Ubuntu, Gentoo or Yellowdog 4 for G3 iBook

[John Collins]

I'm trying to decide on a distro for my lowly iBook 500 with 256MB.

Tried YDL 3 and it worked OK, but had a few troubles:
couldn't get mounting of USB disks and cameras sorted to my
satisfaction. Could mount them OK if I always put the disk in the same
USB port, but that's not how USB is supposed to be.

Couldn't get Phillips ToUcam Pro II working.

Instant messaging didn't seem to work (Gaim failed to log on to MSN or
Yahoo)

Also a bit limiting for the web not having a shockwave flash player.

I persevered for a few months and went back to OS X, but now I'm
frustrated at the limitations of this again.

Anyway to my choices:
Gentoo customizability looks good, but is it just a gimmick?

Ubuntu is a single CD download, then installation/updates from the net-
tried it with debian and it worked nicely, but how good is the hardware
support?

YDL 4, seems well supported is it the most popular PPC distro? But have
the niggles been ironed out?

Any views or other alternatives?

Thanks in Advance

john

[Jack Malmostoso]

Post by John Collins
I'm trying to decide on a distro for my lowly iBook 500 with 256MB.
couldn't get mounting of USB disks and cameras sorted to my
satisfaction. Could mount them OK if I always put the disk in the same
USB port, but that's not how USB is supposed to be.

YDL3 has a 2.4 kernel. Much of those things weren't supported then.

Post by John Collins
Couldn't get Phillips ToUcam Pro II working.

That is probably not YDL related.

Post by John Collins
Instant messaging didn't seem to work (Gaim failed to log on to MSN or
Yahoo)

Weird, a broken Gaim could happen.

Post by John Collins
Also a bit limiting for the web not having a shockwave flash player.

That you will not find it anywhere.

Post by John Collins
Gentoo customizability looks good, but is it just a gimmick?

If you have the time and patience to play with gentoo, go with it. If you
want something that works OutOfTheBox(TM) then stay away from that.

Post by John Collins
Ubuntu is a single CD download, then installation/updates from the net-
tried it with debian and it worked nicely, but how good is the hardware
support?

Hardware support isn't made by distributions. Is made by the kernel.
And Ubuntu ships a livecd you can try, but it is definitely a great choice
if you don't want to install a plain Debian (which is quite easy, with the
Sarge Debian Installer).

Post by John Collins
YDL 4, seems well supported is it the most popular PPC distro? But have
the niggles been ironed out?

They have just released 4.0.1 that should have resolved some of the bugs
present in the 4 release.

Post by John Collins
Any views or other alternatives?

I run Debian, and I am very happy with that. I suggest you Ubuntu/Debian
as the first choice, then YDL/Fedora (core 4 will ship in ppc flavor!!)
and in the end source distros like Gentoo/Rock/Crux.

[cutterjohn]

Post by John Collins
I'm trying to decide on a distro for my lowly iBook 500 with 256MB.
couldn't get mounting of USB disks and cameras sorted to my
satisfaction. Could mount them OK if I always put the disk in the same
USB port, but that's not how USB is supposed to be.

Try Ubuntu. There are significantly more binary packages avilable for
Ubuntu than YDL, and Ubuntu is on a 6mo update schedule. Security
patches/updates are frequent and timely(unlike YDL). (YDL4 is also pretty
well bloated.)

Bottom line: from the looks of things YDL's popularity is dropping like a
rock(if it ever was that popular, as even before Ubuntu it seemed that
most ppc linux people were using Debian).

Gentoo: pretty much constantly updated, lots of packages. Drawbacks
updated so frequently you may break your system partially until the repos
are updated with fixes, and you have to compile pretty much everything
which will take a LONG time with a G3 for a minimal performance
improvement. Just not worth it, IMNHO.

You may also want to look at other ppc distros or distros with ppc
support, e.g. Crux ppc, etc.

Personally, I ended up with Ubuntu on the same machine that you have.
Originally had SuSE 7.1, YDL 2.3, YDL 3.x, and now Ubuntu 4.10 soon to 5.x.
(Be aware Ubuntu officially (as of now) only supports GNOME, however there
has been some pushing for KDE and a temporary KUbuntu unofficial project.
Also most of KDE stuff and Qt libs are in the non-"official" repos.
Personally, I can't stand KDE, but in case you do... (I tend to run xfce
or fluxbox))

[John Collins]

Thanks, I was leaning towards Ubuntu, even though I can't find a Ubuntu
PPC livecd anywhere, I think I'll give it a try.

Nothing much to lose, only a couple of hours backing up my data and
settling down for the evening during the install.

I presume the disk partitioning will be destructive- I'm not aware of a
reliable non destructive partitioning tool for hfs+ partitions :(

If I remember correctly to dual boot with YDL 3 the linux partitions had
to go before the Mac OS. Is there any similar requirement for Ubuntu.

john

Post by cutterjohn

Post by John Collins
I'm trying to decide on a distro for my lowly iBook 500 with 256MB.
couldn't get mounting of USB disks and cameras sorted to my
satisfaction. Could mount them OK if I always put the disk in the same
USB port, but that's not how USB is supposed to be.

