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ficone
Member
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Posted: Mon Mar 19th, 2007 05:37 am |
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Hi -
After reading an article in the Jan MacAddict, I decided I'd give Ubuntu Linux a try on my Lombard (upgraded with the Daystar 433 G4).
I burned the 6.10 CD, and after choosing my option from the boot screen (have tried most of the different options), Ubuntu starts to load from the CD. When the desktop starts to appear, I begin to receive several error windows. Most notably is the inability for Nautilus to load properly. Consequently, I can't load the installer program to be able to setup my installation on the HD.
After a bit of frustration I took the same CD and booted my 1.67 GHz 17" G4, with no issues.
So I now wonder, is there some Lombard-ism (or its upgrade), that will not allow me to properly run Ubuntu?
Thanks,
MattLast edited on Mon Mar 19th, 2007 11:57 pm by ficone
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ficone
Member
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Posted: Tue Mar 20th, 2007 12:00 am |
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| Solved - make sure you have your Mac's internal clock set to a valid time. I changed it to the current date/time and the above-mentioned problems went away. Ubuntu is currently installing on my Lombard!
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Gary
Administrator
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Posted: Wed Mar 21st, 2007 04:10 pm |
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ficone wrote:
Solved - make sure you have your Mac's internal clock set to a valid time. I changed it to the current date/time and the above-mentioned problems went away. Ubuntu is currently installing on my Lombard!
Thanks for the followup 
____________________
Gary Dailey
Daystar Technology
http://Daystar-Tech.com, http://Daystar-Store.com
email: gary@daystartechnology.com, chat: garydailey@mac.com
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ceratophyllum
Member
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Posted: Sat Dec 1st, 2007 03:20 pm |
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I don't know what happened with recent linux kernels, but my G4 Lombard will not boot any current PPC linux distribution except for Debian and Slackintosh. I tried (x)ubuntu, YDL, and a few others. All either freeze shortly after the splash screen or drop to a crappy busybox shell that only allows you to perferm a shutdown.
Since PPC is dead, maybe there isn't much testing anymore? So nobody except one or two nostalgic, old mac lovers notices when new "features" cause trouble when ported to PPC?
Debian Etch works, but don't get your hopes up. It's very rough and not for the typical user. It took about 5 tries to get the install process to complete. (I'm not sure why.) The default X fonts looked like hell. I apt-get installed xfce4 and I think it sucked in some better fonts.
I tried inserting several PCMCIA wifi cards and got an oops each time. I read in some forum that reserve=0xfdffffff,0xffffff would fix the PCMCIA conflict and it did. However, I never would have figured what address range to exclude on my own; the screenfull of hexadecimal that appears during the oops didn't mean much to me.
Sleep/wake works almost perfectly, without any configuring. (Ironically, sleep is broken for new core duo 2 macbooks in the latest stable Ubuntu.) Once in a while the system fails to wake, but I can't figure out why. Sleep is 100% perfect in Panther, so I don't think the problem is hardware.
DRM would not work out of the box and it looks like the mach64 modules are not included in the kernel 2.6.18. Why? (I wasn't in the mood to try get 5+ year old source code to compile that was probably only barely working back in X11 4.3. Lombard's video is so wimpy ayway...is there any point?)
On the positive side, there's no need for swap in Debian. Even with a few browser windows, xterms, and a PDF viewer open, I rarely saw more than 256MB used and there was never any swap used. Alt-tabbing, start up, and desktop switching felt waaay faster in Debian. (I have 512MB.) Panther pages a lot. Even with 512MB RAM. Probably some lame disk caching. Why does OS X do this? I mean, does it EVER make sense to cache disk in RAM when there's only 512MB?
The bottom line: Don't bother with linux on a Lombard.
With the availability of so many linux apps through Fink and Darwin Ports, the stability and tolerable speed of Panther, and up-to-date 3rd party browsers(Camino, Firefox), I don't really see the point of going through all the hassle of installing Linux on moribund PPC hardware.
Taking half a minute or so off boot time and having alt-tab take 0.1 seconds instead of 0.4 seconds is not worth it.
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