Can anyone help a newbie to Ubuntu and to Mac?

[Wraithmaster]

So i was given an old iBook G4 recently.. i didnt just trash it because i figured i could get some use out of it somehow. It boots up find but the battery doesnt hold a charge and the charger falls out so it can die pretty easily.. unfortunately.. that wasnt the worst part. i found out the the OS on it currently (Mac OS C 10.4.11 cant do anything at all lol.. i mean, from what i've seen the OS is garbage. im a Windows person myself so it took me a while to figure it out. oh well.. back to the main point. i have this laptop with pretty bad specs but i still want to try to get some use out of it.


Specs:
14.1" Apple iBook G4 running Mac OS X version 10.4.11
has a 1.33 GHz PowerPC G4 processor
and has 768 megs of ddr sdram
60 gig hdd


i heard there is a program called Wine that can run windows programs... i want to run something called Moras Equipment Planner (a template builder for an old MMO called Dark Age of Camelot) and a bittorrent program (preferably uTorrent since thats what im used to).. oh and i would also like to be able to run google chrome if at all possible.

so i guess what im asking is what version of ubuntu can i use that wont boggle down an old laptop like this and will still run those 2 programs... im willing to completely remove the current OS if i need to. it doesnt really matter to me as long as i can get those programs to work. I know absolutely nothing about Ubuntu or Macs so please bare with me as im pretty sure im going to ask a lot of questions =D

and thanks in advance for any and all help

[Wraithmaster]

i've found a link at http://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?t=427714

and i heard Intrepid is the most recent fully supported version. any thoughts?

[Wraithmaster]

the Intrepid link under my link appears to be broken =/

[krapp]

Well, as you noticed, Ubuntu stopped supporting the PPC architecture in the last few rounds of releases, so your best bet would probably be to look elsewhere. For someone new to Linux, I'd suggest the Debian PPC port. The last release for PPC is the latest release in general (6). I actually have an old Powerbook not unlike yours, but haven't had a chance to try out Debian PPC on it, so I can't tell you much about it, aside from it being supposed to work. Do a search for iBook and Debian or something like that. Installation will probably amount to little more than asking the installer to reformat your entire HD and replace OSX with Debian.

Keep in mind, however, that you're likely to lose all the nice touches Apple puts on their laptops, like waking up and suspending with minimum fuss, etc. If you want to use newer software than what Tiger can give you Linux is the way to go. Never used WINE so can't help there.

Edit: I take back what I said earlier about Ubuntu not supporting PPC. It seems the Ubuntu community does, but Canonical doesn't. My recommendation for Debian still stands if Ubuntu doesn't work out for you. Best of luck. https://wiki.ubuntu.com/PowerPCDownloads