Wrestling with PowerPC

There is some sort of Mac fever in the Geophysical Fluid Dynamics lab that I'm under. Pretty much all the desktops and laptops issued to staff and students are all Macs, and I've been assigned an old PowerPC system.

It doesn't matter much to me that it is old because I won't be performing high-power computing with the system. Nonetheless, the different shortcut keys and ways of handling files always irritates me whenever I used Mac, so I was determined to install Ubuntu on it (not to mention the increase in speed that will come with Linux).

But boy it was not easy. For some reason I could not get the Ubuntu CD to boot, only to discover today that PowerPCs require a different boot CD. And that's after I've burnt like two different CDs in my previous attempts. And my desk is out of CD-Rs. Moreover, there seem to be this tiny problem that the monitor cannot detect signals before Mac OS X boots. So when I try to bring up the boot selection screen, I cannot see a thing.

Hopefully, when I bring over a fresh CD-R tomorrow, I can get Ubuntu up and running without much problems...