I have a clamshell iBook that does not want to read any CD I burn. It has no floppy drive either. Nevertheless, I am determined to make it into something I can use (need OpenOffice, GIMP, and GnuCash - which are hard to configure on OS X)

Is there something I can edit (bootloader.conf, OpenFirmware, or something) so that the OSX bootloader points to a linux kernel on a second partition which could then use ftp, downloaded files, or mount an ISO and continue a linux installation?

I know Mac isn't linux, but from my N00b experience it seems close enough that I should be able to do this with some degree of ease (and I use that term loosely).

Mandrake is a simple distro for beginners which can be installed on a PPC architecture. You can ask them here:

http://linuxiso.org/forums/viewforum.php?forum=2&1

You could boot to the NIC, and install that way. It would be a pretty big project though, and you would need to have one machine already setup and running Linux.

I have a linux box dual booting windows. Do you know what options I would need to set in the Mac OS / OpenFirware to get it to boot from the network and how I would make the corrent kernel image available to it from the linux box?