My old TiBook, which quit running reliably after the upgrade to Mac OS 10.3.8, has new life. When it started dying and wouldn't reboot or turn on properly I thought that the problem was a hardware problem. The laptop would run for an hour or two then would suddenly freeze - it just stopped, no word of a kernel panic or errors of any kind, the screen would just freeze on the last image available and the machine would no longer respond to the outside world. After dying, the laptop would start only about 25% of the time. A tech told me it was likely heat related, or a bad contact with the VGA card - and he wanted $100/hour bench to try and diagnose it. Without an Apple Care plan on that beast, I decided it would be a safer bet to replace the laptop - that was around finals week in December.
Today, for the hell of it, I installed Yellow Dog Linux on the laptop and it seems to be running fine. I have three theories. (1) It was simply a bug with the older power books and 10.3.8. (2) It was a hardware virus (or firmware virus) - yes they do exist. (3) Apple needed a sales boost, so they purposely stopped supporting the older TiBooks :(
In any case, I'm as happy as a lark to have my old friend back. It will become my main linux development machine. In my home lab, I now have an XP desktop machine, a BSD desktop machine, a Mac OS X laptop, and a linux laptop.
Update: I spoke too soon. The old gal took a dive early this evening, though that was after I upgraded to YDL 4.0, it ran for more than a day under YDL 3.x without any issues. I'm going to rollback to YDL 3 and see if it will run stable again. Its possible that whatever buggy code that got put into Darwin might have been ported into YDL also :( If I see problems with YDL 3, then I feel certain that it is some kind of hardware issue. 
