My latest adventure

[screwballl]

I got a Blueberry iMac from work that originally had OS8 but came with the OS9.0.4 discs and OS9 installed. I figured, great! another linux box!
It has 192Mb of PC100 memory, unsure if it has the 266 or 333Mhz cpu and someone before me put in a WD 40GD hard drive.

Been playing with it for a few days and...
Well... not so great.. 3 days working with it and long story short, BootX will not boot to linux even though everything seems to be setup properly.

Still playing with it to see what else can be done...

edit: see post on 5/25/07 below on what I went through.

[screwballl]

Well good news, seems that the latest install of linux allowed it to boot to the desktop but I am waiting for it to update and restart to see if it sticks...

[Panda Man]

I DEMAND PICTURES! haha, nice, where do you work?

[screwballl]

REAL Pictures are on the way along with a how I did it and where I screwed it up (or simply misunderstood).
I work for a small ISP and it was my bosses' mother's old computer that has just sat here for 2 years now. Everything still worked perfectly but just to old and slow and incompatible for anything useful nowadays using OS9 (until now with linux).

The only real catch is... I don't know exactly why this installation worked and the previous ones didn't aside from 2 possibilities.

Originally I simply downloaded the 6.06.1 Ubuntu PowerPC iso and burned the CD... I got it to boot to the LiveCD desktop but I am guessing it has a 4x CD ROM because that was completely useless.
Then I tried Kubuntu...that one would not even boot to the Live CD.
Then I got the Alternative Ubuntu 6.06.1 CLI version.
I formatted and repartitioned the entire hard drive, installed Ubuntu without a single error or problem. Until I restarted it. When it restarted all it showed was a folder with a question mark in it. Nothing else... would not go anywhere. This consumed half of day 1.
The next day after work I did some google-ing and found out this one is called an "Oldworld" Mac that stated it will not boot to any OS other than Mac (OS8, 9, X). GREAT! I found a few sources where other people had gotten Linux working on their Mac of the same generation (sometimes a G3 iMac or iBook, but they installed something a bit older like Ubuntu 5.10 or another distro). The key seemed to be a little app called BootX which displays a box that gives you the option of booting to MacOS or Linux. So I broke out the OS9.0.4 disc, partitioned the hard drive so OS9 had 1GB of hard drive space and the rest is for Linux. OS9 installed without a hitch, updated StuffIt so that it could unpackage BootX and then installed BootX. Then I restarted, installed Ubuntu to the rest of the hard drive space not touching the Mac partitions (of which it created 10 partitions ranging from 5KB to 1GB). On the installation it never asked for a boot loader or which partition I wanted to boot from, nothing like that but I figured it saw BootX or soemthign else was in use. *shrugs* Upon reboot I got the BootX and chose MacOS.. that booted normally. Opened BootX on the desktop and chose Linux, it rebooted... and stuck at a blank screen. Stayed like that all night. Copied a few files from the Ubuntu CD to the System folder, tried a few command line arguments..... and still nothing. This consumed after work on Day 2 (minus the hour I went to coach daughters soccer).
I didn't have to work until the evening shift so I had most of the morning to play with it today. I downloaded each update for the OS (9.0.4 to 9.1, 9.1 to 9.2.1, 9.2.1 to 9.2.2) plus a firmware update (like a BIOS update) to 4.19f (I think it was). After that was done I went through and started the Ubuntu setup AGAIN during which I deleted the previous Linux partitions (not touching the 10 Apple partitions) to start from scratch. This time during the installation, towards the end it asked if I wanted to setup yaboot to make this installation bootable so I said yes (figuring this would be needed by BootX to boot to linux).
After the installation finished and it ejected the disc and restarted, something magical happened...
IT BOOTED STRAIGHT TO UBUNTU, NEVER STARTING THE MAC OS OR BootX.
I installed all updates from Synaptic and restarted it, booted to Ubuntu again. Restarted a few times just to be sure and each time it booted straight to Ubuntu. At the beginning of the boot process it does display the folder with a question mark for 1/2 a second then shows a happy Mac for 1/2 a second and boots to Linux.
I suspect it was the firmware update that made this possible but without going back over every single step again (which I will not do for now, if its not broken, don't fix it) I am unable to pinpoint exactly what made this happen. I have not had to mess with any video or other drivers, it gets its IP via DHCP using the built-in ethernet without a problem, it gets good download speeds (with OS9 the fastest I ever saw was 130-150Kb/s, with Ubuntu it cruises along 300-600Kb/s), and it seems to run very well considering the specs (266 or 333MHz PPC CPU, 192MB PC100 RAM).

I may clean the system off and try it without the MacOS partition to see if it works but that will not be for awhile after I have played with it.

Since this install, I have also changed the desktop to Kubuntu which seems to work well for this setup.

[screwballl]

got a quick picture of it in action:

[Hitman]

Wow you need to clean up LOL.

[yurimxpxman]

Words cannot express my hatred towards Apple's desktop machines, especially their mice. That looks like a lot of fun, though.

[screwballl]

@hitman... yeah this is my work desk so it stays fairly messy

@yuri... it was kinda fun but also a challenge which I like

my next adventure is to get a second SATA3 hard drive for my new computer and get kubuntu dual booted and get some gaming like CS:S working on it... have not had much luck with wine in the past but it may have changed enough to be usable now.

[Lead Head]

Originally Posted by screwballl

@hitman... yeah this is my work desk so it stays fairly messy

@yuri... it was kinda fun but also a challenge which I like

my next adventure is to get a second SATA3 hard drive for my new computer and get kubuntu dual booted and get some gaming like CS:S working on it... have not had much luck with wine in the past but it may have changed enough to be usable now.

My last go with Wine about a month or two ago sucked. Half Life 2 crashed while loading the level

[screwballl]

last go I had it worked fine on my XP3000+ system except any online play would lag at 900+ ping but also around 30-50 fps
never could figure that out.