Woo Hoo!!!
I got Ubuntu Linux running on my old powerbook. The only tricky bit was getting the ISO image I downloaded yesterday burnt onto a CD. From various comments I read on the forum, the standard Apple Disk Utility does not work with the Ubuntu Linux PPC LiveCD ISO image. Initially I thought it was a bad image. To get around this, I used the cdrecord package from fink to burn the ISO image.
sudo cdrecord dev=IODVDServices hoary-live-powerpc.iso
Once I burnt the image, the other interesting challenge I faced was booting the powerbook from the CDROM. I googled for it and found out that when you restart hold down on the “C” key. That is the letter C and NOT the Control key. I made the mistake the first time of holding down the Control key.
Finally I heard my CDROM rumbling away as it tried to boot from it. Lots of console messages went by until it started up X and dumped me in front of GNOME. Screen resolution was 640x480 which made it look terrible (I guess it didn’t detect my LCD correctly) and I couldn’t find any application that would allow me to reconfigure my display.
Network connectivity was available. I opened up Firefox and was able to browse the web. I even took a screenshot and uploaded the image to Flickr. I played around with the shell and poked at the various menu choices (games, OpenOffice …)
Performance was spiffy. The system was much more responsive than when I’m running OS X. To be fair though, OS X does run more processes in the background.
Overall, it was a good first impression. I need to figure out how to get the screen resolution fixed but other than that no major issues. The new question I have is whether I can install Ubuntu onto a firewire drive and run Linux off that. Being able to dual boot Linux and Mac OS X would be awesome. It would allow me to start using Linux around the house again.