Recommend me a distro for a pre-Intel Mac PowerBook G4 laptop

[Nabcake]

Hi all,
I hope this is the correct place to post this.

I recently got a free PowerBook G4 Mac laptop off a friend who no longer uses it. It comes with OS X Tiger, which is fine, but slow, and a little outdated when it comes to internet browsing. Can someone recommend me a light distro that will work with it? And point me towards instruction to get it installed on a Mac?

My concern is that, especially as a complete Mac noob, I'll get into difficulty and make a mess of the laptop trying multiple distros until I find one that works / has compatible drivers etc.

I've have experience with Puppy Linux on PC as well as Mint. Would these work on this machine? I'm a relatively non-tecnical user though, so something easy to set up would suit best.

Thanks all!

 

[arochester]

http://www.jeremymorgan.com/tutorials/linux/how-to-install-linux-ppc-powerbook-g4/

 

[Nabcake]

arochester's link

Thanks so much arochester! Is it possible to dual boot this with OS X?

 

[arochester]

Yes, though I have no direct experience of it, I has a G3 and did a straight install. (In the tutorial above there are more recent versions of Ubuntu PPC available.) Look at something like http://lifehacker.com/5934942/how-t...-and-take-back-your-powerhouse-apple-hardware

 

[Nabcake]

Yes, though I have no direct experience of it, I has a G3 and did a straight install. (In the tutorial above there are more recent versions of Ubuntu PPC available.) Look at something like

Thanks, yeah, I had found that page when I was looking into this, but it requires Leopard, and I'm running Tiger unfortunately. I'm not sure if that's to do with rEFIt or not, and know so little about this I'm not sure where to even start!

[EDIT] It looks like rEFIt only works with Intel Macs

 

[arochester]

How about this as a pointer? http://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?t=1579393

 

[Nabcake]

Thanks! I'll get stuck into that!

 

[Nabcake]

I just noticed flash (and therefore YouTube etc.) doesn't work with Ubuntu on PPC - so that's kind of a deal breaker!

 

[arochester]

There is no Adobe Flash for PowerPC. There are, however, two open source flash players still under development: gnash and lightspark.

https://wiki.ubuntu.com/PowerPCFAQ#Flash.2C_Flash_video.2C_Gnash_and_Lightspark

 

[Nabcake]

Thanks again! A lot to dig into here. Will post here should I decide to take the plunge (I'm still afraid of trashing this laptop that a friend kindly gave to me). I've messed around with a lot of linux distros on various PCs and Laptops I've owned but for Mac there's still "the fear"!