A lady at work asked me a few months ago, if we had any really old PCs for her Aunt, an 84 year old woman. The Aunt had a PC a few years ago, it was old, crappy, but she could play Solitaire on it, so she loved it. But, this PC died, and she was been without for a while. Then one day, the lady at work brought in a G3 iMac. The thing booted up, with Mac OS 8.6 on it. And by the definition of the term… it worked. But it was pokey, and filled with crap from years of use. Enter xUbuntu [ Site ].
xUbuntu is a lightweight version of my new favorite Linux distro, Ubuntu. xUbuntu uses xfce as a desktop manager, instead of the Gnome or KDE. It is designed to be installed on older computers, with limited resources. This iMac was a G3 350mHz, 6GB Hard Drive, with 192MB of RAM, 64 of which I was able to scrounge from some old laptops we had at work. Yeah, the iMac uses laptop SO-DIMM RAM. And, as with the other flavors of Ubuntu, they have a PowerPC ( for the Macs ) version. I ended up using the Alternative Install CD, because the LiveCD didnt have X configured correctly to work with the monitor, and the installer kept crashing. Ill fill the bug report later, dont worry.
At any rate, at the end of the day, I was able to resurrect this iMac into a working computer, with a modern operating system, and I have Ubuntu Linux to thank for it. Just another example of why I love Linux, and the many possibilities it presents.
And to top it all off, we gave the iMac to her yesterday, which also happened to be the Aunt’s birthday! Awwwwwwwwww!
