Thought I would share my experiences installing Mandrake 8.0 on a Rev. A iMac (266 Mhz, 64MB RAM) pulled down the iso image and burnt to CD under Mandrake 8.0(x86) no problems. Machine wouldn't boot from CD, but since i already had LinuxPPC installed and booting from BootX on the iMac, i just fired up the MacOS, copied the vmlinuz and all.gz files (kernel and initrd image) to my MacOS drive, set BootX to use them and had the installer running in graphical mode straight off the bat. Everything went smoothly until it came time to partition the disks. It is not clear what to do to reserve a boot partition 'manually', and if your disk already has the MacOS installed on it, it seems impossible to install a boot partition anyway. DiskDrake ended up making a bit of a mess of the partition table, saying it was 'unable to create new partion' on the disk, and the installer refused to go further. I rebooted, and tried it again, but this time diskdrake said the 'disk's partition table was too corrupted to use' and it would have to wipe it clean to install Mandrake 8.0 I didn't want that to happen, so i hit alt-ctrl-F2 to get a virtual terminal with a prompt and ran pdisk to clear the partitions i had created previously, which seemed to work fine. I couldn't Alt-F7 back to the framebuffer X Server, so i rebooted again and tried it again. This time, diskdrake seemed happy enough, i set it to automatically create partitions, and it left an unallocated 1MB partition as /dev/hda7 which is presumably supposed to be it's boot partition. Everything installed fine, except it complained about the fact it couldn't install the boot loader. This was expected, with all the problems i have had with partitioning, and from bitter experience with x86s i presumed you can't boot off a partition sitting in the middle of the disk anyway. No problem, i'd just use BootX to fire it up like before. in order to do this, i set BootX to use the install kernel, no initrd and set root to /dev/hda8, the root partition diskdrake created. Mandrake then booted up to the prompt, and from there i was able to start the network and use scp (Secure copy) to copy the kernel and initrd image off to one of my other machines. I then rebooted into the MacOS, copied that initrd and kernel into the BootX folder, set BootX to use them and booted into Linux again. Perfect. Everything came up fine, and I was running KDE (with very ugly and minimal set of fonts) after a few minutes. Copying some truetype fonts over and running drakfont to install them went smoothly, and now i'm pretty happy with the machine. There are a few notable problems: 1. kde-multimedia is not supplied. The sound works great, but without a volume control it's a bit annoying since everything is played at full volume. 2. XFree is pretty sluggish - presumably the ati driver needs work. It was sluggish under LinuxPPC too.. I wouldn't want to use this machine as my primary desktop workstation with it's current video performance. 3. programs complain the RENDER extension is missing, so no antialiased fonts for me. 4. libXv and libXfdga (and maybe some others) are not present. Not sure if this is all that bad or not, but the KDE (as opposed to Mandrake) kde-multimedia RPM won't install without these libraries present. 5. Mozilla 0.8 is ancient and has major problems with displaying truetype fonts. it would be nice to see Mozilla 0.9.2 or better, or Netscape 6.1 bundled by default. Otherwise, the install feels rock-solid, and barring some X issues, it's really good. Hope thats helpful to some people. -Pete -- -----BEGIN PGP PUBLIC KEY BLOCK----- Version: GnuPG v1.0.4 (GNU/Linux) Comment: For info see http://www.gnupg.org mQGiBDt7Mf4RBADKYj0I5Jf+MMADvby+j2SS4E7e+D+4jyo4VMNjBCr4tD/sCCNr 0JX4Vuxu7lLtS1+HgyITvl9ZoQUH34q1Xajy8URyLSQVZBQf86lWU1okborMf18H jFSA9TUak3z3Q40WGLXpf6XOvH+8OAWAJfrxI9ln/+3hoZryr8zqBolnUwCgpj+g n/SStK0eBeRbbXL0L5NcGEUD/jzCq21JXsnJg04uV7UAo9W5Vn3zXU9A1DvAsjPf MQsiTqDr6nUsVYIkwXW/1cWn/+q7EfEFe/WJZfAz/ELCLD52R2uoj1QOdTzffKlN fSFa8N38c2K/WYcvNewcHILlfwJBEKX8YTQd4bsVIAQEQOZ4yATcgaJVw8xdQmUF t8zxBACkwAGbKeZ96wBfaT6PZpdkDVN2AyPk2TcefJYlDnQ6M1Yv5kUP1gVbXlfm E9KCGF+YhdArxoYQwBiL4Zquu5yU402ToZBIhroQfQaiQThq4bk23euxOO2bfGF0 GVbLcEpRbVzeRdnnLVjpS3RT7hX5p59/UbTdXefj8q1T8lJsyLQlUGV0ZSBCbGFj ayA8cGV0ZUBjbGF1ZGlhLmR5bi5kaHMub3JnPohXBBMRAgAXBQI7ezH+BQsHCgME AxUDAgMWAgECF4AACgkQtkDcoP96Lps7WgCcCpSFttj2XyRUm4udeGnybPNpgyMA n2xpZbCLIyx0l7+hIRKwTDgKcGUyuQENBDt7MgMQBACj+by6bMcg0PSMACUucRbq BB/ojpnFqTVWf5VE3e3UTXvMnVeVZqcx6J45oz7HSvGJksop0V1zxrS/6NHsmX4n kUl417lEyE/omzhCNKTQ4+TuzXpsupQbfo1teGllCHXehUfsZEUBBAqzfvLtD0pR uGnw4s2y/g3wINDmDWQHpwADBwP8CBvZbwt1GK6bm0wI9JhLCzkRSwXScAgIv4WE wqudslrpIvoF4jJiDdUTaJPZTJ21KoCbq4p3wLlvQfJeeACXxDbC4oy0+HE3sXm/ bqnQqFGk1XJscgIm8fh7W1YPGkXUKN0n0QQCDH7tJT+4SvKkON5F/A/TNocIHI0U V5o2UjCIRgQYEQIABgUCO3syAwAKCRC2QNyg/3oum0umAJ9vC7ahkaHl1428+8e0 h8D0ryjGLACgoO28tDPzJHUT5/OumIjAIPbDT98= =uIlY -----END PGP PUBLIC KEY BLOCK-----
