Ubuntu 7.04 Installation Notes

I added a new page to my website with some of my notes on installing Ubuntu 7.04 “Feisty Fawn” on my iBook G4. Even though PowerPC computers are no longer supported by Canonical I’m impressed with how little I had to do this time to get it working. Kudos to the Debian and Ubuntu communities. I especially want to thank the xorg ati driver developers for getting 3d acceleration working, you guys seriously rock. I’m going to try this summer to get the changes listed on my page into Ubuntu for the next release.

As for my thoughts on this release, I have to say that I’m genuinely impressed. Linux has Vista beat in every front in my book. (Even in the game department! ) With desktop-effects and virtual desktops we have a more functional 3D desktop than Vista and we are at least 6 months ahead of Apple’s next version of OS X. Plus all the bells and whistles fits into 256MB of RAM, while Vista needs 512MB of RAM minimum just to run in it’s most basic mode. Ubuntu definitely wins in terms of preserving your computer’s value.

I’m really proud to be a (small) part of this community. People everywhere are doing amazing things with Linux, and while Apple maybe be doing some pretty innovative stuff to OS X it’s not even close to the out-of-the-box (computer) thinking that is happening in the Free Software community.


Comments

2 responses to “Ubuntu 7.04 Installation Notes”

  1. Great post, but could you explain more on the setting up the wireless?

  2. Look in Google for a recent tutorial on bcm43xx in Ubuntu. It’s a three step process. Copy the driver into somewhere where Ubuntu can read it, and run the program firmware cutter (bcm43xx-fwcutter?) program on it. Then take the .fw files and put them in /lib/firmware (or someplace like that.)

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