I own an original iMac G5 17″ that I have designated as my production/desktop machine. I’ve been running panther on it for the last two years…until today that is. Since I began using Linux seriously, I have become more and more frustrated by the limitations of OS X. I made attempts at using Fink (package manager) to enhance the UNIX and development tools aspect of the computer with limited success. So last night I organized and scp’d my content onto another box and wiped the disk. I figure if all else fails I’ll have a fresh install of panther to work with.
I burned the live DVD of Kubuntu 6.0.6.1 PPC and gave it a try. To boot from cd (before yaboot is installed) hold down the c key during boot-up. That did the trick on my configuration. The DVD did well until the KDE starting progress dialog when it hung on “Initializing Peripherals”. I had read elsewhere that the live cd had problems and you really had to install it to know if it works.
The install went fine and took less than a half hour. After reboot I found that my wireless keyboard (bluetooth) was not recognized. Not having a USB keyboard handy I made a quick trip Radioshack for a PS/2 to USB converter for the everyday rip-off price of $15.
I found that when i logged in using KDM the system would hang during “Initializing Peripherals” suprise suprise. From my understanding, this problem arrises with KDE on 64bit machines that use Hyperthreading. Fortunatly the computer still worked so I logged into the terminal and thrashed around for a bit. I was unable to find a way to turn off hyperthreading on the iMac and was unable to find a fix for KDE so I installed ubuntu-desktop.
GNOME was the same song second verse. I am going to try a clean install of Ubuntu (without KDE at all) and I’m going to try a few other distros (OpenSUSE, and Slackware most likely). I look forward to posting the follow up to this from my new linux desktop.
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2 responses so far ↓
1 mariuz // Oct 12, 2006 at 04:04
try to download the beta version (edgyeft) , maybe some problems are solved
2 Linux on the iMac, part II « 1 is A, 2 is B // Oct 12, 2006 at 20:31
[...] Thanks to a helpful comment on my last post, I tried the Ubuntu 6.10 Edgy Eft live CD with great success. The live cd worked brilliantly, the install took a half hour, and so far everything is working fine. The only abnormality is ubuntu boot screen (not the gnome boot screen) is a little funky looking. For now I don’t think I will try to install KDE; I have a kubuntu machine already and wouldn’t mind learning more about GNOME. [...]
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