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Long live the penguin!

Submitted by Zorin on Wed, 2005-06-29 10:08.

I installed Linux on my Powerbook G4 last night. This was rather painful because the optical drive on the laptop is hosed, and Yellow Dog doesn't support installation from an external firewire CD-ROM (like OSX does), so I had to do some heavy hacking.

To make a long story short, I ended up doing a network install over http from hushpad, by loopback mounting the iso images (in order) inside hushpad's webspace. It worked pretty well, though it was a major kludge, and got the OS installed. Whee!!

Linux on a G4 867 is fast as hell. It feels a lot faster than OSX, but of course doesn't have a lot of the pretty eye candy, which makes sense. The primary downside to LinuxPPC is the lack of a Macromedia Flash plugin for the architecture; for some reason they don't just compile the thing on a PPC to make the community of Linux PPC users happy.

My next goal is to get MacOnLinux working. This lets you boot up MacOS X *INSIDE* LinuxPPC. Should be fun!

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As they say on slashdot...

Submitted by Julio Capote (not verified) on Sat, 2005-07-02 09:48.

This post is useless without pictures. =)

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Oh wow, pictures!

Submitted by Zorin on Sat, 2005-07-02 12:20.

Wow, pictures of:

  • A KDE desktop (we all know what this looks like)
  • The kernel booting (ditto)
  • Firefox running under Linux (ditto)
  • The uname -a (I can give you that right here: Linux nala 2.6.10-1.ydl.1custom #2 Fri Jul 1 12:36:21 EDT 2005 ppc ppc ppc GNU/Linux)
  • My face when I'm all pissed off that I can't boot the thing over the network-- Hmm, okay, you got me there, you wouldn't know what that looks like. };)

Heh...

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Ok, ok... how about pics of J

Submitted by Treppiede (not verified) on Wed, 2005-07-06 21:01.

Ok, ok... how about pics of John all pissed off because of the corruption problem when the G4 goes to sleep? }:oD

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Aiee!

Submitted by Zorin on Thu, 2005-07-07 09:18.

Yep, happened yesterday. Remember that picture in the screensaver slideshow that was all hosed up? After a reboot it was fine! So the problem was indeed a corrupted version of it in cache.

It's kind of poetic in a way...

Afterall, the machine is named Nala, corrupts memory silently.. and I can just hear it laughing at me...

I need a new laptop. Anyone want to buy a.. slightly used... G4? }:)

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