Mac - Ibook G3

[smack]

Has anyone had any luck installing Open Suse, Fedora or Ubuntu on a Mac Laptop, or more specifically on an IBook G3?

I was given an old Mac Ibook G3, but it is very slow primarily because of the OS hogging what little resources there are for the book. I am open to any suggestions, I want it for my kids (5-6 yr old) to play games online.

[clowenstein]

What you need is a Linux distribution made for the PowerPC, the processor used in the Ibook G3. Read about Ubuntu for the PowerPC at ubuntuforums.org.

http:////ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?t=427714

There is also a Debian distribution for PowerPC.

[ryokimball]

I put Ubuntu on a Powerbook G4 for a short amount of time; it worked out-of-the-box except for the touchpad (a USB mouse worked fine, though).

My problem was that the PowerPC architecture seems to be heavily outmoded now. As Clowenstein suggests, you will want to hunt for PowerPC-specific distros or forks . If you are willing to spend the time building it, Arch (Arch Linux PPC) or even Gentoo is still available.

[papageno1951]

I succesfull install ubuntu 10.04 server edition on a iBook clamshell with a minimum hd usage straight from cd installation, and now I-m tweaking to have a minimal xwindows GUI

[super-biscuit]

ryokimball: The POWER architecture is not heavily outmoded. It is still much more efficient than any i386/amd64 processor being developed. Stop and ask yourself, "What is the most popular and used OS and on what architectures does it run?" There is your answer.

Smack: There is also the option of using NetBSD, FreeBSD, and OpenBSD on the machine in question. You may also want to search through DMOZ for other options. Fedora and OpenSUSE require a lot of memory to run. Both have stopped official support for the architecture. The same applies to Ubuntu- Desktop editions only.. Debian, Gentoo, Slackware's Slackintosh, and kit systems such as Arch and ROCK have support. Yellowdog only has support with it's initial release- which means it's outdated for your machine.

[VirtualLinuxUser]

I've never used GNU-Linux on a Mac, so I wouldn't know what the best option is.

The advice given above is good. However, I have something to add : I'd suggest going with Arch if you have some considerable time on your hands and don't mind installing and configuring the things you want from core. (It's not as difficult as it seems ; even I've done it.) If you just want a system installed and aren't too concerned with exactly what you're going to put on your rig, go with Fedora and/ or Yellow Dog. Then again, if you really couldn't give a flying fig, you might as well install boot camp/ parallels and MS Windows.