Ubuntu Productivity

Hypothesis

Ubuntu 7.10 looks interesting, but it cannot replace Mac OS X as my primary operating system.

Experiment

I did not want to break my main desktop computer, so I first tried Ubuntu 7.10 on my 17″ 1.25 GHz G4 Powerbook. At that time the Power PC (PPC) version of Ubuntu was already officially unsupported, but the Ubuntu PPC community was very active so I gave it a go.

Despite having never played with Linux (except for using Yellow Dog Linux for 10 minutes about 6 years ago) the download, burning of the boot disk, and install went rather well. Everything worked up to and until I booted the laptop off its own hard-drive. It would not boot at all. I hit a black screen.

Some diligent searching through the Ubuntu forums turned up the solution and in a few moments I was booting (after entering some command-line commands to get around the bug.) From here I had to fix the wireless and a few other odds and ends that did not work out-of-the-box.

Result

Ubuntu worked ok. Not great. Many things from the wireless card to the sound did not work at all. Other things were flaky. I had to search the Ubuntu Forums, ask questions, try some shell scripts, and ended up breaking as much as I fixed. But in the end I learned alot about how Linux works.

Given the bugs and weirdness of the PPC version I was inclined to believe that Ubuntu itself was buggy and not worth my time. But I realized that it is not Ubuntu, but only the PPC port of Ubuntu. While the PPC port of Ubuntu will not work as a primary operating system I am inclided to believe that the Intel (x86) version will work.

So now its on to experiment #2.