Yellow Dog 5.0.2 and Apple IMac G3 (white)

Ok heres the deal. I have an old White IMac G3 that i am trying to get running for a friend he does not want to pay for Mac OS so i said i would try and get linux up and running on it. i found a distro called Yellow Dog Linux and it seems to install fine, but when i go to do the post boot configuration the mac just gives me the little face and question mark icon. the only thing i can narrow it down to is that thee mac doesnt see the bootloader on the drive. now this is not the original hard drive that came in the mac its an old one i had laying around its about 20 gigs or so. the originnal drive was completely dead.

I did try inserting the cd and using the live yaboot bootloader to boot the hard drive image but i am not 100% sure of the actual directory of the kernal image. i have tried a countless number of commands and directories. but the only responses i can get are :

command not suported
not a valid Elf32 imagee
not a valid partition

does anyone know what the hell is going on. or know what i can do to manually boot this linux kernel. or does anyone know where i can find an old version of MAC OS for free, or know of a linux distro that will not cause as many problems. i dont use macs... and have never owned one... hell i dont even own an ipod.

any help would be greatly appreciated.

 

The only other current PPC distro I know of is called Slackintosh - a port from Slackware

ftp://ftp.slackintosh.hu/pub/Slackintosh/12.0-iso/slackintosh-12.0-dvd.iso

or via Bittorrent

http://slackintosh.workaround.ch/pu...-torrent/Slackintosh_12.0.3742814.TPB.torrent

 

There are many PPC distros.

http://penguinppc.org/about/distributions.php

 

i did try ubuntu 7.0.6 for mac i had issues with it. it seems like it would load i could hear a startup chime. but could not see anything. i tried booting with video=ofonly and still got the same problem. i also kept getting an error saying failed to load x server would you like to see an output file for debugging. so far ubuntu and yellow dog are the only ones i have tried. i will try a couple others tomorrow when i get off work and let you know what i come up with. thanks for the links to the distros. when i searched google for a mac distros the main ones that came up were ubuntu and yellow dog.

i did read somewhere that if the hard drive has an incorrect jumper setting it could cause the mac not to see the boot partition.

 

Fedora is more than available for ppc. It can do the multi-cd boot too. I am partial to fedora, my favorite distro. Put five on it, light enough maybe.

 

Make sure you are root, then when this is asked, say yes to all the dialogs it asks for. Try to configure too.
X will start up in a weird mode, and you will get a dialog display box, go to hardware, video card, and select fbdev - linux framebuffer. Then choose a resolution you like, and close the box with OK. X will stop, and you will be dropped back to a prompt. type gdm to get to the gnome display manager on an install system, or startx on the livecd, because odds are you won't know the password.

 

I realize this, but that does not mean people who google this issue still won't find it. I discovered the cure on my own, and so I wanted to help people who google here.
Just tryin' to help my fellow penguiners.

:major

 

I will give this a shot tomorrow. The hunk of junk is sitting in my garage waiting for attention. Thanks for the 15 month late reply btw.