Thursday, February 28, 2008

Installing Ubuntu on an iMac G3


While surfing Craigslist the other day I came across an old Blueberry iMac G3 with a 266 mhz processor, 64mb of RAM and huge 5 gb hard drive; but the best part of this was that it was $30. For that price I would have been a fool not buy it. I got it home started it up and thought that $30 was way too high. The OS was slow and the most recent browser that you could download was Netscape 5. Oops. So what was I supposed to do with this behemoth.


Well that's when the experimentation began. I download the alternate CD version of Xubuntu an official derivative of Ubuntu using the xfce desktop environment and burned the image to a CD. I did this several time because the boot disk was bad each time. I finally got a working copy by burning it at the slowest speed allowable. The install was a very slow process it took around two hours for the install to complete. But what a wonderful sight to see the boot up work and Xubuntu install. I immediately started to download all the educational software that is available since its primary use will be by my 20 month old. (I know its a little early but it was $30) The install was great. The computer runs quick not fast just quick. Quite frankly, I have been overly impressed with the OS. I would highly recommend.

Downfall: Every good thing has something that just doesn't go right. Xubuntu comes with Firefox which is the greatest browser. However, I cannot get a working version of Adobe Flash to install. I have found versions for the x86 just not the PPC processor. Any recommendations would be appreciated. In the spirit of sharing.







2 comments:

Unknown said...

check out gnash... GNU's flash... probably your best bet on getting most flash stuff on your PPC

Reyes said...

check here:

https://wiki.ubuntu.com/PowerPCFAQ