[NBLUG/talk] Hello

William Tracy afishionado at gmail.com
Thu Sep 13 15:10:01 PDT 2007


On 9/13/07, Troy Arnold <troy at zenux.net> wrote:
> > X-Mailer: Apple Mail (2.752.3)
>
> Seems like you still have at least one machine left to format ;-)

Heh, the last few weeks I've been playing with a G3 tower that I got
my hands on. I've managed to get it dual-booting KUbuntu and Mac OS X
10.3.

Things I've learned:

1. It *is* possible to resize an HFS partition with Ubuntu if you're
willing to muck around a bit. This is a Good Thing if you don't have
an OS X install disc.
2. If you have a really weird SCSI disk configuration like my tower
does, both Ubuntu 7.4 and the latest Yellow Dog will install
"successfully" but fail to boot, apparently because Yaboot gets
confused and points Open Firmware to the wrong device name. Ubuntu
5.10 (!!!) will, however, install flawlessly, and you can apt-get to
Feisty from there. Go figure.
2a. Open Firmware is trippy weird. It is 50% awesome, 50% horror, and
100% weird.
2b. Allen wrenches are handy when you are are wondering WTF is
*inside* a G3 that Linux can mount and install to but not boot from.
3. There's no good closed source Linux/PPC software (with the possible
exception of IBM's version of Java--yay IBM!). There's no Flash and no
good drivers for the ATi card in the tower.
4. The folks on the Ubuntu forums are awesome. :-)

-- 
William Tracy
afishionado at gmail.com -- wtracy at calpoly.edu

Assembly language experience is [important] for the maturity and
understanding of how computers work that it provides.
                -- D. Gries



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