iMac 600 MHZ

[Peter Gort]

a long time ago, I installed Ubuntu 4 on an old iMac G3 600(blue  
dalmation thing) I have laying around, and it worked OK.  Then I  
needed it to run as a Mac for a while for some project work so I  
erased everything and set it up with Mac OS X 10.3, then 10.4.

A little while ago I got some new computers and retired the old iMac,  
which had done sterling service and never failed in any way, and it's  
over 5 years old now.

Now I have a need of a DNS server in my local subnet, I thought I'd  
stick Ubuntu onto it again.  I went for Desktop rather than server so  
that it could be used to keep 8 year old amused during school  
holidays.  Boy did I get a shock!, neither 6.06 or 6.10 live cds will  
boot to a graphical screen, no matter what options I have been able  
to figure out.  Either I got a completely blank screen or I got a  
mixed up looking text screen that said the XServer had failed to  
start.  Eventually I gave up and downloaded the 6.10 alternate CD,  
and ran an "expert" installation, mostly going with the default  
settings.  At no time during the installation did it ask for XServer  
settings, but the install completed without incident and it rebooted.  
It booted with a strange white square occupying the lower two thirds  
of the screen.....  However it eventually came to a graphical login  
screen that looked normal, and I was able to log in, but it is  
responding so slowly that mouse movements take up to 30 seconds to  
show on the screen and I've been waiting 10 minutes now for the  
Preferences sub menu to appear under the System menu.

Anybody got any idea why this unusably slow thing is happening?  Box  
is an iMac G3 600 MHz, 512MB RAM, 40G hard drive all of it dedicated  
to Ubuntu, no Mac OS Partition.  Spec says "ATI RAGE 128 Pro graphics  
with 8 MB of SDRAM or ATI RAGE 128 Ultra graphics with 16 MB of  
SDRAM" not sure which I've got.  If I can get it to shut down  
gracefully I'll reboot from Mac OS CD and find out...

Peter