Have spent a few hours over the past couple of days installing and playing with Ubuntu Linux on my Powerbook G4. I thought I was quite happy with Mandrake^H^H^Hiva 10.2 (one of the few other mainstream distros that runs on a Powerbook), but I think I was wrong… with Ubuntu, the GNOME battery monitor works, my plug-in wireless card works, and my Wacom tablet works (mostly– no pressure sensitivity). And most of all, everything feels a lot snappier, especially the indispensable MOL (which is one of the few things that’s been more of a hassle to set up with Ubuntu than it was with MDK, thanks to the lack of a pre-compiled kernel module).
As with any flavour of Linux of course, there’s still no hardware acceleration for the G4’s ATI Radeon 9700 graphics chip (I do miss being able to play TuxRacer in its native environment, although the OSX port isn’t bad), and no driver for its built-in Airport Extreme wireless card. And there probably never will be, given both manufacturers’ reluctance to release any information about them whatsoever to Linux hackers. But what the heck.