I set out to get Linux installed on my old iBook G4 over the weekend. Not a huge task, I thought, easy install good payoff, a fun weekend project. Bah.
I downloaded the newly released and ported Ubuntu Gutsy Gibbon for PPC. The install went bad, a software installation failed, so I had to install a bunch of packages with apt-get after the installer finished. After installing GDM, I couldn’t see the screen. It turns out, there’s a bug in a package that was pushed into the Gutsy release. Because PPC is a community supported release, its prone to a few more bugs than the mainline releases. No biggee, I think, I’ll just install Fiesty. All I really want is to have linux on some of my old hardware to play around with.
Somehow, my Fiesty CD didn’t burn correctly, and started throwing errors during the installation. Right after my hard drive was formatted. Now, when I insert a good CD, I hold down ‘C’ to try and boot off of the CD-ROM, nothing happens. I get to the Yaboot screen, which asks me to boot a bad partition of Linux. It lists CD as an option for booting, but nothing happens when I try booting off a new fresh CD.
All this is well and good, and kind of fun to troubleshoot. I’m not losing any sleep over the fix of the iBook, I’m sure I’ll figure it out. I think my next step is to confirm that I have a good CD for PPC. I’m not entirely sure how to do that. I’m thinking about trying to boot off my known-good OSX installation CD, just to see if the machine is still capable of booting off a CD.
Anyone else run into these sorts of troubs? I really would like to have a nice Ubuntu laptop that I can break occasionally, maybe hook up to a robot or something.