Installing Ubuntu 6.06 on an iBook, first try

Attempting to install Ubuntu Dapper 6.06 on an older iBook 500 MHz, 256MB RAM, 15GB Hard Drive.

Booting up

The Hoary Live CD/Install CD have been combined into a Live CD that can install. Handy.

The Live CD would not at first boot up the iBook — in fact, wasn’t even recognized as bootable in the System Preferences/Startup Disk. Holding down C on restart had no effect.

Did some digging, and resetting NVRAM via Open Firmware was the solution, although it does not solve the problem for everybody. How to reset NVRAM.

Installation

1. Answered 6 questions.
2. Waited for install to finish. 2a. Be patient. It make take some time.
3. Restarted.
4. Et voilà!

Networking

Initially, the same wireless issues as covered in my previous article installing Hoary on the same iBook — no support for WPA security out of the box. Reportedly, there have been some advances in wireless in Ubuntu since then, so I will be researching WPA drivers.

For the time being, I scrounged up an Ethernet connection for the next stage.

Post-install updates

Security and other updates. Ran the Update Manager, under the System/Administration submenu. Mine consisted of updating 149 packages, which required downloading 197MB. Click on the “Show progress of single files” to see what’s going on in better detail during downloading. Takes a while even just downloading, and I had a big pipe. I wasn’t paying really close attention, but it seemed as if the OpenOffice.org files were the ones taking the longest. YMMV. Again, patience is obviously a virtue here, given the hardware. You might want to disable the screensaver for the time being.

Patience ran out — the updater hung when configuring the “capplets” update, partway through the config process; I restarted to clear (likely not strictly necessary). After restart and attempting to log back in, it hung at a black screen. Force restart. Same result.

Left the disc at home. Sigh.

Deja Hoary

So I can’t completely blame Dapper for the problem, as I probably should have gone about getting out of the hangup less dramatically, but still.

Ah, but the Hoary 5.04 discs that I used previously (and successfully) are here. So, just for the heck of it, I popped in the install disc and started again from scratch. More from curiosity than anything, as I don’t really need Dapper on this iBook per se, and I also want to see if there are any problems with the updater on Hoary — an activity I did not try last time around.

Installation went smoothly, as before. I decided to shut down for the time being and revisit things later. Dapper was running well enough until I did the mass update — perhaps one of the other update utilities would be more prudent off the bat.

Update

I’ve reinstalled Dapper without a hitch on the iBook — christened “ibuntu” naturally ;) — and will now have to decide on what update route to take. I’ll probably just need to do some poking around on the net.

The original title of this article was “Attempting to install Ubuntu Dapper on an iBook” which in retrospect was I think misleading. After all, the installation went fine…the updating, not so much.