333Mhz Apple PowerBook, complete nooB, which distro?

[LMJ]

It was a freebie I got at a city PC roundup that's ostensibly for them to be repurposed for the underprivaledged, but most of the machines just end up stripped and junked. I'd love to use it as a living room web/chat machine, but it's got an ATi Rage LT Pro that's not supported under OS X. So no watching YouTube vids with X. What would be a good idiotproof Linux distro for this? I already tried an Ubuntu LiveCD that didn't cooperate with the CD drive. It loaded once and crashed after about 15 minutes. Since then, it'll spin down the disc, fail to read, and go into kernel panick every subsequent time I've tried to load it.

I also have a Belkin 802.11G dongle that I strongly believe (based on the ONLY driver it works with under OS X) uses a Ralink RT2500 chipset. I'd love for that to be supported in the distro. Yes, it was a freebie. I at least know better than to buy anything network-related from Belkin.

There's 384MB of memory installed, and about 1GB clear on the internal HD.

I'm an idiot when it come to command lines, but again, all I'll be using is Firefox, OpenOffice.org, and whatever ICQ-compatible chat program comes installed. So what's good for me and that machine?

I'd love to become Linux-proficient in the future, but... Baby steps.

Thanks!

[techieMoe]

Was the Ubuntu disc you chose the PowerPC version?

[LMJ]

Was the Ubuntu disc you chose the PowerPC version?

Yessir. 7.04 Fiesty Fawn, PPC edition.

[techieMoe]

You might try using the Alternate Install CD for PPC.

[LMJ]

You might try using the Alternate Install CD for PPC.

It hangs after detecting network hardware.

Could it be the expansion bay 24X CD-ROM? I haven't had any trouble with it under OS X, but, I can't for the life of me figure out what's going wrong here.

I'm gonna see if I can wrangle a USB cd drive from a friend.