Well, I haven’t touched this log for some time now. It’s not that I got tired of it; actually it was a matter of using all of my personal time for computing-related activity elsewhere. I have just ended a two-week journey through the world of the Debian Linux PowerPC port. I have also come to see just how critical hardware choices can be.

I have learned a costly but valuable lesson when it comes to trying to use alternative operating systems on an Apple PowerBook. I can distill it into two bullet points. These two facts can save you hours of fruitless toil:

1.) The nVidia-based 1GHz 17″ PowerBooks from Apple are an open-source OS nightmare.

2.) Any PowerPC-based machine with an nVidia card is not a good idea for running an open-source OS.

The past few weeks have been filled with most of my writing going toward certain mailing lists, trying to figure out why I was having so much trouble getting a decent Debian Linux install on my PowerBook. A couple of posts stirred up quite a bit of activity, particularly on the Debian PowerPC list. I have actually backfilled entries in the weblog that provide a chronology of highlights in my recent open-source odyssey.