If At First Through Sixth You Don’t Succeed…

…maybe it’s time to change your goals.

I recently asked five of my friends if any of them happened to have an Apple laptop of working or almost working status, which they would be willing to part with for the low, low price of free. It turned out that two of them did, so I acquired two circa-2001 G3 iBooks, a 500 MHz model which was working fine, and a 600 MHz one which reportedly never worked well at all.

Neither of them had a wireless network card, so I ordered a used one online. While waiting for the card to show up I tried upgrading the operating system on the faster computer to Mac OS X 10.3.9. I could get 10.3 installed, but no matter how I tried upgrading it, the computer was dead after applying the upgrade, so I had to start from scratch each time. I downloaded the update to 10.3.8, and it had the same result. The Apple Airport card arrived, and it worked fine in 10.3, but the computer still wouldn’t update to a more secure version of the Panther operating system.

In the mean time, I had successfully installed Ubuntu Linux (Breezy Badger edition) on the slower computer, and it was working great other than the lack of a wireless card. I tried installing Ubuntu on the faster computer, again to ill effect. It turns out that Nicole was right—her poor old iBook is just no good. I do hope to salvage the RAM, the little-used keyboard, and possibly someday even the DVD drive and hard drive for the slower computer, so all is not lost.

I moved the Airport card to the slower machine, but couldn’t get Mac OS X to install and update on that computer either. Just great. However, after one unsuccessful attempt at reinstalling Ubuntu Linux, the second try took, and it worked great with the wireless network, even. The built-in speakers weren’t working (though sound would come out of headphones attached to the speaker jack) and it wouldn’t easily play mp3 files, but since my goals were just to have a wireless laptop with a text editor, word processor, spreadsheet, and Firefox, my mission was accomplished.

Not willing to just let it be for some reason, last night I went ahead and upgraded to the recently released Dapper Drake edition of Ubuntu. Not only does it still work great, but the speakers now work as well and it will even play mp3s.

I have used RedHat, Fedora Core 3, and a hard drive installation of Knoppix before on Intel PCs, and so far I’m liking Ubuntu the best of all these flavors of Linux. Updating the software is amazingly simple and trouble-free, and it happily connects to our Macs over the network, and even prints to our HP laser printer through the Airport, and I did it all for less than $100.

So the moral of the story is that when it comes to salvaging free computers, insane amounts of patience plus great software equals computery goodness. Or something like that.