Yellow Dog Linux, they know PPC

After many go rounds with various Linux distros and failed installs on the old clamshell iBook, it seems I may have found a winning solution.

Yellow Dog Linux after all?

The first thing I learned: when burning a Linux ISO disk image, burn it at a SLOW speed with GOOD CD-R media! I had been using THAT’S brand CD-R media in Japan. It’s the best of all, but harder to get in the USA. Memorex seems to be Ok. And now I’m burning at 8x instead of the super fast speed. Still, the Ubuntu family seem to have given up on PPC.

All the other distros failed mysteriously or gave me this error:
PCI: Cannot allocate resource region 0 of device 0001:10:18.0
This error apparently is quite common lately for lots of PPC owners. No surprise, most Linux geeks are used to working with Intel machines and probably just copy and paste stuff for PPC. Really, I don’t know, and I don’t want to talk bad about them. It is amazing what they create for everyone.

But it definitely seems that the TerraSoft people who do Yellow Dog Linux know their PPC stuff well! I’m sure the Gentoo and other distros work, but you have to know way more stuff than I want to or should need to at this point. Anyway, YDL even had a nice installer to tell me the old clamshell iBook didn’t have enough RAM to do a GUI based installation from the liveCD, but still had a pretty slick and colorful text installer, reminiscent of Intel machines’ BIOS setup screens.

Good stuff so far…

In preparation, I mounted the clamshell iBook’s HD in FireWire Target Disk Mode and wiped it with OS X Disk Utility. This old thing still has a better battery life than lots of new machines so I’m hoping to make it a test bed for Linux as a platform.

The old Dell Latitude I mentioned yesterday? Well, it sure looked good in Kubuntu, but too many of the notebook’s buttons were non-functioning. On a whim I decided to re-install Windows 2000 and run all the updates, and now it’s humming along as a Windows test bed. If nothing else, it’s a great way to test web designs for all the stuff that still has to meet IE 6 as a baseline of bug proofing CSS layouts.