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Back to the end of 2004. I have two Mac Powerbooks, G4 Titanium and G3 Pismo. G3 Pismo was dead. There was something wrong with its battery. I was using Mac OS 9.1 for both notebooks. I need to do a lot of things with my G4. Most of softwares were not available anymore to Mac OS 9. I was thinking to use Linux on my G4. Later I found out many people were able to use Linux on any Power PC Platform. One of them was Yellow Dog Linux. I downloaded its ISOs, 4 CDs just for Linux. However I haven’t tried to install it coz I found out it didn’t support many hardware of PowerPC. At that time Sound and Network were still problems.

I searched on many articles, Mandrake and RedHat were also porting their code to Power PC platform. There were also others namely Gentoo, Debian and many others. I had difficulties to download those ISOs. Frustated enough, my vision to move to Linux seemed over. Most of Linux ported to PowerPC required pretty handful skills at that time, as you know I am just a human being not an expert on Linux.

Then Google gave me an interesting link based on Linux PowerPC keyword. In one of the website listed the distributions of 32-bit PowerPC Linux.One of them is Ubuntu.

http://www.penguinppc.org/about/distributions.php

I browsed to Ubuntu and downloaded the ISO, it is just 1 (again: read this as ONE) ISO. I never heard of Ubuntu before. I thought it was just like a small village name in Africa. I was impressed with its GUI viewed from various screenshots in the website. I realized its GNOME was not like old GNOME in Mandrake 10.0 (?) anymore.

“Ubuntu” is an ancient African word, meaning “humanity to others”.
Ubuntu also means “I am what I am because of who we all are”. The
Ubuntu Linux distribution brings the spirit of Ubuntu to the software
world.
quoted from UbuntuLinux.org

I installed it on my G4 then it can detect all the hardware and my G4 was running Linux for the first time out of the box. Fear always came to my mind, Linux installation was usually difficult and very dangerous to the partitions. I always ask to my self, what happen if I want to go back to OS 9? Can I do that? Remember, Apple has its own characteristic on managing the hard disk. Its BIOS-like is built within the hard disk. I had trouble with my hard disk running in i386 platform after Linux installation. After 2 days of Ubuntu trip on my G4, I decided to test going back to OS 9. Voila, no problem was found. Mac partition and setup things seemed friendly enough with current Linux partition. My G4 was big OK. Finally, I want to go back to Ubuntu. I wish I could do more with Ubuntu.

My G4 has only 500 MHz, 128 MB, 10 GB spaces and ATI Rage 8 MB card. Although it is only 500 MHz but I am sure I can beat some of Intel P4 machines (especially in graphics).

Later in beginning of 2005.. I was struggling to find the problem in my G3. I was searching for a new adapter, and found it was really expensive. I had thinking to sell it and buying a new Intel notebook. One day, I decided to turn it on for the last time, I plugged the adapter to the machine and suddenly I saw a green light dot (1 out of 4 dots) coming from the battery. I saw a sign of life of my G3. With a heart beat I pressed the power button and heard again a sign of life of PowerPC G3 in sound. It is a common sound of any Apple. After made backup of some data, I took my G3 to Ubuntu as well. And it is happy in Ubuntu. The only problem is to turn on the VGA-out thingy. A notebook will not be complete without a VGA-out. It is still really confusing until now. Nevertheless, my G3 is running really well in Ubuntu. I hope Breezy Badger can fix this problem.

Stumble it!