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

[Karim Nassar]

Having used Ubunutu on a powerbook g4 for over a year now, here are the
negatives:

* No Flash for linux on ppc. Nor does it look like there ever will be.

* Video playback weird at best. Never have I gotten plugins to work in
firefox. I use Xine-gtk for watching dvds, as totem just doesn't work.
Even with xine audio/video gets out of sync during playback, and I
usually have to pause the movie for a second every 20 minutes or so to
let the audio "catch up". Gstreamer apparently has huge performance
improvements in the next release which will make this issue moot.

* Java is horrendous. I managed to get a beta IBM jre to work, but it
sucks the life out of the machine, and when run as a plugin to firefox
closing firefox doesn't end the java process. You have to manually kill
java to make it go away (which kills any open firefox too, so you can't
just kill java).

* Networking on a laptop is difficult at best, however I hear that gnome
2.14 has a super spifty network utility tool. That isn't available until
the June 1 release (unless I get crazy and dist-upgrade to a beta, which
I can't right now)

In my opinion, Ubuntu is not ready for prime time on PPC for the naive
linux user. It serves me well in every other way. I don't know if KDE
has better solutions to the video/networking issues, and I have never
tried it either.

Further, I installed ubuntu on my roommates toshiba lifebook, and
everthing works flawlessly (excepting that the sync issue with movie
playback still exists). Seems that things are significantly better in
the i386 world, but I am still anxiously awaiting the Dapper release (if
only for the networking tool) before I zealously start converting my
friends.

HTH,
\<.


On Sun, 2006-04-16 at 11:32 -0700, Andrew Roazen wrote:
> 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/
> 
> 
> _______________________________________________
> Luna mailing list
> Luna at lists.flaglug.org
> http://lists.flaglug.org/mailman/listinfo/luna