I took the plunge and installed Kubuntu PPC on my old mostly unused G3 Powerbook this afternoon and it went pretty smoothly. I’m now in the process of poking around the environment and getting a better feel for things. Kynaptic makes adding packages totally easy and I’ve already added a couple games and other random doodads that aren’t installed by default. KDE does seem to have a display bug where window titles get a little screwed up, but it seems to be mainly an aesthetic issue. I’m really impressed in general with the level of integration and functionality you get when you use KDE. For a reasonably skilled computer user this is a totally viable free alternative to the Windows (and Macintosh) world.

Linux on the PPC platform has come a long ways since I first started playing with it 6 or 7 years ago. Installing Linux on Macs used to required special floppy boot diskettes and a lot of crazy hoop jumping, but no more. In fact from what I can tell the Linux PPC releases are basically simultaneous and on par with the Linux i386 releases in the Ubuntu/Kubuntu world. Progress is pretty darn cool.

I’m in the process of trying to load Zope on one of my two LinuxPPC boxes. I’m assuming it’s possible, but I haven’t actually seen ppc specific RPM’s anywhere. Looks like I may have to it the hard way.

Apple’s stock is up to a new record price of almost $120 today after last night’s earnings announcement. Here’s some additional info at MacCentral.

Cool! IBM has just released ViaVoice for the Macintosh. This is definitely nifty technology, but I’m curious to see what it will be like five years from now. A standard integrated feature of most operating systems? That’s what I would like to see.

Looks like IBM also has a version of ViaVoice for Linux and is also working on VoiceXML, an XML-based markup language for distributed voice applications. I wonder if there are any open source voice related projects out there?

Yep! There are a number of projects listed here. Open Mind Speech is a Gnome and KDE oriented project listed on that page that looks interesting.

This week just flew by. Tomorrow after a half day of work I’m headed to Seattle for an Indigo Girls concert.

Hopefully Snoqualmie Pass won’t be too bad tomorrow afternoon. We’ve got our snow tires on…

On the linux scene I’ve managed to successfully load LinuxPPC on that old Mac clone I mentioned a few days ago thanks to some borrowed RAM. It’s looking like some of my problems were being cause by a defective DIMM. I’m going to have to pick up some more RAM and a G3 upgrade pretty soon here.

I started playing with Emacs today at work. I know it’s considered the text editor by a lot of people, but I haven’t touched it since my college days and I actually never used it to do anything back then. Better later than never.

Hey boys and girls! It’s the Home Gene Splicing Kit!

David K. Every has a new column on MacWeek discussing, “the i-Bench, a new benchmark for measuring Internet performance that PC Magazine recently deployed to prove that PCs are dramatically faster than Macs when tackling some Web-related tasks.”

I haven’t had a chance to check out the i-Bench myself, but I’m somewhat curious about it. I know that on the Mac Communicator is quite a bit quicker at rendering pages than Explorer. Of course Communicator on LinuxPPC blows both away.

I realized this evening that I actually already have perl and apache installed on the one functioning Linux machine in my apartment, my trusty revision A iMac. Hmm… now I just need to install MySQL and php.

A lot of cool stuff is brewing over at Scripting News. For instance today Dave Winer announced a manila based weblog called Qube Quorner. It will cover the Cobalt Qube of course.

I’ve got an old Mac clone sitting around that I’m hoping I can turn into a Qube equivalent. I just want a Linux box that I can remotely administer and do stuff with and that’s exactly what Cobalt’s products are.

Ferris started off regionals with a 39-24 win over Ike. Next up Walla Walla.

My old mac clone is acting cantankerous. Ugh! Time to install Linux permanently.

Today I’m going on a serious apartment cleaning spree. For some reason I woke up at 6 AM this morning and actually got up rather than going back to sleep.

I’m even thinking about finally getting Linux up and running on my other machine!

The Ferris boys basketball team beat LC 51-39 yesterday to win the GSL district championship. Nice job guys!