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How to Skin Ubuntu MATE to look like El Capitan

Adamscomputerrepair

Adamscomputerrepair

macrumors 6502a
Original poster
Aug 9, 2015
549
287
Do you use Linux instead of or alongside of OS X?

Are you sick of the way it looks?

Do you miss your OS X interface?

Then this video is for you!

Let me know if you have any questions.

-AJC

 
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Don't you find the GUI in Ubuntu crushingly slow and clunky? With high end Powerbooks, the Tiger and Leopard GUI is silky smooth and if you disable drop shadows and animations, windows snap open instantly.
I haven't tried Mate 16 - are there speed improvements over previous bulids?
 
Dronecatcher said:
Don't you find the GUI in Ubuntu crushingly slow and clunky? With high end Powerbooks, the Tiger and Leopard GUI is silky smooth and if you disable drop shadows and animations, windows snap open instantly.
I haven't tried Mate 16 - are there speed improvements over previous bulids?
Click to expand...
That is kinda what I was thinking too, to be honest. However, if it floats his boat, thats fine in my book. All the more better for our little community.
 
Dronecatcher said:
Don't you find the GUI in Ubuntu crushingly slow and clunky? With high end Powerbooks, the Tiger and Leopard GUI is silky smooth and if you disable drop shadows and animations, windows snap open instantly.
I haven't tried Mate 16 - are there speed improvements over previous bulids?
Click to expand...


MATE is a little slow, definitely buggy, but it was more of a proof of concept than anything else. I know some guys (Ahem, channel 48 on YouTube) that say there's no use for Linux on PowerPC. I just kinda wanted to show with Midori I could access the latest Microsoft office, I can play YouTube videos while they buffer, and I even managed to access I heart radio. Spotify web player was still a no go, but hey, I tried. Either way, yeah I switched back to leopard. Not for clunky reasons, but my partitioned hard drive had 10 gigs a piece on each partition. So I had to decide. Better to go with the distro I know whether it's supported or not.
 
Adamscomputerrepair said:
MATE is a little slow, definitely buggy, but it was more of a proof of concept than anything else.
Click to expand...
It's definitely good to have options but such a pity Linux doesn't shine on PPC like it does on similar vintage X86 systems.
I find Debian with Openbox very usable in terms of performance but it's small things like poor touchpad response (despite trying all manner of configs) that spoil the feel of it and make it appear clunky.
 
Dronecatcher said:
It's definitely good to have options but such a pity Linux doesn't shine on PPC like it does on similar vintage X86 systems.
I find Debian with Openbox very usable in terms of performance but it's small things like poor touchpad response (despite trying all manner of configs) that spoil the feel of it and make it appear clunky.
Click to expand...
I didn't have that problem with MATE. My two problems were Firefox constantly bricking and getting error messages when nothing was wrong. I tried Debian and immediately walked away. It is clunky but I've noticed it has problems on every device I've tried. I switched to Ubuntu MATE ten days after buying the Raspberry Pi because I couldn't stand Raspbian any longer
 
Adamscomputerrepair said:
I didn't have that problem with MATE. My two problems were Firefox constantly bricking and getting error messages when nothing was wrong. I tried Debian and immediately walked away. It is clunky but I've noticed it has problems on every device I've tried. I switched to Ubuntu MATE ten days after buying the Raspberry Pi because I couldn't stand Raspbian any longer
Click to expand...

Adamscomputerrepair , super nice guide , really appreciate it.

Firefox is broken due to an update of Ubuntu Mate, mine ( Powerbook G4 12" ) ran pretty stable with Ubuntu Mate 16.04 LTS Beta 1.

Beta 2 was a disaster on my Nvidia Powerbook.

Radeon on the 15" Powerbook G4 meant no HW acceleration last time I tried even with tuning all boot options so I'm going
to format the partitions and make my OS X Leopard partition better.

I feel without HW acceleration , VLC, Mplayer in Ubuntu Mate are left behind by Coreplayer without trying.

A tuned TFF or Webkit is more stable or faster then Firefox in Linux.

Once the default Ubuntu Mate install resolves these issues, I might switch back.

Debian is nice , lightweight when you're not running heavy DE on it like indeed Openbox.

OpenBSD/FreeBSD in my opinion have the 2nd best touchpad support next to OS X but only OpenBSD has packages and Lumina. Compiling X or any DE on FreeBSD is so cumbersome and slow , I gave up.
 
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Lastic said:
I feel without HW acceleration , VLC, Mplayer in Ubuntu Mate are left behind by Coreplayer without trying.
Click to expand...
Can't speak for Ubuntu but under Debian, Mplayer is more efficient than Coreplayer on 360P h264 - higher resolutions and it falls behind to a performance parity with VLC on OSX - that's testing on my 1.67 Powerbook 17" though, probably will differ on other machines.
 
