Jeremy, This thread already contains some false and misleading information. I just installed 8.04 Server on a Power Mac G4 not long ago, so I'll try to give you some real-world experience.
First, while 6.10 is the last officially supported release, you can get the newest version 9.04 for PowerPC. The difference is, its entirely community supported without Canonical's involvement. See this link for more details: https://wiki.ubuntu.com/PowerPCFAQ And this link for downloads: https://wiki.ubuntu.com/PowerPCDownloads For me, the installation of 8.04 was relatively painless, except for one issue. First, note that the IDE controller on older Macs only supports internal hard disks up to 120GB. I don't know the specifics of the controller in your iMac, but if it came with a drive smaller than 80GB, you may run into this limitation. For more information see: http://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?t=1113139 That being said, Ubuntu on old PPCs looks for the hard disks to be initialized in a very specific way in order to work. You can't just use a typical GPT or MBR. You may not have seen the Apple table if you've never installed a PPC version of Ubuntu. The PPC version of Ubuntu comes with very different, very old, very buggy versions of fdisk and parted. Still, use parted to initialize the disk. You can see my Apple-formatted partition tables in the link above. I can't say for sure if your computer will require the Apple Partition Map or not. I know mine did, but I know some newer machines may not. If yours does, just know that its available as an option in parted when you partition the disk. Beyond that, don't be afraid to download a distro and tinker! TBH, that's how I learn. Try something, break it, then try to figure out how to fix it. Also, regarding other distros, Debian is obviously good and very similar to Ubuntu, and Yellow Dog has specialized in Mac Linux distros for a very long time, so that might be a good avenue. However, I haven't tried any of their recent distributions. Good luck and keep us updated! John On Jun 6, 7:29 am, Jeremy Leonard <[email protected]> wrote: > One of my friends has some old Mac hardware that he is wanting to try > Linux on. I told him that I could probably install Ubuntu for him, > but my experience is primarily with picking up hardware by the piece > and creating my own system. Is there anything I should watch out for > when installing on a Mac system? > > Thanks. --~--~---------~--~----~------------~-------~--~----~ You received this message because you are subscribed to the Linux Users Group. To post a message, send email to [email protected] To unsubscribe, send email to [email protected] For more options, visit our group at http://groups.google.com/group/linuxusersgroup -~----------~----~----~----~------~----~------~--~---
