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Thinking about changing Powerbook OS to ubuntu

S

sim667

macrumors 65816
Original poster
Dec 7, 2010
1,390
2,915
SO i've got a well old powerbook (7 years-ish) and ive upgraded the OS as much as I can, but it still seems to run slow and my ram usage is almost maxed out permanently, (1 GB of ram). I dont want to upgrade the ram as its not really worth spending money on it, and the battery lasts 10 mins from a full charge anyway.

I dont really use it for much more than web browsing, but i can tell the poor old thing is struggling.

Would it be worth changing the OS to ubuntu on this machine to try and get it to run a little bit quicker? Im not sure if ubuntu runs well on PPC machines, but I'd certainly read up about it before doing it.

Does anyone else have experience of running a single boot ubuntu powerbook?
 
adcx64

adcx64

macrumors 65816
Nov 17, 2008
1,270
124
Philadelphia
Ubuntu on a PPC Mac is TERRIBLE! There is a huge lack of driver support and it is unbearably slow. I do not reccomend it. I think Tiger (10.4) is your best bet, along with tenfourfox, it will be fine for browsing.
 
SuperJudge

SuperJudge

macrumors 6502
Apr 2, 2008
449
5
The Triangle, NC
See discussion here.

On the whole, Linux ain't what it used to be. Mainstream distros are no longer the lightweight breath life into old hardware magic bullets that they once were, especially not with PPC hardware. Debian on PPC is pretty good for most things as is Yellow Dog, but you'll have to wrestle with drivers for wireless and you'll probably never get the power management stuff to work right (sleep and hibernate won't work right and your battery life will suffer significantly). I doubt that it's worth it for most people.
 
L

lbmontez

macrumors member
Jun 12, 2011
30
0
Texas
Actually, I used Ubuntu on my PowerBook G4 for forever and it ran great...I just didn't care for Linux much. Pretty snappy though, more so than the 10.3.9 that's installed on it now.
 
S

sim667

macrumors 65816
Original poster
Dec 7, 2010
1,390
2,915
Ah thats handy to find that out....... i wont bother then..... I've been live booting ubuntu to try it out.... Ive got a PC i can stick it on so ill see how it runs on that. Ive not really used linux distros much before.

Thanks for the warnings guys.
 
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