Ubuntu on ibook

Saturday, July 22nd, 2006

I don’t remember what stumped me about trying to Ubuntu Hoary on my G3 iBook. It was something dumb, I bet. Like a poorly burned ISO or some goofy video bug. I just tried again with Dapper and was again thwarted. The live CD just won’t boot. Well, it won’t get past the “Adding live CD user…” step in the boot process. It just hangs there. The MD5 checks out on this ISO, so I don’t really believe that it is a bad burn. But when I tried booting with some of the alternate boot images, I got lots of IO errors. Maybe I just tried the wrong one, but IO errors?

When googling for “Adding live CD user”, I found this entertaining description of another failed Ubuntu Dapper install. Unfortunately, it doesn’t provide much insight into what might be the problem.

There is another Ubuntu option that I can try… there is the “Alternate install cd”. I just downloaded one of those. It doesn’t include the Live CD option of trying before you install.

And I suppose I can reluctantly try the newish Yellowdog 4.1 release since I’m currently running satisfactorily Yellowdog 4.0. I just don’t like how slow they are with their updates and how insufficient their ftp servers are. I’ve been trying to get off Yellowdog for a long time now, but it always seems to be the only distro I can get to load on this iBook.

Sadly, I would have been better off getting a PC laptop to run Linux, or just run OSX on the iBook. Luckily, I don’t have to do any real work on that laptop and I can afford to be stubbornly dogmatic. One day soon I’ll get Linux to work on this laptop, and then you’ll see! [shakes fist]