Trey and Cat

Playing with a Mac

Posted on July 8th, 2006 by Trey.
Categories: life.

So recently I have gotten a burr in my britches to configure a mac for linux.  Now I run debian based linux distributions for my media server, and my laptop for work, but never on a mac.  Also mostly at home, I tend to use windows XP for its sheer gaming capabilities (not to mention Outlook from my exchange server).  So I figured this would take a night or 2 to get configured.

Well I found out a few things rather quickly.  First I started with Fedora Core 5.  It is based off of red hat, so most of the structure was a bit different than my normal setups.  I gave it a good college try installing it on the apple iBook, but there was one major issue.  NO SOUND.  Yeah I loaded all the libraries and checked my configs twice.  I could get it to load the drivers, but not to make noise.

So try number 2.  The next evening I went back to debian based linux and tried Ubuntu 6.06 LTS for PPC.  It worked like a charm.  Everything worked right out of the box using the Gnome desktop.  The only drawback is that I lost sound when switching to KDE.  I got it working and all was good… or so I thought.

One glaring issue with a Mac is lack of support for things that most windows user’s take for granted.  I mean Apple is less than 9% of the computer market, so I can understand developer’s not catering to them (especially if they are running linux).  So the issue?  Flash.  Flash 8 just does not work on PPC.  That is a deal breaker for me, so I guess back to OSX.

OSX is not a bad operating system, don’t get me wrong, but I don’t prefer it over windows or Linux.  Both of those allow a geek like me to do more.  That is all.  Oh well, OSX is pretty, so I guess it will have to do.  Officially the iBook is running OSX 10.4.7 Tiger.

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