I have an old Powerbook G4 hanging around doing nothing, and I thought I’d try to get Ubuntu going on it. The install was fairly straight forward but unfortunately there were too many things that turned out to be a hassle. I worked out some things, but then decided the hassle wasn’t worth it. I’m sure PPC isn’t high up on the priority list, but still, I thought they were trying to compete with Windows and OSX, and it is not a good sign when things don’t work “out of the box”. Here’s a list of things that got in my way and have ended my Ubuntu experiment. Some of these things I worked around and others I never got to before I gave up. I’m sure with enough effort, I could fix everything up, but I was looking for an easier time of things. Not sure how non-technical people would deal with this. Anyway, here’s the list (which may not be complete, since I’ve already forgotten stuff) …
- WPA wireless didn’t work out of the box. Had to install and configure wpasupplicant
- General slowness in recognizing and initiating network connections (both wired and wireless)
- Networking is ‘disabled’ after coming back from hibernation and couldn’t get it back up without reboot.
- Right click is supported via a two-finger click on the touchpad but there doesn’t seem to be any easy way to map it to ctrl-click like on OSX.
- No battery level indication or warning that the battery is about to die.