Installing ubuntu on mac

[steve]

I've got Ubuntu (following hoary) installed on a imac 350mhz and it runs
great. I could never get the partitioning right for creating a duel boot
environment, so Ubuntu is all I have on it. I managed to get Yellow Dog
in a dual boot setup, but it's a mac specific distro. One of these days
I hope there is a non-geek gui installer that will do this without
asking too many questions, and works. Good luck, maybe with your success
I'll give it a go on my PBG4.

steve



On Thu, 2004-11-11 at 11:43 +0000, John Levin wrote:
> 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
> 
>