Monday, September 24, 2007

Modernized iMac redux

Long story short: the single mom for whom I rebuilt an iMac as a Dapper Kubuntu box no longer needs it (she inherited a 17" iBook) and gave it to me to do with as I saw fit.

I reformatted it as a Feisty Ubuntu box to see if the experiment was still worth doing. Remember, this is a souped iMac with a G4 and half a gig RAM. Its video card isn't worth writing home about, but hopefully that shouldn't be an issue. If the experiment is a success, the iMac is going up on the local freecycle.

Getting it to a desktop-friendly state post-install consisted of the usual PPC hurdle: multimedia support. Fortunately in the time since the last install of April 2006, the PPCcodecs package was written to complement w32codecs, Gnash became a viable product, and IBM updated their PPC JVM to 1.50. As of this writing, it goes without saying that an Ubuntu install should include adding Medibuntu repositories, and especially so for non-x86 architectures. Helix is still not ready as a total replacement solution for the 2005 RealPlayerGold PPC release, so I ended up using RPG10.5 instead with good results.

Ubuntu's conception of what makes a good baseline desktop is close, but not close enough IMHO. I added Inkscape to complement GIMP, and GnuCash because it should be included with any desktop-oriented distro. If it's good, it deserves more attention, and if it's mediocre, it deserves enough attention to pester the developers to improve it. VLC is the Swiss Army knife of multimedia.

With these packages installed, I set the machine to upgrade itself to the most recent Gutsy, for a few reasons. One, it pushes the envelope on what this Mac can and cannot do, but more importantly it will highlight some possibly incorrect assumptions on the part of the Ubuntu developers. Feisty does not correctly detect networking on boot with some PPC machines, because they changed out some packages; I'd like to see if Gutsy fixes this. Gutsy by default uses Compiz/Beryl; this iMac is incapable of desktop effects and I want to see if the installer is smart enough to detect it and drop back to regular desktop compositing. Gutsy by default includes a PDF printer device; the libraries necessary to do this in Feisty are deprecated.

Unfortunately for me, Gutsy (even three weeks from the official deployment date) is not ready for primetime on PPC:
  1. The kernel no longer recognizes all IDE drives by default. initram-fs/module had to be amended to modprobe ide_core and initramfs rebuilt to boot the HD
  2. a core mathematics library (used by Sound control panel) which prior to Gutsy recalled that G3s don't have AltiVec was carelessly rewritten to assume AltiVec. It had to be downgraded to the previous version.
  3. Special and foreign keyboards are reporting all kinds of recognition problems.
  4. Wired network still not being detected on startup.
I'm reinstalling Feisty and waiting for favorable reports from PPC Ubuntu users. Longterm, support for PPC has issues:
  • Kernel developers appear to be working with late-model equipment and ignoring/forgetting about first-generation NewWorld hardware specs. From a company where the CEO has an iMac on his desktop, this is either troubling or amusing.
  • Applet technologies are increasingly not being serviced by their vendors but open-source cloners. While this shouldn't be an issue for the world of GNU/Linux, installation is not always trivial.
  • Multimedia support seems to be becoming more complicated than it was in Dapper.
IBM has a vested interest in supporting Linux on PPC, even if they've functionally ended their relationship with non-Cell desktop PPC architecture. One of Debian's strengths is that it serves most architectures no matter how arcane they are. Ubuntu, OTOH, is a business and I can grudgingly understand their need to focus support on live desktop architectures (although ruling out ARM is probably a mistake). It may sound like dogma, but it's a strength to support multiple architectures.

Conclusions: installing Feisty is not a bad move on this Mac. However, upgrading to Gutsy is a wait and see situation given the number of balls dropped.