Debian Lenny: It's an up-and-down thing
I know that quite a few of those who use Debian on the desktop favor the Testing distribution, which is currently Lenny, over Stable (now Etch).
The primary reason is that once the Stable version of Debian is set, so are the packages that come with it. Even though they get security fixes and bug patches, you'll be stuck with, let's say OpenOffice 2.0 when others are "enjoying" version 2.4.
I know there are always backports, and if there are a few packages that you absolutely, positively must have in the latest versions, that's a great way to stay with Debian Stable.
But for most, Testing is the way to get something that runs pretty well for the most part along with much newer packages.
On this Gateway Solo 1450 laptop, however, the reason I'm running Debian Lenny (aka Testing) is that I picked up a great deal of hardware compatibility by moving from Etch to Lenny.
Quite a few things have broken along the way. At various times, there have been problems with the Epiphany and Iceweasel browsers (in both instances the problems were really with NetworkManager, but they affected use of the Web browsers just the same), plus issues with sound and video.
I'm still having the problem with video. The screen just doesn't seem to want to refresh all the way during the computing session, and as a result there can be a lot of "artifacts" on the screen at various times.
Running xrefresh in a terminal window usually helps, as does running the Update Manager. But should I really have to worry about this kind of thing, especially when the problem doesn't occur on this hardware with every other Linux distribution I've used on it?
The problem is that I really like Debian.
From the way the community that puts it together is structured, to the commitment to non-i386 ports such as PowerPC and Sparc, to the way the desktop distribution is structured and the speed with which it runs, there is a whole lot that keeps me using Debian. The many thousands of packages are another great thing.
And I actually like GNOME.
Getting Debian to achieve what, for this laptop anyway, is the hardware holy grail, meaning suspend/resume, would tie it with Ubuntu for most effective OS on this platform.
That and this annoying video refresh problem.
Yes, I've tweaked just about everything I can think of in xorg.conf. No, none of that has had any affect whatsoever.
I'd love to magically change horizontal sync and vertical refresh and have the problem go away. And if anybody has a clue as to how I should do this, I'm more than ready to receive your wisdom.
And since Ubuntu still runs exceedingly well on this laptop, better than Debian even though the former is based on the latter, I should probably just migrate to it and stop whining about Debian so much.
Since Debian so far runs exceedingly well on my newest acquisition, a circa-1999 Power Macintosh G4/450, I can let Debian go on the Gateway and still have a place to run it.
With two hard-drive bays and less worries about ACPI, the G4 is a great test bed for anything and everything that runs on a PowerPC chip, and that frees up the Gateway to be more of a working computer with a lot less dual- and triple booting.
While on that subject, I'm moving toward chainloading everything I can out of the main GRUB in the master boot record. That way I don't have to rely on an update to one distro in a dual- or triple-boot system to rewrite /boot/grub/menu.lst in every installation on the drive.
I'm currently chainloading to an experimental Debian install from the GRUB controlled by Ubuntu on this laptop, and it's working out quite well. Chainloading -- it's what's for dinner.
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Steven Rosenberg aims to learn what he does not know. He writes about it here.
Steven Rosenberg aims to learn what he does not know. He writes about it here.
Did you run into any issues getting Debian on the G4 Mac? I have a G4 Powermac and I have had a hell of a time trying to get an open-source OS on the box. Debian is just about the only distro I haven't tried. I've tried various flavors of Ubuntu, OpenSUSE, Fedora, NetBSD and OpenBSD. Each time it boots the kernel, but then it gets to a point where it says "loading basic drivers" and then hangs, its very frustrating. The best part is that I got to use the OS X partitioning tool, which was a breeze to use. I guess I gotta bite the bullet and go buy another stack of CD-Rs and give Debian a spin...
Ric, I've got to tell you, installing Debian Etch on this Power Mac G4 was one of the smoothest, most uneventful installs I've ever done.
I had a suspicion that at least some of the PowerPC distros are built with Macs of that era (circa 2000) in mind, and in this case I was right.
Debian installed perfectly. I had to choose between two network interfaces -- it seems that the Firewire port is considered a network interface by the kernel. But when I chose the Ethernet port, configuration went perfectly.
I chose a separate /home partition and let Debian decide the sizes of everything.
After the install, the box runs perfectly and still does.
