PowerBook 1400

Revisiting the PowerBook 1400 (Continued)

The G3 card enabled me to run Mac OS 9.1 with ease. With Ram Doubler installed, I was able to run Cameron Kaiser's excellent Classilla. It's great having a modern browser that is continually updated running on this old beast. But, that's the end of the line for this machine as far as the Mac OS is concerned.

There is always Linux, though. Apple experimented with a version of this operating system back in 1996 called MkLinux but gave it up with the advent of OS X. I remember playing around with it in the late nineties, but development of this distribution ground to a halt soon afterward. A few Nubus Linux aficionados, however, have been maintaining a version of Linux that runs on the PowerBook 1400 and other Nubus Macs since 2000. They have been making kernel upgrades over the years, the latest of which is based on Linux 2.4 although they continue to experiment with later versions which are available at sourceforge. Their mailing list provides a wealth of information and expertise to Linux newbies like myself.

So, onward and upward. I have all the pieces of the puzzle at hand, including a 10 GIG hard drive (eBay, $14) and lots of free time for a change. Let's get Debian PPC running on this old beast.

No single source of information exists regarding a Nubus Linux installation, although this site provides invaluable help, as do the good folks on the Nubus Linux mailing list. Here are some important considerations:

My particular machine with its Sonnet G3 processor required a bit of Mac OS driver reprogramming using ResEdit. The procedure is similar to the one described here.
Partition the hard drive as directed to include a separate Linux root partition and a swap partition of at least 512 MB. The more swap memory the better, actually, on this RAM-deprived machine.
Using the old MkLinux booter (available at sourceforge) is probably the best way to go. It provides you with the option of booting into a Mac OS partition if anything goes wrong.
When it comes to setting up apt sources for Debian Sarge after the installation is complete, use these in /etc/apt/sources.list

deb http://archive.debian.org/debian-security sarge/updates main

deb http://archive.debian.org/debian sarge main

Setting up XFree86 is a major pain as it requires manual configuration. Email me for an XF86config-4 file that works.
Gnome is usable with a G3 processor and plenty of swap memory. As far as desktops go, it's at least as good as Windows XP and costs you nothing. You might, however, consider a less resource-hungry window manager such as Xfce, especially if you have a stock machine.

Update: While it is still possible to run Nubus Linux on the PowerBook 1400, one has to wonder if it's really all worth it. Sarge hasn't been supported by Debian for years and this machine's puny 1MB of VRAM means that one is never going to realistically use it to do much in the way of web surfing. I'm sticking with Mac OS 9.1 as it is still somewhat supported by Apple and there is a relatively active development community of dedicated "CodeWarriors" still trying to keep OS 9 apps up to date for the thousands of Mac users who continue to rely on their legacy software for day-to-day tasks.

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