[Luna] Any caveats for putting Kubuntu on a souped-up G3 PPC iMac rev.A?

[Andrew Roazen]

I've been messing around with Linux here in town for about 2 years. I do web 
development for Cline Library at NAU, and managed to get an old Optiplex GX1 
for compatibility testing on Konqueror.

Since then, I've installed Debian Woody/Sarge, SuSe 10.0, SLAX and DSL on a 
thumbdrive, submitted modules to SLAX, installed Ubuntu/Kubuntu on PCs, worked 
with any number of liveCDs, configured dual-boots with both GRUB and LILO, 
written documentation on getting Knoppix to recognize your hardware, and I 
feel reasonably comfortable getting these systems running (working for a 
living on a Solaris server helps).

A friend in town has a hand-me-down first-generation iMac with 512M/20G and a 
souped-up G3 (a Sonnet upgrade), but it's still running OS X 10.1. 20Gb is 
decent disk space for running OS X Panther 10.2, but not so much for Tiger, 
and Tiger's video prefers a more hardcore video card than the one Apple put in 
their first-gen tray-loading iMacs back in 1999.

I was planning to give her a bunch of FOSS for OS X before I realized she was 
still running 10.1, and it looks like it would be a better longterm deal to 
put Kubuntu on it for her. While I've gotten the liveCDs to work on PPC 
platforms (I have a dual G5 PowerPC at home and an iBook G4 at work), I 
haven't tried installing it on PPC yet.

I've managed to get the Dapper and Breezy liveCDs to work on an iBook G4, but 
when I tried to boot the Breezy liveCD the screen stayed black after the 
ncurses config screens (I expect the screen resolution choices had something 
to do with it).

She doesn't need a screamer with bleeding-edge XGL support, she needs OOo 2.0 
and FF 1.5.0.2 with media support.

Any advice? (I've managed to get mplayer with mozilla-plugin support running 
on the x86 platform by grabbing win32codecs and the libggi/libgii stuff, but I 
understand this is somewhat different on the PPC platform)

http://www2.nau.edu/~ar24/opensource/
http://www2.nau.edu/~ar24/opensource/knop/