[crolinux]

Hi... Chris from DC Here... just getting antsy in the Nation's capital and saw my friends dormant ibook g3 tangerine clamshell.

I thought to myself, if I could load Damn Small Linux to a 333Mhz 64MB RAM IBM computer I should be able to load Debian to this trendy but old powerPC laptop... trackpad mouse and durable.

The only reason I've been able to load linux to any computer is because installation of the OS is seemingly simple as it was to load DOS and Windows 3.1 to 386SX's or Windows 95 to 486DX's and Pentium I's at 90Mhz.

So I downloaded and installed Debian on the iBook G3 333Mhz 128Mb RAM. I ran into a ghost-like problem with the video... something was wrong... top portion of screen was scrambled... when you open windows, whats inside was distorted. This only happened after the second boot, third, fourth... reinstall, boot, boot... reinstall and boot.

Finally on the last reinstall and subsequent boots, the display is not distorted.

Not sure why???

I used a forum thread >>
http://www.linuxforums.org/forum/lin...-ibook-g3.html

and played around with the xorg.conf file changing the video depth from 24 to 16. The video seems to display faster now and it still has distorted!

ANOTHER PROBLEM [ NETWORK SETTINGS ]

When I am in the console mode... I get a message popping up every few minutes changing the protocol on the ethernet from 10bt to 100bt. It says something like 'eth0: switching to forced 10bt'

I don't see errors when the Gnome GUI is running... can you tell me why this is happening and how to prevent it as I think its slowing down surfing on the internet and downloads time.

ANOTHER MORE IMPORTANT PROBLEM

I only have 128MB of RAM on this clamshell iBook... not much especially considering when the Gnome environment is running it's using half of this!?!? 62 MB RAM

Is there other GUI environments I could use ontop of Debian... which one is the lightest?? And how does one remove the old and install the new??

Peace and thanks ahead!
Chris in DC

[techieMoe]

Originally Posted by crolinux

So I downloaded and installed Debian on the iBook G3 333Mhz 128Mb RAM. I ran into a ghost-like problem with the video... something was wrong... top portion of screen was scrambled... when you open windows, whats inside was distorted. This only happened after the second boot, third, fourth... reinstall, boot, boot... reinstall and boot.

Just to cover all the basics, did you make sure to download the PowerPC version of Debian? I assume you did since I'm not sure an Intel version would even boot... but it doesn't hurt to confirm.

I only have 128MB of RAM on this clamshell iBook... not much especially considering when the Gnome environment is running it's using half of this!?!? 62 MB RAM

Is there other GUI environments I could use ontop of Debian... which one is the lightest?? And how does one remove the old and install the new??

Yes, there are much lighter environments than GNOME. Some popular ones are Xfce, Fluxbox, FVWM, and OpenStep just off the top of my head. Blackbox is nice too, although like Fluxbox it's very minimalistic. The upside is that either of those use very, very little RAM (approx 1MB for blackbox).

[crolinux]

yes... it was the power pc port of debian that Iinstalled.
thank you for recommending those lighter GUI's. the question follows... now that I have Gnome, what do I need to do to get, lets say Fluxbox, and make that my default boot environment?

[parkie]

Hmm i run ubuntu gnome and kde on my g3 ibook, with 3d effects enabled. and Stuff and its running fine!, But i heard rumors about ubuntu screwing up laptop hdd's and i really don;t want that to happen, so i am moving to suse. But yeah it worked fine for me So i am unsure of what happened with yours.

[rezwits]

My Debian (etch) install to an iBook 466 MHz did the same thing to the video.