Tuesday, January 01, 2008
Put that old laptop to good use
What happens when a geek gets some vacation time and has an old laptop sitting around? Hmmmm.Some time ago I bought an Apple PowerBook "Pismo" off eBay and actually spent some additionally money on it to beef up the CPU (to a G4), a combo drive, and new batteries. It ran MacOS X Tiger just fine for the past year or so, but I finally decided to gut it and install Linux on it. Oh what fun...
First, Linux has really matured into a stable desktop environment with notable distributions ("distro") such as Ubuntu, Fedora, and Yellow Dog. Of course, the Pismo is a PowerPC machine so that limited the choices out there. I finally decided on Ubuntu as I've heard many good things about it (plus it has cool version names, e.g. Gutsy Gibbon).
The installation process wasn't too bad. I downloaded the .iso image, burned it onto CD, and booted with it. It detected just about all the hardware, but there was a problem with the display. A few searches on ubuntuforums.org revealed the fix (includes Linux shell commands) and the next step was getting the wireless connectivity going.
Be warned! Ubuntu does NOT like WPA-enabled WLANs. After hours of trying to get WPA to work, I gave up and "downgraded" my WLAN to WEP encryption plus MAC filtering. Once I configured Ubuntu for WEP, everything was great!
The other complaint I have is Adobe Flash support, but that's Adobe's fault for not respecting PowerPC systems. Thankfully there's an open source player called Gnash which sorta-kinda works. If all you need is a Web browser, word processor, simple games, IM client, etc. then have no fear in making the Linux move, especially when you have an old system lying around...
posted by eugene at 2:24 AM
2 Comments:
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Edward said...
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It most likely the hardware not supporting WPA rather than Ubuntu itself. :)
- 1/03/2008 01:16:00 PM
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said...
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WPA connectivity worked fine under Mac OS X, so that's why I suspected Ubuntu. Or perhaps Ubuntu's implementation of the AirPort (original) driver.
- 1/03/2008 02:38:00 PM
