Adventures in Linux Day 2: Row, Row, Row Your Mouse, Gently Down the Screen
(Editor’s Note: Please understand, when I say “this morning”, “today”, etc. – I am referring to yesterday, when all this shit went down. When I say “yesterday”, I mean Monday, the 26th of October)
This morning, my beloved Samara woke me up with a kiss and some good news – when she woke up last night, she found a distro of Linux that would actually work on my computer. I walked into the living room this morning and found my iBook G4 opened with a copy of Ubuntu installed onto it. You see, she spent a good deal of time last night looking through Ubuntu’s FTP mirrors and archives until she found the latest version she could get that (we thought) would run on a PowerPC processor – Efty Eft. I was happy to see that Samara did do this, meaning that I do not have to hunt down another distro in the vast Linux jungle of distros, but alas, nothing is perfect and a few things were not up to snuff. Namely, the wireless card did not work (I believe it was because it did not mount properly as a network device) and I needed new mouse drivers for my trackpad. In addition to this was the fact that my wireless seriously would not work for the longest time. Wireless Internet on Linux is quite a difficult proposition but it may very well be possible.
The mouse, egads, the mouse – it was not the fact that a lot of system resources were being used simply because that just was not the case. It was the fact that we just simply did not have the proper drivers for my iBook G4’s trackpad. In fact, to commemorate the memory of my trackpad on this distro, I decided to compose a little song for you all…
Row, row, row your mouse
Gently down the screen
Merrily merrily, merrily, merrily
This is a sick ass dream
After a few hours trying to figure out what the deal with the Package Manager was, my beloved decided to give up and let me figure it out – until she got the bright idea of looking to see if there was another, newer, version of Ubuntu at this time. It turns out that every version, including the latest version of Ubuntu is available for PowerPC, it just is not advertised well on the homepage. However, this time around, she wanted me to burn my own disc of Ubuntu because of the fact that her computer’s optical drive is fucked up after overdosing on store-brand Dr. Pepper. I told her that Dr. Pepper is not good for the computer but she did not listen to me! ;-P However, the problem with me doing this is simply the fact that I suck at burning discs and they never seem to come out correctly, since I cannot boot from them at all. Of course, the problem is multiplied by the fact that two out of three of our computers have fucked up CD/DVD burners, one is a MythTV that does not have access to the Net nor a keyboard, one was totally shattered and was not repaired until this evening and one is the target of my install and I could not get Tiger back on it.
My wife, after a trip to Ace Hardware, got my broken MacBook Pro to finally start working. To say that I am not jealous of her being the only one with a decent computer is an understatement. It is now running OS X Snow Leopard and I cannot wait until we go back to Thailand, get both of our surgeries and save enough money to get a decent Mac. Again, as I said before, I am not going to get another laptop and I fully intend to get an OEM Apple desktop – so my only two realistic options are an iMac and a Mac mini. I am leaning towards the Mac mini so I worry that if the iMac were to fall off a desk or be dropped during a move, it would shatter like my MacBook Pro was after the theft. In addition, it is much more lightweight and thus, much easier to move in the event that I have to move.
However, the good news is that we were able to find a new PowerPC distribution of Ubuntu than Efty Eft. While Steve Caldwell mentioned it in the comments of yesterday’s Adventures in Linux, I googled and found that I could definitely run the latest version of Ubuntu on PowerPC. Eventually, I was able to connect to my wifey’s MacBook Pro so I could get on the net and do the necessary research for installing LInux on my lappy and get it working. I joined the Ubuntu IRC channel and got a few good ideas, many of which I implemented but none of them worked until I rebooted my Ubuntutosh and was finally able to see the plethora of Wireless networks on my iBook. Wireless security schemes just do not seem to work but I hope that tomorrow, I will be able to get that fixed so I can no longer be tethered to my wifey’s laptop.
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