I've been trying to add memory to boost it from the current 128 MB. It runs pretty well with that amount, but my comfort level rises considerably with 256 MB and even more with 512 MB of RAM.
But so far, none of the SIMMs I have lying around have worked. Only the original 128 MB SIMM (PC-133) has worked. I have what I thought was a sweet 512 MB PC-133 module from Kingston, but that didn't work. I've never been able to test that one because I've never had a box that addressed PC-133 modules of that size.
I do have a working 256 MB module, but I have to pull it from another box, and that will take a few minutes.
Some of the SIMMs I have here, I know they work in PCs, but not in this Mac.
Still, the box is performing admirably well with Debian Etch.
Next, I'll probably try OpenBSD (or even NetBSD; I want to look at how hard it is to add packages and get a full desktop before I chose it over OpenBSD). Since it's a PowerPC box, I could even run FreeBSD. I've been looking for a good box to run it on, especially because I still need to do a review of Dru Lavigne's "The Best of FreeBSD Basics," and I'd like to have a FreeBSD machine to use with the examples that go along with it.
Overall, though, Debian Etch is an excellent choice for this box. I'd also like to try Lenny, but since I have no configuration issues with Etch, I will probably stick with it. I've been at various times pleased and a bit the other way with Lenny on my Gateway laptop, but since many basic configuration issues were initially solved with Lenny, I've stuck with it rather than rolling back to Etch, something I still consider from time to time. That and just devoting the whole drive to Ubuntu.
I'll probably try Sidux on it soon just to see if my display problems are resolved.
But back to the Power Mac G4. I can't believe that this box was made in 2000 or so, and it has gigabit Ethernet and a built-in CD-RW drive. I also have a sweet 22-inch monitor to go with it. The damn thing is heavy, though.
I came across my Mac in a similar fashion. I was volunteering for my school TV station and they were looking to add a windows PC to do some video editing with Adobe Premiere. They had a G4 and G5 Powermacs already in place. I build the PC for them and asked if they weren't going to use the G4 if I could have it. Its a 2001 Quicksilver G4 with a 867Ghz Processor and 512MB of ram, so I know it can run pretty much any OS I throw at it. I really wanted to run OpenSUSE 11, but I'm at a dead end trying to get it to run. I guess I gotta bite the bullet and waste a DVD-R on the paltry Debian net install (I always hate burning a really small disk image on my DVDs, I put Puppy on one and I feel like a moron). I wasn't clear on one thing that I was told in the install, did you "invoke" the Open Firmware? I got this from the NetBSD PowerPC instruction guide, which pretty much every site recommends for putting BSD or Linux on a mac.
On a side note, while I was researching BSD for mac's, I found out that you can still buy CPU upgrades for G4s, not just what Apple put out, but CPUs from 3rd parties. Even though its ridiculously expensive, I like the idea of being able to make my mac into a dual 1.8Ghz G4 beast.
"Even though they get security fixes and bug patches, you'll be stuck with, let's say OpenOffice 2.0 when others are "enjoying" version 2.4."
No. You really should check your information. Debian Lenny, which will be the next stable, already has OpenOffice 2.4.
What I mean is that if you're running Debian Stable now, you have OpenOffice 2.0.
And Lenny has OO 2.4, but OpenOffice will be well into version 3 while Lenny will stick with 2.4 for the duration.
So if you're using Lenny now and, say, for the next six months, OO 2.4 won't look so long in the tooth, but after that things do start getting old.
As I say, it all depends on how important new features are in a given package.
For me, I like to have the ability to open a .docx file with OO 2.4, and while I can certainly get along with OO 2.0, that feature alone is compelling enough for me to want 2.4.
And Lenny isn't stable yet.
One thing I'm enjoying right now, running Etch on my Mac G4, is that there aren't 70 or so updates every couple of days. Stable really is stable.
Re: linux on power mac, newer versions of Ubuntu aren't supported by the newest versions, but 6.06 had an official powerpc release, and it works great. Of course, like Steven said, Debian works great, too.
Re: memory for the G4 power mac, you have to make sure you're using low density PC133 DIMMS for these machines. For 512MB, they should say 32x8. I just went through this with my Quicksilver G4. (I'm new to Macs too).
Thanks for the info on the RAM. Those Macs seem pretty darn sensitive when it comes to adding RAM.
There still are new versions of Ubuntu for PowerPC. You can get to them from here, or more specifically here.