March 16, 2005

PPC Ubuntu

I know Edd is probably being tongue-in-cheek with his post manifestly not at ETech, but I was stung by his comment:

Give Ubuntu PowerPC LiveCDs to all the open source people shamefully running OS X

I shamefully run OS X on my PowerPC powerbook. Why? Because there are no wireless drivers available for the built-in wireless card, and my days of carting around cards and dongles are done. Thom tells me the reason there's no wireless support is because Broadcom built a software radio rather than just a wireless card. FCC regulations stop them releasing the source in case people use it as a software radio.

Of course, I probably wouldn't run Ubuntu even if wifi did work. I'm done with games like messing with the kernel. I don't care any more - when it Just Works it's good enough for me. I did my Free Software sackcloth-and-ashes internship with two linux laptops and a handful of linux desktops (not to mention assorted cards and dongles), now I want to get something productive done TYVM.

Posted by savs at March 16, 2005 8:16 AM
Comments

Yeah - all of that +1, except I never did manage to get X running on my second laptop.

Posted by: John Billings at March 16, 2005 11:12 AM

Oh.. and according to http://www.ubuntulinux.org/download/ there is no LiveCD for PPC.

(Just a minor point)

Posted by: John Billings at March 16, 2005 12:06 PM

Oh.. and according to http://www.ubuntulinux.org/download/ there is no LiveCD for PPC.

This isn't true - I downloaded and ran the live CD 2 weeks ago. It worked fine on an older G4 machine, but kept bombing when ran on my 2ghz G5 setup.

I think it was the 2nd display (of my 2 monitor system), as it would boot fine until it initialized that 2nd monitor.

For what it's worth...

Posted by: PassThrough at March 20, 2005 6:48 PM