I had to go through some pain to get this thing running, but it was cool. <p/>

Ubuntu “Hoary” LiveCD<p/>

Then the ISO kept crashing Disk Utility, so I had to burn it with cdecord. In Terminal:<p/>

sudo apt-get install cdrecord<p/>

then:<p/>

sudo cdrecord dev=IODVDServices hoary-live-powerpc.iso<p/>

finally, it was burned. I rebooted holding C until it started booting Linux.<p/>

The Linux boot took a hella long time. It went through like five “detecting…” phases, all for different things, which was kinda cool but very slow. Then it killed all processes and rebooted with a new, Live system. And of course that took pretty much the usual Linux boot time. Plus the time it took to start X and GNOME. <p/>

Anyway, while I was booting I wasn’t plugged into the network (I normally use wireless with a WEP key), and I got a DHCP error. I let it boot, assuming I could fix it once I had gotten up. It started GNOME and all my other devices seemed properly detected – trackpad, sound, usb mouse, it was in my screen resolution (1440x900), and so forth. The network still didn’t work – in fact, it only detected one device, the wired card. No wireless at all. Darn; I went over to my router and plugged the thing in, and started playing. Unfortunately it didn’t react to my plugging the cable in (no dhcp). I had to run dhclient eth0 at the terminal to get it to work, but that was fine and dandy, fortunately. <p/>

I was able to use the package manager to install new software, which was cool. (everything was on a ramdisk). To mount my regular hard drive I did: <p/>

mkdir /mnt/mac
mount -t hfsplus /dev/hda3 /mnt/mac <p/>

Of course, my home directory is a FileVault disk, so I couldn’t browse it, but the rest of the filesystem seemed to work fine.<p/>

I wanted to try Mac-On-Linux. Unfortunately I couldn’t compile it, presumably because I think it wanted to recompile the kernel, and I didn’t want to do that. I gave up after several tries.<p/>

Overall Ubuntu did a decent job, but not great – I really wish they had included wireless drivers, or at least fix the networking in the OS so that it does DHCP if you plug something in. <p/>

Lincoln