Ubuntu Edgy 6.10 on Powerbook G4 (general)
November 12th, 2006
Recently I had to install a GNU/Linux system on my notebook. My
work-group is heavily Linux-based and the software which I’m going to
use/extend for my thesis at the moment compiles only on Linux (and
probably on BSD, however, not on MacOS X).
Although it’s a Prolog
software some parts are written in C++ and I haven’t had time to make
it work on MacOS X. Modifications are quite trivial (it’s a matter of
building a dylib). However, I should port the build system to libtool
to make it work on both platforms.
So I decided to install a GNU/Linux distribution. My first choice was Fedora. I’m not particularly fond of RH little sister, but that is the first choice in my team. The PPC version quite sucks. It’s not that things do not work: simply it seems just a bit more than a recompilation of the x86 version. For example package pbbuttons (that makes multimedia keys of my pb work, wasn’t even on the repositories).
It’s not that I particularly want to have the buttons working: it is like those who built it never used it. I mean no one ever tried to use it on a notebook? Moreover, it’s painfully slow. Six minutes to boot. To start some applications (Emacs, the gnome ‘quick’ disc burner, etc) it takes minutes. This does not happen on the x86 version.
Partitioning
So I tried Ubuntu 6.10. It’s heaven. Everything worked without my intervention. Well, almost everything.
The live CD did not recognize properly my screen. It thought it was a 20000×30000 pixel screen (and of course that was *wrong*): I just had to fix that manually. After booting the live CD, I started the installation. Everything went quite smoothly. Details in next posts
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