[shifuimam]

I've been trying to get Ubuntu 8.04 installed on an iBook, after discovering just how badly OS 9 sucks.

So far, booting off the LiveCD via the iBook itself has been a complete failure - it brings up all kinds of errors. I started wondering if maybe the CD-ROM was simply too slow, so I tried booting it on my 733MHz G4. That worked, and I got Ubuntu installed (I had to format the iBook's HDD using my Panther CD), but it won't boot - Ubuntu errored out near the end of the installation process, because it couldn't write the bootloader configuration. I tried this suggestion, but makeofboot -v failed.

Anyone seen this before? I can't even get the LiveCD to boot directly from the iBook's CD-ROM without major failures, which is why I was trying TDM in the first place.

[64stang06]

I have the same iBook and couldn't get anything past Ubuntu 6.06 LTS to install. I just threw Panther back on the machine about about a week of struggling and fighting to get Ubuntu to work.

[shifuimam]

I figured out what I was doing wrong - I'm up and running now.

However, it's pretty slow compared to how I recall Tiger running on this machine. The LiveCD ran beautifully on my 733MHz G4, though...and Compiz sure looks nice.

[ghporter]

OK, so what were you doing wrong? Inquiring minds and all that stuff... 'stang had problems past 6.06, and you've succeeded with 8, so I think that deserves an explanation.

As for speed, do you have virtual memory enabled? I don't know what is and isn't standard in a basic Ubuntu 8 install.

But are you just running from the LiveCD (which may not be able to do virtual memory)?

[shifuimam]

I'm running a local install on the iBook's internal hard drive. I'm pretty sure virtual memory/paging is enabled by default. It's just sluggish all over, although I haven't done anything by way of looking for specific drivers to make it suck less.

I ended up doing what I said in my OP - I installed via Target Disk Mode, because the LiveCD was failing miserably when trying to boot directly on the iBook. I don't know why, TBH - one would think a 24x CD-ROM would be fast enough. At any rate, my PowerMac has a much newer drive, and I think the read speed for CDs is either 42x or 52x, so it booted perfectly. Once the installer was done (it did error out when trying to install the bootloader - yaboot), I created a new yaboot.config file in /etc/, per the instructions on the link in my OP. However, my FW disk was mounted as /dev/sdd/, so I did the following:

Code:
boot=/dev/sdd2
device=hd:
partition=3
ofboot=hd:2
root=/dev/sdd3
timeout=100
install=/usr/lib/yaboot/yaboot
magicboot=/usr/lib/yaboot/ofboot
enablecdboot
enableofboot

image=/boot/vmlinux
      label=Linux
      root=/dev/hda3
      initrd=/boot/initrd.img
      partition=3
      read-only

It turns out I was getting an error because yaboot was trying to compile using the default config file - yaboot.conf. My file was yaboot.config. So, in order to tell it to use the config file I created, I used makeofboot -v -C /etc/yaboot.config. At that point, it compiled perfectly and booted.

Yaboot requires a little intervention during the boot process right now - I'm not sure if I can make it more automated or not. I also haven't yet figured out how to make Ubuntu treat the keyboard like a Mac keyboard, and I haven't figured out to make it realize command+click is right-clicking. I enabled click-and-hold for the right mouse button, but it doesn't always behave the way it's supposed to. I also had to edit the default xorg.conf to make it display 1024x768. That was pretty easy, though.

Oh - and I can't get WPA to work for the life of me, and it refuses to display available shares on my Windows Server 2003 and Windows Vista Ultimate boxes, although that may be due to it not authenticating first. I'm on WEP for now, and map to the shares manually.

And it BAKES compared to when it's running OS 9 or OS X. I think I need to tweak the performance settings a bit.