Try Ubuntu. There are significantly more binary packages avilable for
Ubuntu than YDL, and Ubuntu is on a 6mo update schedule. Security
patches/updates are frequent and timely(unlike YDL). (YDL4 is also pretty
well bloated.)
Bottom line: from the looks of things YDL's popularity is dropping like a
rock(if it ever was that popular, as even before Ubuntu it seemed that
most ppc linux people were using Debian).
Gentoo: pretty much constantly updated, lots of packages. Drawbacks
updated so frequently you may break your system partially until the repos
are updated with fixes, and you have to compile pretty much everything
which will take a LONG time with a G3 for a minimal performance
improvement. Just not worth it, IMNHO.
You may also want to look at other ppc distros or distros with ppc
support, e.g. Crux ppc, etc.
Personally, I ended up with Ubuntu on the same machine that you have.
Originally had SuSE 7.1, YDL 2.3, YDL 3.x, and now Ubuntu 4.10 soon to 5.x.
(Be aware Ubuntu officially (as of now) only supports GNOME, however there
has been some pushing for KDE and a temporary KUbuntu unofficial project.
Also most of KDE stuff and Qt libs are in the non-"official" repos.
Personally, I can't stand KDE, but in case you do... (I tend to run xfce
or fluxbox))

[Jack Malmostoso]

Post by John Collins
Thanks, I was leaning towards Ubuntu, even though I can't find a Ubuntu
PPC livecd anywhere, I think I'll give it a try.

There:

http://cdimage.ubuntulinux.org/daily-live/current/hoary-live-powerpc.iso

Post by John Collins
Nothing much to lose, only a couple of hours backing up my data and
settling down for the evening during the install.
I presume the disk partitioning will be destructive- I'm not aware of a
reliable non destructive partitioning tool for hfs+ partitions :(

Some commercial tool like iPartition can help you.

Post by John Collins
If I remember correctly to dual boot with YDL 3 the linux partitions had
to go before the Mac OS. Is there any similar requirement for Ubuntu.

I have them like those and works.

[fudo]

Post by John Collins
Thanks, I was leaning towards Ubuntu, even though I can't find a Ubuntu
PPC livecd anywhere, I think I'll give it a try.
Nothing much to lose, only a couple of hours backing up my data and
settling down for the evening during the install.
I presume the disk partitioning will be destructive- I'm not aware of a
reliable non destructive partitioning tool for hfs+ partitions :(
If I remember correctly to dual boot with YDL 3 the linux partitions had
to go before the Mac OS. Is there any similar requirement for Ubuntu.
john

I have a Powerbook G3 with three partitions, Ubuntu is on the last one,
and it works. Sort of. I don't see much use in using a laptop unless you
can put it to sleep, and I couldn't see any way to do that with Ubuntu,
though perhaps I didn't look hard enough. I the meantime, I got
distracted by another project, so I haven't messed with it for a while.

Post by John Collins
The patch that let you shrink your mac partition non destructivly with
http://xilun.nerim.net/Projet/Parted/parted-1.6.12-hfs-13.patch.gz
( GNU Parted is available here : http://ftp.gnu.org/gnu/parted/ )

I have not tried this myself.

[John Collins]

Post by fudo

Post by John Collins
Thanks, I was leaning towards Ubuntu, even though I can't find a Ubuntu
PPC livecd anywhere, I think I'll give it a try.
Nothing much to lose, only a couple of hours backing up my data and
settling down for the evening during the install.
I presume the disk partitioning will be destructive- I'm not aware of a
reliable non destructive partitioning tool for hfs+ partitions :(
If I remember correctly to dual boot with YDL 3 the linux partitions had
to go before the Mac OS. Is there any similar requirement for Ubuntu.
john

I have a Powerbook G3 with three partitions, Ubuntu is on the last one,
and it works. Sort of. I don't see much use in using a laptop unless you
can put it to sleep, and I couldn't see any way to do that with Ubuntu,
though perhaps I didn't look hard enough. I the meantime, I got
distracted by another project, so I haven't messed with it for a while.

Post by John Collins
The patch that let you shrink your mac partition non destructivly with
http://xilun.nerim.net/Projet/Parted/parted-1.6.12-hfs-13.patch.gz
( GNU Parted is available here : http://ftp.gnu.org/gnu/parted/ )

I have not tried this myself.

Thanks - I'll take a look at the the patch for parted.

For your interest I had the exact same problem with suspend, there's a
fair bit about it in the Ubuntu forums. The fix described here:
http://ubuntuforums.org/archive/index.php/t-6803.html worked perfectly
for me. See the posting by diablo (4th from top) which worked perfectly
for me. Shouldn't take you more than 10 mins. Just one thing to add, I
had to restart pbbuttonsd, with sudo /etc/init.d pbbuttonsd restart.

You may also want to do a little bit of fiddling with
/etc/pbbuttons/pbbuttonsd.conf to tweak the power saving options.


john

[fudo]

Post by John Collins
Thanks - I'll take a look at the the patch for parted.
For your interest I had the exact same problem with suspend, there's a
http://ubuntuforums.org/archive/index.php/t-6803.html worked perfectly
for me. See the posting by diablo (4th from top) which worked perfectly
for me. Shouldn't take you more than 10 mins. Just one thing to add, I
had to restart pbbuttonsd, with sudo /etc/init.d pbbuttonsd restart.
You may also want to do a little bit of fiddling with
/etc/pbbuttons/pbbuttonsd.conf to tweak the power saving options.

Thanks, I'll go have a look when I have some free time.

[I R A Darth Aggie]

On Sat, 05 Mar 2005 16:59:47 +0000,

+ Thanks, I was leaning towards Ubuntu, even though I can't find a Ubuntu
+ PPC livecd anywhere, I think I'll give it a try.

http://cdimage.ubuntu.com/releases/hoary/array-3.5-live/

James