Wednesday, April 12, 2006

A couple good things to say about Ubuntu as well.

As Debian distros go, it's the easiest and fastest to install from an installer CD. Least number of irritating questions about hardware, and I was able to go from boot to go in 60 minutes.

edit: The installer seems smarter in some cases than the liveCD when it comes to detecting hardware. Older iMacs have a few distinctly different hardware configurations/chipsets than later G4/G5s, but they're IMO the most likely PPC candidates for Ubuntu and detection of their hardware should be a higher priority than comments to the effect of "well, they'll all be dead in a few months anyway, why bother."

In particular, booting an Ubuntu liveCD on an older iMac means having to CTRL-ALT-F1 to stop the X server, edit xorg.conf to change the horiz/vert sync settings, and manually restart the display manager.

Once you're there, if your network card wasn't detected properly, you have no eth0 at all. You'll have to drop down into the kernel's /modules/devices/net directory, guess which .ko to insmod, and then dhclient to rebuild the network devices before you can so much as ping your router.

Insofar as a liveCD is supposed to A) impress people with your platform and B) predict whether a given computer can run that distro, this is short-sighted to say the least.