Arch Linux

signor_rossi

Member

Registered: 2007-08-24

Posts: 257

Arch Linux for an old iBook G4 or better Ubuntu?

I am thinking to put Linux on an old PPC iBook G4 1,2GHz, I simply can't adjust to OSX usability-wise (this happens too :-) ).
But I am unsure which one to pick. I am almost certain that Arch is faster than Ubuntu (it is so on my main latptop) and I am ready to invest quite some time for the installation, but maintenance should be not that time-intensive and most of all, and this is a k.o. criteria, Suspend-to-RAM has to work flawlessy and battery-consumption shoudln't be twice as high (you get what I mean) as under OSX in Linux.
Can anybody with experience share it with me?
Thanks.

.:B:.

Forum Fellow

Registered: 2006-11-26

Posts: 5,819

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Re: Arch Linux for an old iBook G4 or better Ubuntu?

What bogs down Ubuntu are the tons of services it starts for 'userfriendliness' and stuff. I'm sure you can trim down Ubuntu and get it to run and boot quite fast if you want to. I surely wouldn't go with Gnome or KDE - and nowadays even Xfce seems quite heavy to me...

If you want to try Arch, there's ArchPPC, but I have no clue how up to date it is.

http://www.archlinuxppc.org/

There has been a fairly recent news announcement.

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signor_rossi

Member

Registered: 2007-08-24

Posts: 257

Re: Arch Linux for an old iBook G4 or better Ubuntu?

I think I will have to try things out to really see what is better. ;-)
But I actually wanted to use the KDE netbook shell of plasma (I use KDE on my laptop too) on the iBook and if I stay with Arch (I will investigate what packages are currently available for PPC and see if it is enough for what I need the iBook for) I am sure that I can trim down everything so that it stays fast. As for trimming down Ubuntu, I think on an update I will have the services restarted again and is generally not that easy, since the dependencies are quite broad in it for packages.
Thanks.

DaNiMoTh

Member

Registered: 2006-06-10

Posts: 260

Re: Arch Linux for an old iBook G4 or better Ubuntu?

We're trying to stay up2date with archlinux86. I'm actually wrinting from a KDE4.4.3, lastest X.org, lastest openoffice, etc. Please note we're the only provinding this (except for gentoo.. but you need to compile all things)

doorknob60

Member

Registered: 2008-09-29

Posts: 403

Re: Arch Linux for an old iBook G4 or better Ubuntu?

For a PPC I recommend Debian, or Ubuntu, but that may be a little slow (a server installation and building from scratch Ubuntu would be fast though). I've used both (on PS3...I guess that counts ) and they both worked and have nice, complete repos (for the most part, doesn't have Flash and Java and some stuff like that. Java you need to install from IBM last time I checked and Flash you need to use Gnash or something)

drcouzelis

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From: Connecticut, USA

Registered: 2009-11-09

Posts: 4,092

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Re: Arch Linux for an old iBook G4 or better Ubuntu?

About six months ago I got a PowerBook G4 from a friend and installed Arch Linux PPC on it. It was an interesting learning experience.

Although many packages are available through pacman, I ended up using the ABS to install a lot of software that wasn't provided. I got into problems where something I installed through the ABS didn't match with the version of another package I installed through pacman, and the whole situation was pretty confusing and time consuming. Because I just wanted to use the laptop as a simple way to sit on the sofa or in bed and browse the internet, I don't think Arch Linux was a good choice.

More recently, I installed Debian Lenny (stable) on it for another friend to use for email and writing documents. It was a good experience. It was easy to install and setup, and of course is very stable and has a lot of software available for it.

Mardok

Member

Registered: 2010-04-30

Posts: 6

Re: Arch Linux for an old iBook G4 or better Ubuntu?

For PowerPC, I've tried Ubuntu, Gentoo, and Arch.

Ubuntu is okay, but I've had horrible problems with their Xorg drivers.  It may differ from person to person.

Gentoo was pretty fun to use for a while, but my machine is too old for compiling (everything) nowadays, the filesystem superblock got screwed up, and then mac-fdisk stopped working for whatever reason.  It got really frustrating after a while and I didn't feel like messing with it anymore.  I stuck with Gentoo more than other distributions because I already had a huge stiffy for Gentoo as it was.

As for Arch, I love being able to build everything from scratch so I know exactly what's on it.  However, I miss Portage's extensive list of applications.  Gentoo is the only distro I can think of that supports Grub2 for PowerPC.  The up-side, however, is no compiling times. 

Arch still needs work on their PPC releases, but when it comes to old PowerPC machines, I'd say Arch is probably the best way to go because I absolutely love rolling release distributions and Arch is slightly faster (from my own experience) than other distro's, except for Gentoo (when I'm not compiling).

signor_rossi

Member

Registered: 2007-08-24

Posts: 257

Re: Arch Linux for an old iBook G4 or better Ubuntu?

Thanks for all the additional feedback, wasn't here for quite some time. As things stand I still haven't tried any Linux distribution on this old G4, the reason being that it's CD-drive is broken, damn. I have an external firewire drive for it, but had trouble getting the machine to boot from it and due to limited time I have atm for such things I postponed the whole 'experiment'. Will still try it some time, though, as I really don't like OSX. ;-)