the powerpc linux saga continues

I net-installed Ubuntu Linux ("Hoary" beta release) on my four-year-old Powerbook G3 on Friday. For the most part, I'm loving it. There's a few quirks here and there -- Linux on powerpc has always been sort of second-class -- but using Gnome and Openbox is everything I thought it would be. Plus, Ubuntu revealed some pleasant surprises.

My biggest worry with the switch was the use of suspend and resume. I had never really seen it work well except on a friend's ThinkPad. Even then, he had a press a button and wait, etc. Surprisingly, suspend/resume works just like Mac OS X. Opening and closing the lid do exactly what you'd expect, including the pulsing sleep light and having the screensaver prompt me for a password when I open it back up. Good job, guys!
Managing Perl is mostly sweet. Since Debian's Perl is, by default, setup to using INSTALLDIRS=site, I can install prebuild packages using apt alongside modules I install with the CPAN shell, which will drop them into /usr/local. Well, mostly -- I still can't figure out how to get modules to install executables into /usr/local/bin. It keeps trying /usr/bin, even when I tried specifying INSTALLBIN or INSTALLSITEBIN manually. (Thanks for the tip, Ari.)
Sound is a bit loud. Apparently there's no setting between off and wake-the-neighbors.
Sensors don't work, but that's okay -- this thing has been running exceptionally cooler than expected. I'd estimate about 96 F / 35 C, based on previous experience with Mac OS X when I did have sensors.
3D worked almost out of the box, I simply had to set the depth to 16 bits instead of 24. This gives me an excuse to play with the SDL and OpenGL perl modules.
Turns out Powerbooks have Synaptics-brand trackpads that don't follow the Synaptics protocol. Looks like there's no equivalent of SideTrack :(

This biggest surprise so far is speed. Everything is amazingly snappy for a 500 MHz G3. Daily operations such as working with Perl, tab-completing Subversion commands with Zsh, ssh'ing to hosts, and browsing the web are all amazingly fast. I'm even treating myself to Firefox's smoothscroll setting! I've lost all desire for a new laptop.

The biggest disappointment is networking. The network-admin program tries really hard, but I simply don't have much luck with it. It hangs a lot, which isn't good when you change access points frequently. For now I'm sticking with iwconfig and dhclient.

Not that I use it that much, but I'm unsure if there's a solution regarding QuickTime and Flash with PowerPC Linux. There's an open-source SWF library, but it appears to need some work. We'll see.

Oh yeah -- there's no more spinning beachball.