Gnoppix is quickly releasing new developer versions of its Ubuntu-based Live CD. We tested the latest release, dated 27th of January 2005, which comes in the PowerPC version too.
This is version 0.9.9b1, a beta version, based upon the upcoming release of Ubuntu, Hoary. Above all, a brand new Gnome 2.9.90, support fo usb mass storage booting and some other features, as support for CD writers. The Live CD is 594 MB of size and we took some screenshots too for your pleasure.

Gnoppix seems to release new version with a good frequence, even for PPC: the latest (developer) 0.9.3 version for PPC was made available on January the 20th, so just one week before this beta release. While the stable version, 0.8.2, is based upon Warty and does not show a version for PowerPC.

The bootable cd sports a 2.6.10 kernel: three different kernels with PowerPC, Power3 and Power4 versions available. The PowerPC kernel we booted comes with almost every module one could need. Our test machine is brand new iBook G4 1.2 Ghz, an ATI-based machine, 768 MB of DDR-RAM.

This LiveCD will not take you directly to the Gnome Desktop environment, it will ask you some questions and you will be prompted with some ncurses dialog windows that will ask you about the language you want to use and your keyboard layout. After that and some hardware autodetection the boot of the graphical environment will boot.

The look&feel is the Ubuntu's one, same wallpaper as background too. This is due, probably, to the fact that this is a beta version and work is still in progress. Having tried Gnoppix on a x86 desktop too, I expected a different and customized look.

Hardware auto-detection works fine: graphic card and DRM acceleration, ethernet network card, thermal support, pmu emulation....everything is in place. Airport Extreme, as we all know, is not supported, but a good number of wireless card support comes with Gnoppix, including wlan-ng supported devices. For some reason the wireless card I am using, a D-Link usb wireless dongle, is not working, although the prism2_usb driver is there (and works perfectly with my debian custom kernel). Probably this needs some more work.Audio support for the PowerMac Snapper device is working, with no need of configuration. Modules for hfs and hfsplus filesystems are provided, so you can always do your work with this LiveCD and then copy it over, eventually, your MacOS /Mac OS X partition.

This CD gives you the opportunity to test the Ubuntu desktop and, although this is only a Live CD, runs at acceptable speed on this test machine. OpenOffice, Gimp, RythmBox, Evolution, Mozilla FireFox, Gaim and Xchat are just some of the applications you will find on Gnoppix.

If Gnoppix is good as a portable and handy distribution, I found it useful and perfect as a rescue CD for my main installation: it includes xfs, ext3, jfs and reiserfs utils that will help you repair damaged filesystems.

Screenshots