Reed’s Blog

I recently installed Debian Linux on an Apple iBook G3. In the interest of helping the Linux community I’m posting my experience with Linux on this laptop and how to improve yours.

I started by downloading and burning the stable Debian 4.0 installer to a CD. Turned the iBook on and held down the option key to show a choice of boot-able media.

After installing here is what worked and what didn’t:

• Airport wireless card, fully functional right away, Great!

• Screen: 640×480 by default, fixable.
• Keyboard: Fully functional
• Trackpad: Fully functional
• Sound: Didn’t work right away
• Built in Mic: Didn’t work right away
• CD Drive: the SONY CD-RW CRX800E was fully functional right out of the box

As for the screen I was able to fix it to display at 1024×768 by reconfiguring xorg by running “dpkg-reconfigure xserver-xorg” as root.

I’m glad the Airport wireless card worked right away

I got the sound working by running alsa-conf as root.

The Built in Mic didn’t work right away and I have no plans for getting it working. Mostly because the only thing I really use a microphone for is Skype, and there is no PPC version of Skype.

Overall I think Debian is great and an excellent choice for the iBook G3.

Mozilla has officially released Firefox 3 Release Candidate 1.
See the Release Notes and Known Issues or just get Firefox 3 RC1.

Xubuntu is a GNU/Linux distro.  If you don’t know what GNU/Linux is prepare to be very lost.

A friend wanted a CD of GNU/Linux to try out recently.  I burned them a copy of Xubuntu to try out.  Before I gave it to them I tried it myself by installing it on an old PC.  It was much faster than Ubuntu.  I am not saying that Ubuntu is bloated, just that it requres more to run.  I really like Xubuntu because it is much faster.  It does not include fancy transitions when you alt-tab to other applications like Vista or Ubuntu.  Although you can disable those fancy transitions.   Xubuntu does seem somewhat like Ubuntu for Apple people.  More Mac keyboard shortcuts seemed to work than Ubuntu.  I like Xubuntu a lot and it has replaced Ubuntu for me.