How to Install Ubuntu 6.06 Dapper in an Apple G3 iBook

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.

  1. Backup all the information in your computer; what we are about to do erases your hard disk completely!!! You have been warned!
  2. 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
  3. In the Mac OS X installer, go to the “Install” menu and select “Disk Utility”
  4. 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
  5. Select the first partition, the one at the top, and choose “Free space” from the “Format” drop down menu at the right.
  6. Select the second partition, at the bottom, and choose “Mac OS Extended” from the “Format” drop down menu.
  7. Quit Disk Utility, and Install Mac OS X as usual
  8. 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 :)
  9. 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”
  10. 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 :)