Should I take the plunge?

I have an ibook 12" 800mhz with 256MB of RAM. Not a hugely powerful machine, but good enough. I use it mainly to watch video on my daily commute, and occasionally as a second computer in the house.

I'm really not liking OSX too much, though, and am considering nuking it in favor of OSX. Am I going to take a performance hit by doing so? Are there any drawbacks in making this move?

The only proprietary software on the mac that I kinda is iMovie (but I'm about to buy Main Actor for linux, so no bigger, plus its codecs support sucks) and DTV (but they are working on a linux version, so no big deal either.)

If I do make this laptop a kubuntu machine, are there any super-quick ways of logging onto my desktop kubuntu machine for file-sync etc? Or is it best to do it over the network? (I have a router).

Thanks for any input.

Why don't you try a Kubuntu live CD?

The livecd is not particularly helpful, given that it runs from CD. You cannot judge how fast the system will be on your computer once you've fully installed it. I was really looking for opinions. Thanks anyway.

Hi I'm running Kubuntu on an G4 iBook from last December, and it works very well. It's very responsive and I didn't have any problems so far. I also suggest you try the LiveCD, it's the best way to see if everything works and if you like Kubuntu. Yes, it won't tell you much about the speed, but of what use would be a system that is fast as hell but nothing works? For me, really everything worked, the iBook keys for brightness/volume/CD eject, sleeping, hdd spindown, the fan etc. and I love it.

Tom

The LiveCD won't give you a good speed benchmark, but it will be invaluable to you to see how you like the Kubuntu experience and how well your hardware integrates with it before you "take the plunge."

Hi y'all,

Thanks for the advice, but a "try the livecd" response would be terrible advice to a newbie (which I'm not, but the original responder couldn't have known). I did, this morning, and it was awful -- as in agonizingly slow. I would have run a mile if I didn't know that the hard disk install would be much faster.

So, yes, I did take the plunge...I tried dapper first for the hell of it, and encountered a ton of bugs; so currently toasting an install of breezy. Hopefully will go well.

However, given that there is a limited set of mac hardware out there, shouldn't this be a fairly straightforward question? Aren't there charts of supported boxes & not?

Cheers, Reuben

Well as I said I'm using it on my iBook G4. I first had Gentoo on it, but I was tired having to fiddle around with it all the time (it's still a great distro, though!), then I just thought hey let's try the Kubuntu LiveCD, I inserted into the iBook, booted, and everything worked right from the start, so I didn't think a lot and just installed it, and me & my girlfriend is very happy with it :-)

Trying a BETA release is never a good idea - not when you expect everything to just work ;-)

Tom

Thanks for the advice, but a "try the livecd" response would be terrible advice to a newbie (which I'm not, but the original responder couldn't have known). I did, this morning, and it was awful -- as in agonizingly slow. I would have run a mile if I didn't know that the hard disk install would be much faster.

So, yes, I did take the plunge...I tried dapper first for the hell of it, and encountered a ton of bugs; so currently toasting an install of breezy.

Newbie or experienced user, the Live CD is there so that you can try Ubuntu/Kubuntu without installing it.

The LiveCD is slow because it loads from the CD, but loading from the CD is the whole point.

And, yes, it's not a good idea to try an operating system's uncompleted, unpolished, development release. I'm sure that the time that you spent waiting for the LiveCD to boot up was nothing in comparison to the time of downloading, burning, and booting Dapper.

Hey, I know about betas -- I'm a developer. I figured since I was doing a vanilla install I might as well give back to the community a little by trying out the beta and finding some issues...so bugzilla is 15 bugs the fatter for it. And I don't mind the time spent on it, I'm a tinkerer.

I think you're really missing my point though, kairu0 -- my original question was "will I take a performance hit" ... there's no way I could find that out by using the livecd (having tried, I can attest to that.) I fully acknowledge and realize that livecds will not be as fast -- but if you are going to recommend that somebody try it, you should offer the disclaimer that the point of doing so (especially on an older system, like my ibook) is to check to see if the hardware will play well.

Additionally, it would be nice (if it doesn't exist already) to start a wiki, listing the basic mac models, and the reliability of ubuntu on them. (There are only a dozen flavors of ibook at most; I don't know about powerbook; etc -- this seems like a doable project.)

Cheers Reuben

I thought your main question was "Should I take the plunge?" My response to that was "try the LiveCD," because, well, that's the best way to try Kubuntu before "tak[ing] the plunge."

Now, for your other questions. Will you take a performance hit? Probably not. Especially since this is only a second computer to keep you busy on the commute and the bulk of what it seems you are going to do with it is video playback. I'm sure Kubuntu will be able to do this sufficiently enough. (It's not like it's a demanding task for a new computer.)

Are there any drawbacks? Well, you might have some ACPI issues. Watching videos on the commute probably means that you would benefit from hibernation on closing the lid. That is one thing you'll have to research via Ubuntu on iBook pages.

And I'm not sure that I understand your last two questions. You want to sync data between 2 ubuntu machines. How else were you planning to do it other than over your network?

Additionally, it would be nice (if it doesn't exist already) to start a wiki, listing the basic mac models, and the reliability of ubuntu on them. (There are only a dozen flavors of ibook at most; I don't know about powerbook; etc -- this seems like a doable project.)

Once you get your iBook up maybe you could start one, since you are both a developer and a tinkerer.

Done. Wiki away!

https://wiki.ubuntu.com/UbuntuOnMac