(Some of the notes below are specific to this netbook; maybe it will be useful to other 311 owners who want to try installing it as well.)

It appears that Jolicloud is basically Ubuntu with a friendly user interface. The “home screen” shows applications in various categories, and several locations (home directory, desktop, network, etc). It comes with a number of applications, many of them aimed at social networking, internet and “the cloud” in general.

Installing it is a breeze. I already had Windows XP on the netbook; I downloaded the installer and ran it (still from within Windows). Partitioning, installing etc happens automagically. (There’s also an ISO available, which, I assume, gives the user more control during the installation process.)

If you have a HP Mini 311 as well, note the following. Once Jolicloud has been installed, and the computer reboots, you’ll see a boot screen that lets you choose between Windows and Jolicloud. Counter-intuitively, you must choose “Windows” here; you will then see a similar screen, and there you select “Jolicloud”. (This may be because the 311 comes with a separate partition containing system restore data… I do hope that Jolicloud did not interfere with that.)

You will need to do some configuring to get the current version (which, as I write this, is pre-beta) to recognize the HP Mini’s Nvidia Ion. JC did use a widescreen resolution, but it didn’t offer much in the way of configuring the screen, and the home screen was REALLY slow. This turned out to be easy to fix; create a Jolicloud account, do a software update, and reboot. The software update will download proprietary software by Nvidia; RMS would frown upon that, but it made the home screen much more snappy, and offers a whole range of configuration options (much like on Windows).

The Jolicloud site offers a relatively small number of apps, although many of these are important and/or popular ones, like Firefox, Google Chrome, apps for Facebook and Twitter, etc. While you may choose to restrict yourself to these apps, you ALSO have access to other Linux software. Synaptic (Ubuntu’s package manager) is “hidden”, but it’s there, and it’s easy to add it to the main menu. I did so in order to install vim, Emacs and a few other things. A nice touch was that icons for these applications were added to the menu automatically.

(Oh, and Python 2.6 is already installed out of the box. How could it be otherwise? :-)

Anyway, so this is a nice little Linux… useful if you just want to browse the web and check your Facebook, but also if you want to use it for hacking. ^_^

Backstory: Gentoo insists on booting up in a resolution of 1024×768 on the iMac, and then sets the console dimensions to 128×48, which leads to a font that is just a little too small for me to read comfortably on this screen. So I spent a lot of time trying to set the resolution to 800×600, hoping that this would lead to a larger font. Under OS X, that resolution works fine, but under Gentoo, the machine refuses to recognize it. Or rather, it ignores video settings that I pass, or the screen goes blank and the computer seems to hang. Pretty weird. At some point I even tracked down the driver in the kernel source, changed it to boot into 800×600, recompiled and reinstalled… which had the same effect as manually setting the resolution, i.e. the computer hangs.

So eventually I started looking for larger console fonts. There aren’t many… there’s the Sigma font, and Terminus… I am using that last one now, and I don’t like it too much, but at least I can read what I’m writing. :-) Fortunately, the sources of both fonts are available, which means I can change them to my liking, or create my own font (eventually). ^_^

Other than that, Gentoo works great on the iMac. Network worked right out of the box, which is essential as many packages can be downloaded using emerge.

Well, back to my hacking configuration hell… :-)

I recommend trying this; it’s a great learning experience when you don’t know much about what makes Linux tick. I learned a lot, anyway.

Although the PPC version is not “official” (it’s supported by the community), it appears to be up-to-date and the installation went well. Granted, there were a few parts in the handbook that worked a bit differently in the newest version of Gentoo, but nothing I couldn’t figure out. Overall, the manual did an excellent job of guiding me through all the steps (many of which I had never done before, like setting up a file system from the command line, or preparing and compiling a kernel).

Now I just need to find a way to set the text mode to something lower than 128×48, and I’m golden… =)

• This is actually an old iMac from around 2000-2001 or so. Specs: G3/450, 256 Mb of memory, 20 Gb hard drive, DVD-R. (Note that this is a PowerPC.)
• Linux should run in text mode only. (For various reasons, e.g. to save space, because the machine isn’t really equipped to run GUIs smoothly, and because I actually LIKE text mode. :-)
• I want to do as much as possible with this machine, so any distro that caters to text mode users (more so than usual), gets extra points.
• Although I have a few years of experience with Unixoid systems, I am not all that familiar with Linux per se, so the distro should probably not require expert knowledge.

So far I am considering Ubuntu (server install), Debian, and maybe Gentoo. (Although I don’t know how difficult it is to use… the compilation part doesn’t scare me… and the Portage package management system is apparently written in Python, which is interesting.)

Are there any other distros that would be suitable for a PPC with limited hardware?