What OS for my ibook G4

[Zahne]

I had my laptop fixed a little while ago. The guys at Apple warned me that the repair people tend to erase the HDD when they send it back. In anticipation, I removed all my files etc. Sure enough I found that they did indeed erase my drive. I was glad to think ahead, I was even happier to find that they put Leopard on it considering I only had Tiger on it before.

I thought a free license of Leopard would be awesome. I thought wrong. On this 1.42 ghz PPC and only 512 RAM it is running quite slow. Leopard is quite memory intensive and I believe it is the source of my slow computer syndrome. I run very little on it so I can't imagine what else it may be.

I was wondering, would having Ubuntu or one of it's related distros run a bit faster? I really only use this machine for word processing and internet. Will Ubuntu bring my ibook back to the speed it was at when it was running Tiger? Or perhaps better?

Also, I actually do use the ibook for one more use. And that's syncing my iCal with my iTouch. Can I sync my iTouch with a calendar program on Ubuntu? Or Linux distro for that matter?

[mkvnmtr]

For very little money you can get a 1Gb stick of ram and see a world of difference. That being said I run Ubuntu 8.04 on my G4 Ibook and am quite happy with it. I can do a lot more stuff than I could on Mac. The speed is ok about like OSX 10,3,9 that was on it when it was new 5 years ago. I did install the ram and it helped a lot on the Mac system also.

[TreeHugger52]

I agree, you may fix your problem with a relatively cheap ram upgrade. Ubuntu is likely to run quickly on your hardware, but you could also check out some other Linux distributions that were designed to run lighter, and thus faster, on older hardware. You could try Xubuntu, Puppy, Damn Small, Vector Linux... (there are lots of them). Check out www.distrowatch.com or do some googling. There's a distro out there for you. Be sure to look for distros with ppc installers.

[Zahne]

Thanks for the help!!