[Novalug] MAC mini PPC and Ubuntu

[Mark Smith]

okay, silly question, but i reckoned there'd be some sort of linux live
disk that i could use to boot the unit.  then i'd get a shell and destroy
the first couple of sectors of the disk drive and then continue on to
install the system normally.  of course, in retrospect, if i had a live
disk for my mac then the install would work w/o having to destroy the
apple os partition in the first place.  ;-)

so, i guess i can boot into macosx and then run dd over my hard drive or
fdisk or similar, or i can boot from a macosx rescue disk and then do
the same.  i'm a bit afraid though as that's a one way ticket.  if the
partition type idea fails then i still can't install and i'm also left
w/o a macosx.  apple is not supporting macosx on g4 any longer so i
might be stuck.

do you happen to know any live images that i can use to access the disk?

On Mon, Jan 23, 2012 at 03:59:45PM -0500, Mark A. Metz wrote:
> I think you'll have to remove the Apple OS partition table with the live image or GParted first.
> I think it will work unpartitioned.
> 
> Mark Smith <mark at winksmith.com> wrote:
> 
> i tried an 11.10 install last night. after a couple of false starts
> i was able to boot from a usb key and everything looked keen until i
> reached the disk partition section. no hard disks were represented.
> i booted back to macosx and lo and behold my disk was there so obviously
> it's missing a driver or something. it's a standard ata disk bus so
> i'm not sure why it failed. google revealed nothing interesting.
> 
> anyway, i'll give debian 6.0.3 a go tonight unless something else comes
> to mind.
> 
> On Mon, Jan 23, 2012 at 02:46:59PM +1300, Mark Smith wrote:
> > Hey... I was gonna buy my daughter a smallish desktop computer for her
> > room, but then i remembered that i had a MAC mini (one of the older
> > PPC varieties). I had originally purchased it due to its size and
> > noiselessness; both of these features will be helpful here too. It's
> > not the latest and greatest, but for her needs it should be completely
> > adequate.
> > 
> > I looked it up for Ubuntu and it turns out that it's supported in a
> > fashion. I have 32b PPC for 11.10 and 11.04. At least it's way better
> > supported than by Apple!
> > 
> > I found the right images to try and I found some documentation to help
> > me along. Has anyone given this a go? or has some additional comments
> > regarding this platform/os combination?
> 
> -- 
> Mark Smith
> mark at winksmith.com
> mark at tux.org
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-- 
Mark Smith
mark at winksmith.com
mark at tux.org