Persistence? or Stupidity? iBook and Ubuntu Saga Continues

Yoda would say, “Persistent are you! Mmm!” And he’d be right. (she?) I finally seem to have found a way to get the Ubuntu installer to run on this old iBook! I tried all the easily available ISO’s. Burned them at slow speeds. But the one thing I hadn’t really done was try for the ‘text-based’ install. Trouble is, it’s not available on their current crop of live CD’s as an option at yaboot’s boot prompt. Through random trial and error and lots of semi-successful Googling, I found an answer that works (so far, installer is still going).

Download the “ubuntu-6.10-alternate-powerpc.iso”. Put it in the CD tray of the clamshell iBook, press the power button to turn it on and hold the C key on the keyboard until you see the often intimidating text screen! Don’t be afraid. At the prompt that says “boot” you just type install-powerpc !!!
And press enter!

You may still see this error at some point: PCI: Cannot allocate resource region 0 of device 0001:10:18.0 Others ask about it online, nobody seems to have an answer that shows up on Google.

Either way the installation will take place, with plenty useable colored text screens that look more like BIOS screens on windows, but nicer.

We’ll see in a while what happens with it…