Over the years I learned to use, tweak and administer (for home use) Gentoo, Ubuntu and finally Debian. For the iBook I bought second hand some months ago I tried the latter two and was not satisfied. Having read a review about Fedora 8 made me curious.
In an attempt to broaden my mind I decided to install the distro on the PowerPC laptop. It was not an easy way to get everything going but now that it works there is a compelling reason to stay with that distro: The internal wireless LAN card (bcm4318) works great. :-)
The issues I had where the following:
At installation time the X11-based Anaconda seemed to bring the display into an unsuitable video mode. Everything but 1024x768 is not possible with the OpenFirmware-based ATI Mobility T2e. This manifests by showing a slowly changing color sequence. Unfortunately when I saw that the first time I had no clue what the reason for it can be and decided to use the text based installer instead. This again was not so easy since yaboot does not tell you anything about it and the hint I finally found on the net was for Fedora Core 4 (You have to type "linux text" at the yaboot console).
Installation in text mode went fine. I chose the 'office' package set and did no further package customization. When the box booted for the first time I was confronted with X not starting. Out of better knowledge I started gdm manually and then wondered why stuff like NetworkManager and such was not working. Somehow I found out that I simply had to change the runlevel to 5 and make that the default level by editing some file /etc.
Finally I could use Fedora's GNOME desktop for real. Still there are some minor issues: The xorg.conf contains no entry for the trackpad. Instead the driver is loaded automatically with some default settings. This automatic configuration does not contain the necessary bits to enable vertical scrollbar scrolling by moving the finger on the right side of the trackpad. Unfortunately I have no idea which search term would allow me to find a suitable solution.
Another issue is that the iBook's keyboard is not working like I was used to from Debian and Ubuntu. Pressing fn+alt and then releasing fn yielded in 'Alt Gr' and so I could generate @, € and whatnot. I found a different solution for X which makes the Apple keys behave like 'Alt Gr'. This is even easier than in Debian/Ubuntu but it does not work on the plain console. Bye bye pipe symbol ...
Apart from these issues I missed a great graphical package management tool like Synaptic and I have a hang to the Debian way of naming packages: I find it more eye pleasant when they all have lowercase names (NetworkManager or network-manager?) and library packages can be quickly identified as such by their 'lib' prefix. However on the terminal I had much less problems accepting yum and rpm as a replacement for apt-get and dpkg.
One tiny little thing I hope to get fixed soon is the way superuser rights are gained. On Ubuntu it is completely sudo-style and Debian can be easily tweaked to do the same. In Fedora they use consolehelper[-gtk] instead of gksu and I have not found out how I can configure it to work in sudo-mode.
And here the things I really like about Fedora:
- wireless works great (especially with NetworkManager)
- pulseaudio is enabled by default (and this is a really cool piece of software!)
- startup messages are nearly completely internationalized
- external display connector works immediately
- PowerPC is still a supported architecture in Fedora
If you have any hints for the above mentioned problems so please drop me line! thebohemian_at_gmx.net
