Installing Linux on an iMac indigo
 

Hi everybody,

I have an iMac indigo (500 Mhz) and I am planning to give one of the PowerPC distributions a try. Is it fine to download the ISO images and to hold down 'c' during bootup to install these as you do on a Mac? (heard something about new world firmware and bootstraps etc.)

Also what about unmounting CD-Roms in Linux, the iMac doesn't come with an eject button, are CDs thrown out when I do umount /mnt/cdrom (or similar)? Also do things like 'control-click' work to bring up context menus? And which distro would you recommend? (Mandrake, YellowDog, Debian etc.?) Quite a lot of questions running through my head..

Mkd75

Re: Installing Linux on an iMac indigo
 

I'd love to answer your questions, but I have never really dealt with an iMac. What I would do if I were you is type "iMac Linux Install Tutorial" at google. I'm sure it will give you a ton of results and probably somewhere an iMac Linux forum that can better answer some of your questions.

EDIT: http://penguinppc.org/ This is probably going to be a good resource for you. As far as which distro you want to use, it's preference. I like Fedora, but some think it's slow. Whatever distro you choose make sure it has a solid community since this is your first run with it you will need support.

How do I know if it has a good community?

Most distros have a forum link on their site, so check it out. Look at the response times to issues/problems, and then compare with forums at other distros. I believe that will give you some inclination as to how good the community is!

Re: Installing Linux on an iMac indigo
 

I can only speak about YellowDog.

It's based on RedHat.

It handles the RPM files.

When you download the ISO images, there's a set for New-World Macs (hold C down during boot up) and the old-world Macs.

It'd be interesting to hear whether or not YDL is faster on that Mac than Mac OS X.

I believe SUSE has a distro that runs on that architecture (the imac) as well, but I'm not sure.

As far as the CD-Rom goes, I believe that's a yes for CD-Rom ejecting. It's just been awhile since I played with YDL on a newer Mac.

Good luck!

Make sure you use Yaboot as your boot loader.

http://penguinppc.org/projects/hw/pmac.shtml#latest

Hi everybody,

thanks for your help. Actually there used to be a site called imaclinux.net but it's gone offline. I heard quite a lot of good things about Yellow Dog too, so I probably give it a try. Suse used to have a PPC distribution but AFAIK the last release was 7.3.

I don't know if this will help but there is a Yahoo! group
http://groups.yahoo.com/group/imac-linux/