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I'm trying to install Linux/Unix on an old iBook G4.

I've tried so far:

  • Ubuntu
  • Slackintosh
  • OpenBSD

… but none of the them are as straightforward as they should. Has somebody found a good distro for PowerPC which ideally will support Airport Extreme out of the box? I'm looking also for distro with the Colemak layout pre installed.

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I really liked Yellowdog on my g3 iBook. Last I heard there was no support for Airport Extreme, but plain old Airport worked awesome. – sarnold Nov 23 '11 at 9:48
What the difference between both. What I want is just the WiFi to work . – mb14 Nov 23 '11 at 10:03
Airport Extreme was the ABG card; Airport was just AB. (Maybe just BG and B, respectively. It's been a while.) – sarnold Nov 23 '11 at 10:05
So does that mean that I have either a Airport Extreme card or an Airport one ? in the first case could I use a Airport driver for an Extreme card ? – mb14 Nov 23 '11 at 10:12
The devices are completely incompatible -- you need a completely different driver for the newer card. Maybe they've gotten enough documentation to write one in the last few years :) you can always hope... – sarnold Nov 23 '11 at 10:19
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3 Answers

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I used MintPPC. It worked out of the box (whith the Wifi).

I didn't try YellowDogLinux because they only have a DVD image (3GB) and I didn't have any DVD to burn. MintPPC needs only 256M and an internet connection, as it downloads everything to installation, as far as I have understood.

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up vote 1 down vote

You could try Debian, as b43-fwcutter and firmware-b43-installer are available as binary packages for PowerPC in that distribution. See http://wiki.debian.org/bcm43xx#b43 for details.

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Finally, I used MintPPC, which is Debian based and use those drives out of the box. – mb14 Nov 25 '11 at 13:40
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up vote 1 down vote

We use some PowerPC servers and they run off of CentOS and Red Hat. Before those we used Yellow Dog Linux.

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