Hi all,

the question pretty much in the topic title.

I have a 2004 Powerbook Alu with 1.33GHz PowerPC G4 processor and 768MB of RAM (the model in left column here : http://support.apple.com/kb/SP83 ), whose hard drive is in the process of dying (gives SMART errors). Instead of trying to replace it with a new drive (not for the faint of heart on this model ^^) I'd like to use a Live CD/USB Linux distro, iow one that boots from CD/USB and uses the RAM as a "disk" to operate from (ideally it would use the usb thumbdrive to even save data e.g. config file during a session, but I'm not there yet).

Initially I had to burn CD's to boot from, slow and painful (CD/DVD drive issue I think), but now I'm able to "burn" (on my desktop PC) a thumbdrive with any ISO image containing a Linux distro and boot from it on my Powerbook ( usb drive even recognized as bootable with ALT/OPTION key at boot time, don't have to fiddle with O/F, nice ! )

(for those interested, I'm using this command in a Win7 terminal to do it : >dd if=Ubuntu_distro.iso of=\\.\j: bs=1M )

With that I can boot my PB with Ubuntu and Lubuntu distro's, however never able to get thru to a normal GUI situation :

- Ubuntu 12.04 -> boot freezes, I have to add "nouveau.modeset=0" to the boot command to get thru to the GUI, however colours are totally messed up it's a psychedelic pixel soup, just unusable

- Lubuntu 12.10 -> I get the Lubuntu splash screen, but at some point boot freezes; went to single user, added "single snd-powermac.blacklist=yes nouveau.modeset=0" as suggested in the PowerPC FAQ/KnownIssues, this gets me a little further in the boot process but still not up to the GUI, I'm getting an error message with "b43-open/ucode5.fw not found" in it...

Any suggestion on how to get thru a complete Live install of whatever version or flavour of Linux on my Powerbook would be more than welcome.

TIA.