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View Full Version : [ubuntu] 10.10 - Installation on a PowerBook G4



wongSlam
November 2nd, 2010, 06:13 AM
Hey, I just thought I'd share the way I got Ubuntu 10.10 working on my old PowerBook G4 laptop running Mac OS X Tiger 10.4.

One of the most important things that you have to do is download the correct distribution of Ubuntu (powerbook one). This had me stumped for a few days before I realized that the powerbook processor has it's own unique brand, so it doesn't use an intel or amd chip. Download link here. (http://cdimage.ubuntu.com/ports/releases/10.10/release/)

2nd thing I did was resize the hardrive partition. Followed this tutorial here (http://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?t=89960). To sum it up real fast, disable Journaling on the mac portion, boot from the live cd (boot using live-powerpc), open up terminal, get into the partitioner, type PRINT to get the info, type the mac partition, select the initial size from the print info, then put in the new size that you want (68.0GB in my case). Give yourself a minimum of 13GB (new free space).

Run the Ubuntu Installer on the desktop, when choosing how to install ubuntu, click advanced options (or the option besides wiping out the existing hardrive). This should bring up a box with the current partitions on your hardrive. I'm no ubuntu expert, but from reading another forum post, you need at least 1GB of freespace turned into a swap partition, 3GB for the newworld partiton, at least 10GB for the / partition, and the remainder for /home.

So from the above statement, you should have:

1GB for swap
2.5GB (or 3) for newworld
10GB or more for the "/" partition (formatted as HDF 3 or something)
the rest is for the "/home" partition (formatted same as /)Now you should be able to happily click the next button and proceed to install ubuntu on your powerbook. Running it now with a working wifi driver, although the touchpad doesn't work. Overall, I hope this helped you all in some way.

drkages
December 16th, 2010, 03:30 AM
Found this article most useful.

Much thanks for the help.

Haven't gotten much time to test out system fully, is there any thing I should look out for in advance.

Thanks