Ok, gave it a try on the 15" Powerbook but I think there is an error when installing the ithemes .

It doesn't find them , the correct command is : sudo apt-get install macbuntu-os-ithemes-lts-v7

Dronecatcher now you make me want to install Debian again :) , been reinstalling so much the past month , only partition that always stays present is OS X 10.5 LOL
 
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Lastic said:
Adamscomputerrepair , super nice guide , really appreciate it.

Firefox is broken due to an update of Ubuntu Mate, mine ( Powerbook G4 12" ) ran pretty stable with Ubuntu Mate 16.04 LTS Beta 1.

Beta 2 was a disaster on my Nvidia Powerbook.

Radeon on the 15" Powerbook G4 meant no HW acceleration last time I tried even with tuning all boot options so I'm going
to format the partitions and make my OS X Leopard partition better.

I feel without HW acceleration , VLC, Mplayer in Ubuntu Mate are left behind by Coreplayer without trying.

A tuned TFF or Webkit is more stable or faster then Firefox in Linux.

Once the default Ubuntu Mate install resolves these issues, I might switch back.

Debian is nice , lightweight when you're not running heavy DE on it like indeed Openbox.

OpenBSD/FreeBSD in my opinion have the 2nd best touchpad support next to OS X but only OpenBSD has packages and Lumina. Compiling X or any DE on FreeBSD is so cumbersome and slow , I gave up.
Click to expand...


Yeah Midori is WebKit. I almost ALMOST had 480p playback on YouTube but there just weren't enough resources. If it gets to be more stable, I may go back to Linux but for now I'm enjoying leopard and playing around with it.
[doublepost=1464896793][/doublepost]
Lastic said:
Ok, gave it a try on the 15" Powerbook but I think there is an error when installing the ithemes .

It doesn't find them , the correct command is : sudo apt-get install macbuntu-os-ithemes-lts-v7

Dronecatcher now you make me want to install Debian again :) , been reinstalling so much the past month , only partition that always stays present is OS X 10.5 LOL
Click to expand...

That's what I said isn't it? If I made a mistake, I'm sorry. I shot 2 videos back to back and my camera was being a jerk at the time.
 
Lastic said:
Dronecatcher now you make me want to install Debian again
Click to expand...
Actually, along with Openbox, Debian ran just as well with XFCE - and looks more user friendly:

Wheezy.png
 
Lastic said:
And now I'm going to stop hijacking this thread :) , is that Debian Jessie or Wheezy you're currently running ? ( title says Wheezy so I think I'm being rethoric here )
Click to expand...

You both realize if you manually add the repositories or add the ability to use add apt repository, this will work on Debian too right? I'm strongly fighting the urge to make a 20 gig partition to try it on.
 
Adamscomputerrepair said:
You both realize if you manually add the repositories or add the ability to use add apt repository, this will work on Debian too right? I'm strongly fighting the urge to make a 20 gig partition to try it on.
Click to expand...

Yup, I know, strongly fighting the urge to wipe FreeBSD right now , install Debian , Mate, macbuntu theme tweaking but have to get up in 6 hours from now and already suffering serious sleep deprication the entire week, good thing it will rain a lot this weekend

[EDIT] Just also realised I can use the 128 GB Compact Flash card in the FW Cardreader for this , ok well shutting down for today or I'll see the sun come up
 
Lastic said:
Yup, I know, strongly fighting the urge to wipe FreeBSD right now , install Debian , Mate, macbuntu theme tweaking but have to get up in 6 hours from now and already suffering serious sleep deprication the entire week, good thing it will rain a lot this weekend

[EDIT] Just also realised I can use the 128 GB Compact Flash card in the FW Cardreader for this , ok well shutting down for today or I'll see the sun come up
Click to expand...


Yeah I'm in the US with nothing but time on my hands. I keep telling myself it's not worth it until I get a bigger hard drive but oh well lol.
 
I built my own Debian Jessie installs from Openbox, on all of my notebooks (both G4s, my iBook G3, and even my Wallstreet). Each has its quirks- my TiBook gives me screen bloom when setting the video mode, and I haven't found a solution so I went back to Wheezy on that one. The others only have minor weird issues, but nothing game-breaking. I use LXPanel, Docky (except on the Wallstreet; used LXPanel for a dock/app launcher there), and feh (wallpaper) for the desktop, with Conky as my battery monitor and Compton as the compositor (compiled and use xcompmgr-dana on the TiBook). With such a minimal install, all of the notebooks run at very useable speeds- even the Wallstreet (watching video is out on that one, obviously). I'm fascinated that an 18 year old laptop can run an up-to-date OS at a not-so-painful clip, and use Midori 5.11 from Jessie Backports as the browser.

