Lubuntu 12.10

Well, I prefer Kubuntu for Power PC

I used to have it in my old ibook G3. It was better and everything worked out of the box

 

LXDE is where it's at if you've got an older Mac, I tried Ubuntu and unity was a slide show even on a Dual CPU G5 Xserve. I tried Debian and Gnome 2 is still fairly slow, but usable.

If you want a full featured desktop OS with all the latest web software, Firefox, Thunderbird, transmission, etc (minus flash) VLC and a good range of open source software through Synaptic or the Software Centre then this is where it is at.

You can also try Mint PPC for a similar distro.

 

Tom, how usable is the G3 in everyday use on Lubuntu?

 

Openbox is nice, if a little dated by todays expectations of what a Window Manager should be. It's lightweight and based on the ideas of what Next Step should be as a spiritual successor.

It dates back to about the same time, when Next was still around and there were a few more clones, Openstep, Fluxbox, Afterstep, FVWM, Enlightenment etc... Some of them are around, some of the projects got dissolved. My first Linux install was Redhat 6.0 with Afterstep on PC many years ago now.

If you want to get a feel for what Nextstep might have been like if it were still around try Openbox, or Fluxbox. The good thing about both of them is that they're modular so you can install whatever dock, or menu, or anything else that you would like into it and have it look however you want.

For something lightweight that is OS X like you can try Openbox with Cairo Dock 2D as a dock replacement and Gnome Panel as an Apple Menu replacement that crosses between the OS9 and OS X style Apple menu, or just Gnome panel if you want something more like OS 9. That shouldn't take up to many resources.

The biggest issue I've ever found with Linux on PPC is video card driver support, no, software support or lack there of is not so much the issue. For older video cards there is a real lack of decent video card drivers. The open source drivers really don't provide the hardware support one would expect which makes it a hard platform to use for anything other than software necessity in 2012.

For basic tasks you will still do OK though.

 

I'm running 12.10 on an old C2D ex-Windows PC....It flies, and connects to my network and all Macs too. A great re-use of a machine that was just sitting in a cupboard. I actually advertised it in the MP section, but got no takers..It no lives on a desk in my bedroom..

 

Classilla

Classilla 9.3.1 is out now.

 

XFCE on any GNU/Linux or BSD install..

 

I'm surprised nobody in this thread has mentioned FVWM. It's very easily configurable, can do more than most full-fledged DeskTop Environments, and it's great for multitasking and for tiny screens. I've always wondered how it would perform in Ubuntu as opposed to Debian.

 

I'm very interested to see this, I tried installing 12.10 on my PM over the weekend and (as usual) got a screen error and told to look up how to configure my xorg.conf etc. After some reading I just gave up. Tried the same with MintPPC and actually got a totally black screen, I know it's solvable but I don't have the time or the patience - once it works out the box I'll be the first to play with this as I think Linux is the PPC users future (and I heard it's much faster than OSX).

 

It's easy... learn nano... nano /etc/xorg.conf and makethe changes as per the xorg.conf guides.

 

Yes I know but well I got as far as working out that the 'nouveau' driver probably didnt work on my setup so i would have to use the 'nv' one and make the appropriate changes in the xorg.conf but after seeing nv doesn't support acceleration I didn't bother (whats the point of having a 7800GTX with 512Mb if it can't use acceleration?

 

As I said above really.... As you've learn the hard way, this is the problem of Linux on PPC... Neither Nvidia or ATi (now AMD) have ever released the source code for their drivers and there aren't enough PPC Linux users for them to really care about taking the effort to code PPC binaries for.

I know right... hard task... run make, and then release the binary No can't do it Won't do it....

Once upon a time 3DFX released open source drivers, but they were bought by Nvidia years ago so Nvidia could work out how SLi worked. I doubt even if you had a 3DFX card and the drivers you could get them to work with a modern implementation of Xorg as they were coded for the earlier X11 days.

It is this issue that makes Linux on PPC pretty much a mugs game. Performance would be much better but when you're doing CPU desktop rendering of a modern desktop environment on an obsolete CPU you're going to have a lot of performance issues.

Even my Dual 2.3ghz G5 turned the Unity desktop environment into a slideshow that was unusable.

 

I agree that getting video support Linux is a pain. That applies equally to X86 machines in my experience. But once you have your Xorg file up and running and have a desktop why is acceleration such a big deal? I have used both Linux and FreeBSD on x86 machines and there was no 3D support for my GPUs but that did not much matter to me. I prefer to use something like Openbox which is no frills. What is more important? A working and fast system of flashy Aero Glass "inspired" desktop bling?

Just my two cents.

 

The problem being much like OS X even basic 2D things get some bonus from core image support so a nice GPU helps to some extent with the desktop particularly on heavier desktops such as Unity even Unity 2D.

I guess if you use a lighter desktop environment such as Openbox you can get better performance.

 

You can get 3D acceleration with many ATI cards on PowerPC Macs. Perhaps all, but I haven't tested them all. The radeon driver in the firmware-linux-nonfree package gives decent performance which can be improved by tweaking your xorg.conf file.

Also, everybody hates Unity. Or everybody reasonable, anyway. Openbox + cairo-dock + xfdesktop4 for desktop icons = a desktop pretty close to the Mac with good performance even on old computers.

 

After a long time of lurking these forums, this thread made me want to join up and post.

I can say from experience there are alot of good choices for a Desktop Environment/Window Manager when it comes to Linux on the PowerPC.

KDE - Personally I like KDE the best, outside of taking a little longer to boot into the DE it seems to run pretty well for me on my G4. Blazing fast, which surprised me. Granted I wasn't making it look fancy with any effects or stuff like that. But it ran well and I wasn't disappointed.

LXDE - Very nice for any PPC or low end PC, I install Lubuntu on most custom machines I work on with ram as low as 256MB of ram and it runs great. Its not as customizable, but it also has openbox as a window manager which is nice and lightweight. I assume these would be the same for PPC as it would x86 PCs.

XFCE - Another personal choice, XFCE is slightly more heavy then LXDE, provides more customization but not as much as KDE. Its nice and stable but not as flashy as other DEs

You of course always have the choice of running pure Window Managers if you want, pretty much all are extremely lightweight. Openbox, Fluxbox, IceWM, Window Maker (had to put this one in for lulz), etc. If you really want to go hardcore Linux you can do tiling window managers like Awesome or Xnomad.

I personally hate Gnome 3 and Ubuntu's Unity so I won't even touch on those. nuff said lol.

 

I don't understand the gnome hate, it works OK on a Mac and there is decent enough support for Gnome 2 with Debian stable as well. The only thing that annoys me about Debian stable as opposed to Ubuntu flavors is that the repositories are a little more limited.

 

Note I said Gnome 3, Gnome 2 was great. Gnome 3 just isnt very useable to me. thats all.

 

Gnome 3

is awful, bloody awful. It could be the death of Gnome. Maybe Cinammon will save it, in some form.

For lowend machines, Enlightenment is REALLY where its really at. e17 will runwell on a very low spec PC, Bohdi says 128 mb of ram and a 300 mhz processor. I've seen e16 running on 200 mhz Pentium MMX machine with as little as 32 mb of RAM. No, I am being serious. Here is proof:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=956ExGBAHhA

 

Nice... All of this makes me want to give this another go with my G5 running something lightweight like that with Cairo Dock/Gnome bar except then I would need another machine for my iTunes server.