Live from Ubuntu
I finally decided to try installing Ubuntu on an old g3 iBook we have had lying around not doing much. OS X is too slow on it to do much of anything. I have to say, I am pretty impressed. I downloaded the 700 meg ISO, burned a CD and booted the CD on the iBook. The installer gave me the option to reformat the drive (which I did), took me through a couple of other setup screens (about 6) and then the installer was off and runniing and I went to bed.
In the morning, the wife clicked the restart button and the iBook booted right up from the internal drive. I thought, ok here we go, it is never going to find the wireless card, so that is as far as this will go. I launched the preinstalled copy of Firefox, typed in an url, and bam, a page loaded. Amazing.I guess I am setting the bar pretty low, but I was on the internet with no configuration.
Only as I wrote this did I think that I never typed in my networks WPA password, and a quick trip to the network pane revealed that it looks like Ubuntu PPC 6.06 does not support WPA. So it looks like I am going to be squatting on the nieghbors open network.
Some things I was surprised worked right away:
- sleep (usually an issue with Linux from what I have read)
- wireless networking (except WPA)
- battery status indicator
- web page interaction here on vox
Some things I was surprised didn't work
- playback of MP3 file on NYT podcast
- no second mouse button click (mapped to F12 wtf?) this page gives fix
A few other thoughts:
- lot of extra software preinstalled (Gimp, a dozen games, Evolution Office Suite, CD creation software, etc) no idea how well any of this works
- still, my impression of Linux stands, the main reason to run linux is to run linux, if you want to get work done, use your mac
