So, lots of things have been happening over the past few months, but the more important events are yet to come. Next week, I’ll be starting back into college working towards my Bachelor in Information Science and Technology (IST) from Penn State University. Being a freshman all over again is a pretty awkward feeling, but with hard work and determination I’ll be setting milestones in my life and opening up career opportunities that will be well worth the time invested.
With that said, I’ve also started another project … getting Linux fully functional on one of my PowerPC macs. Currently, I have Fedora 12 working almost flawlessly on my PowerMac G5, with a few quirks and problems I have yet to resolve. I am planning on moving this project off my G5 to reinstall OSX 10.5 Leopard back onto it (I need a reliable system for school), and use my PowerBook G4 instead for my Linux experimenting. Although it doesn’t seem quite as exciting on my laptop, as it lacks the luxury of my 30″ Apple HD Cinema Display that my G5 has consumed my desk with. I think it will still be a worthy system to recon with.
Experimenting with the various PowerPC Linux distributions, I have found one that raises the bar above the rest … Fedora! As popular as Ubuntu is, it’s PowerPC support is absolutely horrendous (at least with my experiences). I haven’t even been able to get Ubuntu installed properly, because it has serious issues with not just my graphics card, but the windfarm controls on my G5. Fedora has graciously taken hold of my G5 and runs impressively fast. But with every great thing, there are several issues.
I have no sound. Not only that, but I have no clue how to get sound working properly on the system. An lspci results in no card information either. Any and all help here would be greatly appreciated.
There is also an issue with my graphics card. Occasionally, my system with lockup and not allow me to do anything forcing me to cold boot. Sometimes, the screen will go crazy, while others it will just appear to be frozen. Then there are times where the monitor just completely stops receiving video all together, and I’m left staring at a black screen.
Other then that, I’m loving the idea of being able to tickle my tux side and enjoy the freedom of pure open source technology. I’ve always been a *nix fan at heart, which is one the reasons I love my Macs (which are BSD based, btw).
