After upgrading my good ol’ PC to Dapper, I proceeded to download and burn a copy of it for PowerPC systems, and I have managed to install it in my old faithful G3 iBook in dual boot, with Mac OS X 10.2 “Jaguar” on the other partition. Here’s how I did it.
- Backup all the information in your computer; what we are about to do erases your hard disk completely!!! You have been warned!
- Insert the Jaguar CD in the drive and reboot; to boot from the CD, remember to press the “C” key on your keyboard when you hear the chime of the iBook booting
- In the Mac OS X installer, go to the “Install” menu and select “Disk Utility”
- In the Disk Utility, partition the hard drive in two parts with the same size; there is a special drop-down menu in the “Partition” tab that provides this automatically
- Select the first partition, the one at the top, and choose “Free space” from the “Format” drop down menu at the right.
- Select the second partition, at the bottom, and choose “Mac OS Extended” from the “Format” drop down menu.
- Quit Disk Utility, and Install Mac OS X as usual
- When Jaguar is installed, insert the Ubuntu disk and reboot; to boot from the CD, remember to press the “C” key on your keyboard when you hear the chime of the iBook booting (I prefer to repeat it :)
- Launch the installation of Ubuntu Dapper, and when you are asked about the partition where to install it, select the second option: “Use the largest block of continuous free space on disk”
- Install Ubuntu as usual after that
The good news is that Ubuntu Dapper recognized everything in the iBook G3; even the Airport wireless card! I was afraid that it wouldn’t… but it worked perfectly well. I joined my home network without any problem at all.
And even better: I can put my computer to sleep, and wake it afterwards without any problem at all! I was asked by Ubuntu to “enable” the sleep functionality (in Breezy it did not work at all, but here it works perfectly well!).
Only funny thing: to simulate a right-click, I have to press the “F12” key :)))
Ubuntu Dapper is awesome :)