / Lubuntu on an iBook G3 500MHz

[wisof]

Hello All,

My latest acquisition was actually just a reunite. After 7 years of being dormant, I revived an old iBook G3 500MHz 384MB Ram. Currently it has OS X 10.4.11 and runs a bit slugishly. I will upgrade the RAM to 640MB and HDD with some parts I have available, so hopefully it will have a bit more pep.

I was wondering if anyone has installed Lubuntu on such a machine, and if so, what is their experience with it? I am looking to do it more to try out a Linux install since I have never had a personal machine which runs Linux. Will be doing the upgrades to the machine and os install bit by bit so no hurry, but was just looking to get some impressions of the experience running this OS (or similar variant) on a PPC 'Book.

Thanks!

Luis

 

[theos911]

Lubuntu has just released a live cd for ppc. There is also MintPPC, a debian derivative with a custom PPC port of The Linux Mint DE.

http://www.mintppc.org/

I would guess that most of your sluggishness under 10.4 is from 384MB RAM more than anything else.

 

[wisof]

I would guess that most of your sluggishness under 10.4 is from 384MB RAM more than anything else.

yep, this is pretty clear.

Thanks for the tip on the mintppc...I will dig a bit deeper!

 

[theos911]

MintPPC even in "RAM Heavy Mode" only needs 128 MB.

 

[wisof]

Stuck in a 512 stick in today, and thing is quite peppy. HDD wants to die...I can tell. I need to swap in another one I have laying around. Then I will try out MintPPC!

 

[ClassicHasClass]

I tried Lubuntu 12.04 LiveCD on my 867MHz TiBook (which normally boots OS 9). I was rather impressed with it.

 

[Mr. Ksoft]

Just to note about MintPPC... I tried it on a 500mhz Pismo, which pretty much has similar specs to the 500mhz iBook (same graphics card, etc). I was not satisfied at all. X didn't work to initially, a known problem, so I had to find a xorg.conf file on the MintPPC forums for the Pismo that would make it work... but said file also disabled all the hardware acceleration so everything video related was painfully slow. Do they really call that a "fix"? It was completely unusable. Since the iBook seems to have the same graphics, I am going to guess this would be an issue on it as well, unless someone here knows a proper fix that will get things working smoothly.

I also didn't like that all the GUI elements in MintPPC are green and it seems impossible to change them completely.

 

[jruschme]

but said file also disabled all the hardware acceleration so everything video related was painfully slow. Do they really call that a "fix"?

Unfortunately, that is not a MintPPC issue but an Xorg one. I've run into the problem with several distros and with equivalent hardware on a PC. (An old Inspiron 5000e that I have has the exact same failures.)

JR

 

[theos911]

Jruschme is right on the money. Xorg issues are out of our (MintPPC's) hands. Debian has been doing a lot of messing around upstream with this as of late. In the past several weeks we've had several machines come online and go offline in this regard.

@Mr. Ksoft

Try MintPPC 9.3. A Pismo is JD's primary G3 test bed, so I'd be quite surprised if 9 didn't work. (Also keep in mind 9 is stable and 11 is in testing, so 11 is likely to have issues.) 9 is roughly equivalent to Squeeze and 11 to Wheezy. 9 also has xorg file auto-detect.

I also didn't like that all the GUI elements in MintPPC are green and it seems impossible to change them completely.

Well, the main DE is JD's custom port of Mint-LXDE and Linux Mint's color scheme is green. You can easily login to plain LXDE if that suits you better. Also, eventually (when I get the time and build machine set back up) I want to finish porting MATE to PPC so we can finally have a workable GNOME alternative.