Finally, a New OS for the old iBook!

Finally, I found the new OS for the old iBook. It was kind of under my nose the whole time. Ubuntu with its Gnome was working, but not well. The monitor’s profile was way wrong with no GUI method of adjusting it. Not to mention the UI was slow as sin. Tried installing every available PPC ISO for Linux. Nothing worked. Most of them were going to blank screens after bootstrapping the system. I noticed that the ones that worked also didn’t detect the LCD’s max dimensions correctly, and the ones that did install (Ubuntu and YDL) had 1024 x 768 flagged to on by default in the installer. Well, that’s all fine and well, but when it starts, it will default to the largest size in the configuration files, not the largest the screen can do. Consequently, most of those installers probably work well on most PPC Macs, but not on the clamshell iBooks. Well, they may install, but you’ll never get to see anything. Sure there are hacks to fix that, but it’s not worth it. Installers should be smarter.

So I went with Darwin! I know, it’s basically OSX, but without the GUI. That’s fine. It should be a little snappier than Panther was on that thing anyway. I’m interested in trying Darwin with Gnome or KDE to see how it does. There’s always X11 too! That little old blue and white workhorse may be useful yet! The only sad thing is, many of the scripting languages are badly installed or out of date, so I’ll have some time to spend getting it up to snuff.