I'm looking for options to get Ubuntu up and running, I'd like help/feedback on any or all of them

[John Levin]

On 30 Mar 2005, at 03:10, chris wrote:

> I have two systems
> 	Powerbook G4 1GHz	 1GB ram	"60GB" (60*10^9 bytes) HD system that I 
> can't seem to get Yaboot to load on.  I was able to load just Ubuntu 
> on this one, but I am emailing you from this now, and must have MacOS 
> on this system (I'd perfer to have a dual boot, but if I can't  get 
> yaboot to install, it won't work).
> 		Of corse, if I can get both Mac and ubuntu to install without 
> yaboot, this would be ideal (obviously my system and yaboot are 
> incompatible -- evidenced by the inability to load).

If you have installed ubuntu on your Powerbook (as opposed to using the 
live cd - I don't know if that uses yaboot) then you have got yaboot 
installed and working. My guess is that when you tried dual booting OS 
X and Ubuntu, yaboot wasn't in the first 8 mb* of the hard drive.
(* 8mb - from memory. I've looked all over the wiki, but can't find the 
page I read when I installed ubuntu with OSX on my iMac - I had 
problems like this because I had installed yaboot after the OS X 
partition.)


> 	I have an older system PowerPC G3 266MHz	192MB ram, 2 hard drives a 
> 4GB (which I don't want to touch) and a 15~20GB HD, both presently 
> formatted in HFS+ but the larger one has no files on it, in 
> preperation to load linux on there when I get the time/version that'll 
> work on a beige G3 w/ built-in scsi and 2 ADB ports (I also have a USB 
> card, I put in a few months after purchase).  The system was assembled 
> in November 1998.  It came with OS 8.5 and currently has OS 8.6 on it. 
>  I tried the same warty release CD I successfully used on my laptop, 
> can't boot from it.
>

The beige G3 powermacs are a real pain to put linux on, due to their 
dodgy bios. I couldn't get any linux cd to boot on it - other than Mac 
OSes, the only thing that works 'out of the box' is DarwinBSD (the base 
of OS X). I believe you need to have an OS8/9 partition for the kernels 
or something - which you have so you're part of the way there. (I 
recently aquired an old beige g3 and when I have time will try this out 
for myself.)
Meanwhile, take a look at:
http://www.ubuntulinux.org/wiki/InstallOnOldWorldMacs

John

www.ubuntulinux.org
linux for humans