Ubuntu on iBook G4

People must think I am going gaga; I have installed Ubuntu on every different CPU architecture I have laid my hands on, and now on my Macbook G4!

Mac Zealots won’t be pleased. But, don’t you worry - the Mac OSX image is still living somewhere in the system. Unfortunately Ubuntu isn’t as efficient in power utilisation as the Mac OSX is on the iBook G4: the machine gets hotter much quicker and you can hear the fan whirring at a much more regular interval.

So I’ve got Ubuntu/Xubuntu living in various incarnations now; on an UltraSparc, PowerPC, x86 and AMD64 (ok, I’ve double counted if you consider 64-bit as a variant of the x86 architecture ;)

Before I get labelled an Ubuntu zealot, I need to clear the air a little. I’ve installed Linux because it has plenty of development tools that a software developer needs; and Ubuntu because it’s an easy distro for installation. Still I’m no less impressed by the vast amount of hardware Linux supports.

I certainly think Linux takes the crown for being an ubiquitous OS, in spite of being driven by a purely free software development movement - remember that nobody gets paid to do this, and yet people are generous enough to donate code and effort to make this all happen. The irony in this, is that it is exactly of Linux’s free nature that makes supporting so many different hardware possible in the first place.

Related Posts: It’s Alive! (Linux on UltraSparc)