Posted on November 20, 2006 - by Justin Hartman

iBook G4 now sporting Ubuntu Edgy Eft

It had to happen and today it did. I have just completed a brand new Ubuntu 6.10 (codename Edgy Eft) Linux installation on my Apple iBook G4 laptop. I have to admit that I have always been very curious about Ubuntu on the whole and in particular the noise that they have made but for some reason I have avoided it up until lately.

I’m no stranger to Linux and have tried a few installations on my personal machines, some of which include Mandrake 10.0, Suse 9 and of course Ubuntu 5.04 (which only lasted about a week on my machine).

I also have experience working on CentOS, Fedora and Red Hat but these are all on a server level as they currently power my various web servers running my sites.

That all said Linux has never really stayed very long on any machine that I own personally and I relate this quite simply to the fact of cross-software capabilities. Now while it has been historically difficult to run various Windows and Apple software on Linux I have found lately that the substitute software available really competes very well with the “money-grabbing” proprietary software giants.

But the key issue has always been that Linux (or GNU/Linux as it should be called) has always been very temperamental for those newbies that have no idea what they are doing on Linux.

I can’t tell you how many times I have had to re-install a Linux distro because I quite simply messed it up but I decided to move to Ubuntu because as their pay-off line reads Ubuntu is “Linux for Human beings”.

Within about 20 minutes the installation of my new Ubuntu software was complete and once my Apple rebooted I had every tool necessary to start surfing the web, work with all my office files and download email. It’s a desktop in a box and requires very little additional software for most end users and I can honestly see why people are using it.

My confidence in Ubuntu really came to fruition when I decided to install Ubuntu on my PC at work. I have been using it for some time now at work and it has really been a distro that just works. I have found it can be quite buggy and does tend to crash more than Apple’s OSX software but because I work a lot with servers I like the file structure and the ability to test things out on my machine before deploying them to a server.

No doubt I’ll be having fun the next while setting my system up and I’ll give you an update on my progress with time.