Rob is right. The Ubuntu wiki is informative and Yellow Dog (now called something else, but I can't remember what) is historically a PowerPC based Linux version.

<soapbox> Unfortunately, a lot of distros have dropped their PowerPC versions, which IMHO is a huge mistake because most of the Apple machines with PPC processors are still running and have very few Linux options.</soapbox>

You can find PPC versions of Debian, Fedora, OpenSUSE and Ubuntu at various places. A good resource is the Oregon State Univeristy Open Source Lab's mirrors at http://ftp.osuosl.org/pub/ where you'll find a list of distros but you'll have to go through the lists to find the PPC version of the iso files to burn.

For what it's worth, on the PowerPC machines in my office I'm running Debian on a iMac G3 (my first Linux install four years ago) and just installed Fedora 9 on a iMac G5. Both run great.

Larry Cafiero
Redwood Digital Research
Felton California
home of SFD/Lindependence Felton 2010

PS -- Also, tech questions like this probably shouldn't be on this list, and I apologize for answering the question.

On Thu, Sep 16, 2010 at 1:42 PM, Rob Beard <rob@esdelle.co.uk> wrote:
On 16/09/10 20:58, don warner saklad wrote:
> How do you setup GNU/Linux on an iMac apple computer
> http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IMac_G4 with Panther OS X 10.3.9
> http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/OS_X_10.3 ?...
>
>
> _______________________________________________
> SFD-discuss mailing list
> SFD-discuss@sf-day.org
> http://mail.sf-day.org/lists/listinfo/sfd-discuss

It's been a long while, but IIRC you should be able to do it with
something like YellowDog Linux (which I believe is a DVD) or an Ubuntu
PowerPC version.  I gather that PowerPC support has been dropped
recently in Ubuntu but you might find that Ubuntu 8.04 PPC would do the job.

When you have a disc (CD or DVD) burnt, restart the Mac with the disc in
and hold down the C key.  It *should* boot from the CD.  I believe you
press enter at the prompt (it'll be a black and white screen) and follow
it from there (I think with Ubuntu it'll be the text installer).  When
it's installed it should boot into yaboot (which is like a PPC version
of Lilo) and then you can choose to boot into Linux or if you've kept
OSX installed alongside Linux you can boot into that too.

This might give you some pointers to get started with:

https://wiki.ubuntu.com/PowerPC

and

http://www.yellowdoglinux.com/support/downloads/

(the YellowDog page seems to mainly cover installing Linux on the PS3).

Hope this helps.  As I say it's been a while (good 4 or 5 years) since I
installed it on my iMac G3 so my memory is a bit sketchy.

Rob


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