Powerbook G4 - 400 MHz

Specs

400 MHz Power PC G4 Processor

128 MB SD-RAM

40 GB Hard Drive

DVD Drive

14 inch TFT LCD Display (1152x768)

10/100 Ethernet, two USB, firewire, S-VGA output

Hardware 56k Modem off of USB

Airport Card

Infared Port

I picked up the Powerbook for a very cheap price. It was a demo model at the UCCS Book store. At the time, I did not know the machine had some problems so buyer beware.

I loaded Fedora 9 on the Powerbook. It already has a Mac OS 9 and a Mac OSX (Tiger) partition. After it is loaded, you will need to find a Mac OS 9.22 Boot Up CD, boot it up and find Disk Utility. Do NOT INITIALIZE the hard drive. Do an "Update Driver" in the menu and it should be bootable.

When you boot Fedora 9 DVD, you will need to do when the prompt comes up is do "linux text" since the X interface will not come up. When it comes up in text mode, pick and select what partition you want to load packages, it should complete.

When the boots up off the hard drive, it will come up in text mode. You will have to edit the "/etc/X11/xorg.conf" file and change the line that usually has "r128" or "radeon" or "ati" to "fbdev" and then type "startx" at the shell prompt. You should be able to go into X.

Once you are in either text or in X, perform the following commands:






	yum -y remove iwl-4965-firmware

	yum -y update kernel



	yum -y remove selinux-policy.noarch selinux-policy-targeted.noarch

	sleep 30

	yum -y install selinux-policy.noarch selinux-policy-targeted.noarch



	yum -y update



	rpm -ivh http://rpm.livna.org/livna-release-9.rpm



	yum -y install libdvdread libdvdcss libmad a52dec xine xine-lib-extras-nonfree.ppc xmms xmms-mp3 xmms-faad2 seamonkey thunderbird

With xine, you can play DVD's, with xmms, you can play mp3's and you have a different web browser of seamonkey and thunderbird to read e-mail.

Send comments to Brad
Last Updated : Sep 28, 2008