I used Dan's guide on ppcluddite and my own research to undertake these installs, of course.

My Blackbook is now running Ubuntu 16.04, since installing Jessie on a 64-bit system with a 32-bit EFI is a huge hurdle that I haven't been able to jump yet. I'll probably install Openbox and purge Unity and all Gnome stuff at some point, and build the same type of system.

My iMac G3 is running OS 9.2.2, my G5 is running 10.4.11 themed to the max, and my Intel iMac and Macbook Pro are both running El Capitan, so all bases are covered here...
 
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swamprock said:
I built my own Debian Jessie installs from Openbox, on all of my notebooks (both G4s, my iBook G3, and even my Wallstreet). Each has its quirks- my TiBook gives me screen bloom when setting the video mode, and I haven't found a solution so I went back to Wheezy on that one. The others only have minor weird issues, but nothing game-breaking. I use LXPanel, Docky (except on the Wallstreet; used LXPanel for a dock/app launcher there), and feh (wallpaper) for the desktop, with Conky as my battery monitor and Compton as the compositor (compiled and use xcompmgr-dana on the TiBook). With such a minimal install, all of the notebooks run at very useable speeds- even the Wallstreet (watching video is out on that one, obviously). I'm fascinated that an 18 year old laptop can run an up-to-date OS at a not-so-painful clip, and use Midori 5.11 from Jessie Backports as the browser.

I used Dan's guide on ppcluddite and my own research to undertake these installs, of course.

My Blackbook is now running Ubuntu 16.04, since installing Jessie on a 64-bit system with a 32-bit EFI is a huge hurdle that I haven't been able to jump yet. I'll probably install Openbox and purge Unity and all Gnome stuff at some point, and build the same type of system.

My iMac G3 is running OS 9.2.2, my G5 is running 10.4.11 themed to the max, and my Intel iMac and Macbook Pro are both running El Capitan, so all bases are covered here...
Click to expand...


Bro, that wall street mod has inspired me. You're not running more that 256 mb's for ram, are you? I thought they were like either late 16 bit or early 32 bit.
 
Adamscomputerrepair said:
Bro, that wall street mod has inspired me. You're not running more that 256 mb's for ram, are you? I thought they were like either late 16 bit or early 32 bit.
Click to expand...

512mb RAM. The way I got the CD to boot for the install was to use BootX. I dragged the kernel and ram disk from the CD to the Wallstreet, selected them in BootX, and used the boot argument "root=/dev/sr1". Once in the install is finished, you'll have to find a way to move the installed kernel and ram disk into your OS 8/9 install and you'll use "root=/dev/sda11" to boot your Jessie install. I did this physically by removing the drive and copying the kernel and ram disk onto my Ubuntu machine, then FTPing it to my server. I then booted OS 9 and downloaded them. If you have an update in Jessie that regenerates the ramdisk ("Updating initrd...), you'll have to move a copy of it into OS 8/9 and overwrite your old one.

I used the mini iso for my installs, by the way...

It's a bit of a pain to maintain a Wallstreet running Linux, but it's worth it to me to have an up-to-date OS on it.
 
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swamprock said:
512mb RAM. The way I got the CD to boot for the install was to use BootX. I dragged the kernel and ram disk from the CD to the Wallstreet, selected them in BootX, and used the boot argument "root=/dev/sr1". Once in the install is finished, you'll have to find a way to move the installed kernel and ram disk into your OS 8/9 install and you'll use "root=/dev/sda11" to boot your Jessie install. I did this physically by removing the drive and copying the kernel and ram disk onto my Ubuntu machine, then FTPing it to my server. I then booted OS 9 and downloaded them. If you have an update in Jessie that regenerates the ramdisk ("Updating initrd...), you'll have to move a copy of it into OS 8/9 and overwrite your old one.

I used the mini iso for my installs, by the way...

It's a bit of a pain to maintain a Wallstreet running Linux, but it's worth it to me to have an up-to-date OS on it.
Click to expand...


That's freaking awesome
 
128keaton said:
I did something similar with my Power Macintosh 8500. 96MB of RAM!! Boots debian and runs apache2. http://play.128keaton.com:82/about/
Click to expand...
As did I, but I used Ubuntu Server 16.04 and a 500MHz Graphite DV iMac with 512MB of RAM. It had shimmering on the CRT, and I originally bought it for parts, so I don't care too much on the CRT gaining hours (no video is displayed but the CRT remains on). It runs a site, World of G3, which will be all about the colourful G3 era of Apple. Currently there's only a home page which I made out of a template, but there'll be more soon: http://imacg3.mooo.com:81/
 
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