Installing ubuntu on mac

[John Levin]

On 11 Nov 2004, at 11:21, Erik Bågfors wrote:

> On Thu, 11 Nov 2004 11:13:58 +0000, John Levin <john at technolalia.org> 
> wrote:
>>
>> On 11 Nov 2004, at 10:42, Erik Bågfors wrote:
>>
>>> Hi
>>>
>>> I'm just about to install ubuntu on a imac and I'm not at all used to
>>> mac's.  When reading the howto on the wiki it talks about a NewWorld
>>> boot partition, but says nothing about what that is. I googled 
>>> alittle
>>> and found something about that it had to be 800K and have a specific
>>> type.
>>
>> What sort of imac do you have?
>
> A G4, the one which has half a football as a computer box :)
> http://www.thekev.org/desktops/1024x768/imac.jpg

No experience with these personally. Don't recall anyone else on the 
list talking about them - most of the mac talk has been about laptops 
and g3 imacs.

<snip>

>> No, I don't think so - but I'm not absolutely sure.
>> What I did - and it worked for me - was:
>> 1: Repartition the hd with OS X disc utility - running from the 
>> install
>> cd. Split the hd into two partitions; one for OS X (HFS+) and one free
>> space.
>> 2: Reinstall OS X.
>> 3: Once OS X was running fine, boot from the Ubuntu CD
>> 4: The partitioner will give a very different view of the hd - on an
>> imac, there was something like 11 partitions - a lot of micro
>> partitions installed by OS X for booting, and a small blank partition
>> near the beginning of the drive. This is what you install the Yaboot
>> bootloader on.
>
> So you didn't have to create a new world boot partition? Is the howto 
> lying?

The space is there - or at least, was for me, on g3 imac and ibook - if 
you install OS X first. The boot partition has to be in the first 800mb 
of the HD - I got caught out by this first time I tried installing 
Ubuntu on the imac. You do have to format the partition and mark it for 
the bootloader, after which Ubuntu will do the work. As I recall, 
ubuntu tried to create a boot partition at the start of the free space, 
which failed with a weird error message. This might be a bug in the ppc 
installer rather than anything else. The HowTo is at least unclear.

<snip>

>> PS: Could you send me your machine details and the partitioning
>> version? I'm trying to collate some data on this. Thanks.
>
> Sure, I'll do that once linux is up and running on it.
>
> /Erik

Thanks

John