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linux on a powerbook G4

skyking

skyking

Lifer
My nephew's powerbook dropped a hard drive. I will be replacing it for him, and want to toss on a distro quick and dirty for testing purposes. he has the MAC install disks in another town.
What distro or OS do you think will support the hardware right out of the gate, with no fussing around?
 
Originally posted by: spherrod
i bow to n0cmonkey's superior linux knowledge but Yellow Dog Linux is meant to be very good
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The question is asking for an opinion, I'm not going to say anyone in this thread is wrong. 😉

I can't say I've heard anything bad about YDL.
 
Originally posted by: n0cmonkey
Originally posted by: spherrod
i bow to n0cmonkey's superior linux knowledge but Yellow Dog Linux is meant to be very good
Click to expand...

The question is asking for an opinion, I'm not going to say anyone in this thread is wrong. 😉

I can't say I've heard anything bad about YDL.
Click to expand...

me neither, but I've only had minimal experience with Linux (apart from Ubuntu on my laptop) so was qualifying my statement early! 😉 :beer:
 
I booted my Mac Mini from a live version of Ubuntu, and it worked without any problems. I'm guessing that the installable version of Ubuntu would work equally as well.
 
Originally posted by: n0cmonkey
OpenBSD.
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So if I download an ISO, burn it and install, It will support the wireless hardware, video, audio without any messing around?
You have a G4 running it?
 
Originally posted by: skyking
Originally posted by: n0cmonkey
OpenBSD.
Click to expand...

So if I download an ISO, burn it and install, It will support the wireless hardware, video, audio without any messing around?
You have a G4 running it?
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Wireless is a negative, it's a broadcom chipset. I didn't think about that.

Video works, audio should depending on the model. There are a number of audio chipsets and some of them are problematic, although most of the problems seem to revolve around the iBooks.

I haven't installed it on my powerbook, but as soon as I get the memory issue fixed (it only recognizes one slot right now) I will. As soon as I get a new Mini or an iMac for the woman it'll probably be going on my Mini too.
 
You brought up another good question🙂
While I have this thing disassembled, I thought about upgrading the RAM. Is this proprietary stuff?
 
Originally posted by: skyking
You brought up another good question🙂
While I have this thing disassembled, I thought about upgrading the RAM. Is this proprietary stuff?
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No, it's pretty standard. Macs have historically been picky about the ram though. Try to find something with the same timings as the one in the machine currently. I purchased a generic kingston sodimm for my powerbook and it worked for a while. Then it started locking up the machine on boot. Removed it and eventually replaced it with a stick from a mac related store (macmall I think) and the new one works fine. Unless I put it in the second slot, then it doesn't work. But neither does the one that came with the powerbook. 😕
 
Gah, that does suck.

So since Openbsd does not do the wireless, which distro does?
Without the wireless, It might as well be a doorstop😀
 
Originally posted by: skyking
Gah, that does suck.

So since Openbsd does not do the wireless, which distro does?
Without the wireless, It might as well be a doorstop😀
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None. Broadcom is close lipped about their products. I keep USB wireless thingies for just this situation.

I think there has been some work with reverse engineering broadcom's chipsets, but I don't know how far along it is or anything.
 
Thanks for that link. I took a look, and this thing has a 1 gig stick of ram:Q
I guess he took it as far as it would go, ram-wise.
The HD should be in next week sometime, I will try that driver.
 
Ubuntu, Fedora, or YellowDog.

YellowDog used to be the best for Mac hardware support, but Ubuntu and Fedora are catching up fast.
 
works great out of the box with ubuntu, with the exception of wireless. I'd have to do a kernel recompile and upgrade to get those wireless drivers linked above, and the nephew will be here in a few minutes with the Mac cd's🙂
 
PowerBooks have used standard SO-DIMM ram and standard 2.5" notebook drives since about 1998. The first generation titanium PowerBook G4 "TiBook" was the first PowerBook that could use a standard notebook optical drive. This is also the case with the second generation aluminum PowerBook G4 "AlBook" and probably the case with the MacBook too. I recently replaced the slot loading 2x DVD-R drive in my PowerBook G4 with a nice generic slot load 8x DL DVD+/-RW drive I bought off ebay.

Which Mac CDs are you using? A Mac version of a linux distro or the real Mac OS X? If you're going for Mac OS X, then I suggest using at least 10.3. The installer is pretty simple, but the "Disk Utility" for formatting/partitioning is kind of hidden. If you want to do anything custom in that regard, boot off the Mac OS X CD and look for Disk Utility in the menu bar. From there you can also launch a command line terminal window and a few other utilities depending on which version of the Mac OS X installer you have.

Oh, and when the install is done and you're booted into OS, let Software Update do it's work and grab the latest version of the OS.
 
I'd have to do a kernel recompile and upgrade to get those wireless drivers linked above
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Why? There should be kernel-headers packages in Ubuntu and that should be all you need to compile the drivers against the Ubuntu kernel.
 
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