Power PC: Part II -- Who do you love (and who's throwing you under the bus)?

The G5 CPU is fairly new, super fast ... and fading into obsolescence.

The same is true for the G4 (except the "new" and "super fast" parts).

The G3: down on all counts.

Many G4s can comfortably run OS X 10.3.9, and I bet most will run 10.4.6 and the soon-debuting 10.5. But that will likely be the last Apple OS upgrade that will even be compiled for any chip in the PowerPC family, I think.

A G3 can run OS X, if it's fast enough. But those machines really thrive on OS 9.2.2. Except that there's no modern Web browser that'll run on them. Oh, and there's been no innovation, support or applications coming down the pike for, say ... seven years now.

Did you know that you can bring a G3 Mac into the era of current browsers and more free apps with Linux? Well ... you can, but it's not all so rosy.

There are a few Linux distributions that compile for PowerPC (going back to G3 and previous PPC chips, but not all the way back), the most popular being the fast-rising, easy-loading Ubuntu.

I have burned PowerPC CDs for Ubuntu and Xubuntu. On my iBook G4, Ubuntu ran right away, with sound and Ethernet auto-configured to work. I've never before gotten sound to work on anything without a little tweaking. Would I dump OS X 10.3.9 for Ubuntu? Probably not, but I'd consider dual-booting for the time being. (Since that machine is used mostly by Ilene, I'm going to leave it as is.)

The relationship between Ubuntu (funded by a weathy South African whose name escapes me) and the PowerPC chip is straining. Since PPC accounts for about 5 percent of Ubuntu users, Ubuntu creator Canonical has recently converted the PowerPC versions of all the 'Buntus from fully supported product with twice-yearly updates to a "community maintained" port ... and a more tenuous status overall.

There is much hair-rending and teeth gnashing in the very busy Ubuntu forums over the distancing from PPC, but the beauty of Linux is that there are hundreds of distributions -- and at least a few of them have PowerPC ports and will maintain them. (Yellow Dog and Suse come to mind).

Let me emphasize: If you're running OS 9 on a G3 or early G4, you might want to give Ubuntu Linux (or its less-powerful cousin Xubuntu) for PowerPC a try.

While the live CD of Ubuntu worked perfectly in the iBook, it didn't fare so well on a Power Mac G4 tower, which pretty much screams on OS 9. On that machine, Ubuntu booted slowly (slow CD drive, I think), Ethernet wouldn't work (I did a quick config and got nothing) and upon launch of Open Office, the whole thing crashes. No 'Buntu live CDs would even load on the iMac G3 500 MHz. Many commenters have said that using the alternative install CD of Xubuntu allows installation to the hard drive, and that method does work.

The upshot: If Ubuntu, or any other distribution, can bring a modern Web browser to G3 Macs, that is huge.