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My wife has an old iBook G3 800mhz laptop that hadn't been used in years because the power adapter was missing. So I spent a couple bucks on ebay and bought a generic apple-compatible one for cheap. I powered it up and had to endure the horrible apple 'ping' and logo while it booted into an operating system designed by and for pre-schoolers. I still don't understand what the pull is to apple. The hardware is nice and nice looking as long as you ignore the glaring usability issue of a one-freakin-button mouse. The software on the other hand, while based off of the pure raw beauty (and security) of the Mach BSD kernel, falls all the way short when you get to the gui.

I had an unused cheapo Belkin wireless USB adapter lying around that I thought would be a nice addition to the iBook. Unfortunately it was not supported by MacOS. At least not natively. There were drivers for MacOS 10.3 and up but not for the 10.2.8 that I had. Bah. I decided to shelf it until I got linux up and running.

After trying to teach MacOS how to play nicely with standard file sharing protocols I managed to back up all the data. Even their valiant attempts to make things simpler failed as I started to find files strewn all over the place. I suppose that can be added up to user ignorance though.

I had my freshly burned copy of Debian 'Lenny' Testing ready to go as soon as the last file was copied safely to my Linux file server. Of course before I could boot off a cd I had to look up how to actually boot off a cd under a mac. Not quite as intuitive as you think. They say you just have to hold 'C' but I ended up holding Shift + Ctrl + Option + Delete until it worked. Silly boot process.

Debian installed like a charm. In fact, an uber-geeky fact is that I had it in my backup, installing Debian while I was walking down the street. Heh. Sadly Debian decided to install Gnome by default. In my opinion Gnome suffers from the same pre-schooler problem that MacOS suffers from, but a little more intuitively. I tried the Belkin USB adapter and was dismayed to find out that it didn't work. It detected fine but didn't show up in my interface list. Ahh well.

I knew that Kubuntu (my favorite distro) had dropped PowerPC support more than a year ago but I was delighted to find that it was still community supported! There was even a brand shiny new Hardy Heron 8.04 release that came out last month! Yay! I quickly downloaded the ISO and powered up the live cd. I love these live cds because you can test the distro out before even installing it. I figured I'd give the Belkin USB adapter a try again and was overjoyed to see it detect my access point with no problems!! After the insanely easy installer finished I rebooted into a beautifully fresh KDE 3.5.9 desktop.

After quickly setting up her email and restoring her documents, photos, and music my wife was set to go. Linux breathed fresh new life into this archaic iBook. The thing runs like a charm.