Well, I’ve had my powerbook for almost a year now and although OSX is nice enough, at times I try to compile applications (as in download source, ./configure, make, make install) and it just will not compile.
Figured I’d try Fedora PPC (core 3) and although it’s not fully ready guessed I could live with a few minor bugs here and there… well, I was wrong.
It took me 4 reboots and take the installer through to various stages before I finally got it to boot afterwards. This was partly my fault for not reading the instructions I found at http://www.bytebot.net/geekdocs/ibook/fedorappc.html fully. I know it’s for an iBook, but it’s fairly generic documentation.
Unfortunately, X-Windows was setup for 640×480 on a TFT that’ll handle 1280×854 so it all looked rather odd. The first casualty was trying to reconfigure X – followed the instructions that appeared on screen, selected generic tft etc and poof! In a flash, X was gone and wouldn’t restart.
“Nevermind”, I thought. “There’s always the console, I can fix X later.”
Tried to up2date the system (I prefer up2date to yum or apt) and found that there was no sources file and hence no updates. Copied /etc/sysconfig/rhn/sources off an x86 FC3 install, changed a few paths and no luck. Copied a few entries off a webpage that I found, still no luck. Attempted to configure yum, that wasn’t going to work either.
Finally, I tried to tweak the yaboot.conf that was created by the installer so that it’d offer me the choice of booting Linux, OSX, a bootable CD or over the network.. that was the final mistake, now it won’t boot at all via yaboot. FC3 comes up with an error about being unable to open initial console and hangs. Of course, there’s no ctrl-alt-del or reset button on a powerbook (that I know of) so you have to power off completely each time which is very irritating.
Luckily, I have OSX installed on a separate partition and can boot it by holding down ALT (Option) and selecting the OSX partition to boot. I think I’ll try Debian PPC next and if that’s no help, probably Yellowdog. If all else fails, I may have to resort to getting an x86 laptop when I can afford it or stick with OSX and put up with not being able to get everything working.