I always try to convince my family to use Linux, and when I found my Mum wanted to get her old Apple PowerBook G4 refurbished, I decided to commandeer it to install Linux.

There are several excellent reasons to get your family in to Linux. But for me one excellent reason was because my Mum researches design for all. A methodology that enables technology to be used by anyone, including the disabled and the elderly. I felt it was important for her to experience Linux.

Tools

PowerBook G4

The PowerBook is a 15" G4 built in late 2004 which means it was one of the range that attempted to set fire to itself. But it's a 5 year old machine with a 2 year old battery, so it is pretty good as far as laptops go, just a bit slow. Perfect Linux material.

Linux

Since the G4 is one of the original PowerPC chips, I had to choose the PPC edition of what ever distro I wanted. I am a fan of Ubuntu, so I wanted to choose that, but I was told my Mum may prefer Mandriva since it is more 'Windows' like. However I could not find a Mandriva PPC edition newer than 2005.

Finding an Ubuntu PPC edition wasn't particularly easy either. Google's first link for 'Ubuntu PPC' directs you to a massively out of date link. But it was a good starting point, because after a tiny bit of URL manipulation I got to the Ubuntu Jaunty 9.04 PPC edition download page. This is actually a community supported edition, since Ubuntu gave up supporting PPC processors for 7.04.

Test Installation

I burned the Ubuntu PPC CD using the Mac, and dropped it in to a slightly newer 12" G4 I have lying around. Amazingly enough it booted to the Live version no problem. You have to hold down the C key when you power-on to boot to CD -- you can let go when you start to see Linux prompts.

However when I popped it in to this slightly older machine that it was actually going to be installed on, the kernel error'd with:
radeonfb 0000:00:10.0: Invalid ROM contents
it then put up a black screen with light patches at the bottom and wouldn't go any further.

Hitting Google for a few minutes came up with a link that suggested I use the live-nosplash kernel command, and success! I got to a desktop.

The only problem here was that the wireless didn't work. But I plugged an Ethernet cable in and kept going. I figured I would fix the wireless problem once Ubuntu was actually installed.

Backing Up and Shrinking

Now at this point, I need to say my Mum wanted me to not lose any of her data if possible. So I went to the Ubuntu install program but the partitioning part didn't offer me anything about shrinking. I went all over the net trying to find a solution, I ended up at the PPC version of the LinuxOutlaws favourite System Rescue CD. But it's about as old as the computer, and would not allow me to shrink a journalled HFS+ partition.

This is where I went back in to the original OSX installation and decided to backup files via scp to my NAS (man I love Unix, this process was so easy). Whilst doing this I found a forum post that said they shrunk their HFS+ partition using the Ubuntu Live CD. Feeling a bit of an idiot (and after finishing copying everything), I booted back in to the Live CD and started gParted. Bingo. Well... not quite, it was a very long Bingo. About 2 hours of shuffling sectors around. I managed to shrink the HFS+ partition from the near full hard-disk size of 75GB to 60GB and gave myself about 15GB for my full Ubuntu installation (including swap and everything).

Goodbye Live CD

After checking OSX still booted and worked, I went back to the Live CD for a final time and hit install on the desktop. This is a painless process I'm sure many of you are familiar with. The only change I made is to select Keyboard Macintosh. Without it the " key and @ key are in the wrong place.

An hour later the installation was complete.

On rebooting I noticed one small problem. The boot-loader asks you what you want to boot in to. Linux (represented by a keypress of L) or OSX (represented by a keypress of X). Except the L is lowercase L and could easily be a numeric 1, which I would expect more people to need to press.

Anyway, it booted up fine, and since I had my network cable still in, it immediately picked up all the updates I needed, including asking me if I would like to install the drivers for the wireless card. Perfect!

Completing The Setup

After fiddling around with the appearance I made it look all pretty, and even found a way to get Compiz working, although it became extremely unstable and I disabled it.

Of course this PowerBook only has one click button and no multi-touch. There are plenty of solutions on the web to help you, but I found the simplest solution is to go in to the accessibility options and enable a timed secondary click when you hold down the mouse button.

Conclusion

There are a couple of things to note here. Of course the magic SysRq restart command doesn't work because there is no SysRq on the keyboard, I cannot find a solution to this. I expect there is one, but I can't find it.

Compiz is unreliable at best, and generally the system seems a bit more flaky than on my EeePC. For example the GUI Synaptic manager regularly crashes, locking you out of the database.

Hopefully those are issues are ones my Mum will never meet. If I'm going to administer this PowerBook now, I will most likely do it remotely.

Anyway, I love the fact that I have done something so difficult, so easily, and I hope my Mum can get used to all the changes, see if she can recommend anything to improve Ubuntu and Gnome.