Installĭownload The Ubuntu 10.04 PPC iso and burn it to a CD.
A few hours of work and it produces a nice stable machine you don’t have to mess with. Also had the screen flicker problem though not as frequent as Debianĭepending on how much time you invest you can get any of these distributions working well, but the fastest and easiest setup for mine is using Ubuntu 10.04. I haven’t had the time to redo this install and didn’t back it up. I got mine setup and dialed in after about 30 hours of work, used it for quite a while and the hard drive went out. Gentoo for PPC - Awesome distro but it takes forever and a week to set up. If you have a lot of time it will probably get you a good setup, but I got frustrated cleaning up errors. You could switch to a new terminal to fix it, but it’s annoying.įreeBSD for PPC - This is a well reviewed option for PPC machines, but I just couldn’t get it working properly and didn’t have the patience for it.
(Thanks Marc!)ĭebian PPC - This distro works very well but some software doesn’t update, the system clock has problems and there is a screen flicker / blank out problem that drove me nuts. He’s been doing more work in this space than I have recently. Update: Diego Asturias has published a list of The Best PowerPC Linux Distros that’s more up to date, you should check that out. Other distributions of Linux/Unix are available for the PPC platform as well. I couldn’t find any compelling advantages to the newer distributions but if you choose to install one of them the instructions should be the same. I also despise the Unity interface no matter how much they improve it.
As I have opined in the past I feel 10.04 is a very stable version of Ubuntu and not too bloated or buggy. What version of Linux am I using and why?įor my machine I chose Ubuntu 10.04.
Every software package is ancient because Using Linux will get you into a more modern environment. Even with everything updated simple things like checking Gmail or Facebook are nearly impossible. Running an old version of OSX leopard in 2013 just doesn’t make sense. Do you want to breathe life back into your old PowerBook or PowerPC machine? Want some modern software on it? In this tutorial I’ll show how you can put Ubuntu Linux on a PowerBook G4 and resurrect one of these durable old laptops from the dead.