My girlfriend has an iBook G4 which doesn't work; the problem is that when ever she tries to log in, Mac doesn't recognize her password (we've tried to solve this, but this isn't really the problem here).

What our sort of "mission objective" was, was to save all her data and install (or "upgrade") to Ubuntu. I tried inserting Knoppix and holding the 'c' button down (I'm new to Mac, but that seems to be how it's done there) but Knoppix wouldn't work. Then after a few minutes on Google I found out that Knoppix doesn't work with Mac and that I should try Yellow Dog or something (which costs money, so I don't think so). Then we tried to put the Ubuntu disk in, but it wouldn't start up.

I can't start it up from the computer because we can't login, so this has to be done by startup- but it seems that mac doesn't had a BIOS. Which is really confusing and a bother.

How should I go about doing this? I want to show my girlfriend how awesome Linux is.

You need to get a Linux livecd PPC version. I think Ubuntu, Fedora and Mandriva have them.

ibooks use the Power PC which is not compatible with intel i.e x86 processors.

As stated there many linux distributions for the PPC other then YDL.
http://penguinppc.org/about/distributions.php
http://distrowatch.com/dwres.php?resource=ppc


BTW
http://support.apple.com/kb/HT1274

First of all I need a Linux distro which will be able to recover her data. What distro is best for that?

Second of all I need to find the PowerPC version of Ubuntu? I can only find i386 and amd64 here, but no PowerPC. Ubuntu is available for Mac right?

(excuse my unfamiliarity in this matter, I just recently found out there were different types of.. what would this be called- platforms?)

This isn't a linux solution, but it may help.

Get hold of an OS-X install disk and run it. I'm pretty sure that one of the options is to reset all passwords. You can do that without losing data etc. Warning - I'm remembering this from some time ago, and probably not the current OS-X version.

Ubuntu is available for PPC however the release is only available from the Main Server Ports area:

http://cdimage.ubuntu.com/ports/rele...repid/release/

For Desktop Version use LiveCD. For Apple Macintosh G3, G4, and G5 computers, including iBooks and PowerBooks as well as IBM OpenPower machines.

Like I said, we already tried to solve this problem, by doing exactly that actually, and it didn't work. She could get to the part where she could reset passwords for a specific user, she could enter the new password, but when she clicked the "Save" button- nothing happened. I.e. she clicked it, it went down (like buttons normally do when you click them) and then... nothing.

Sorry, I hadn't realised you had the OS X install disk.

Thanks, I've downloaded the PPC Ubuntu 8.10 LiveCD so I guess that answers the second question. But I also need to recover the data from her iBook.

Can all liveCDs recover data, or can only OSs like Knoppix do that? If the Ubuntu liveCD can't recover data, what would be the best OS to do so?

What version of the Mac OS are you running? This will give some indication of what type of filesystem your PowerBook is using. Depending upon the filesystem there are several ways to recover the files.

Do you have an external USB or other hard disk? You will need some device to which to copy the files to be recovered or saved.

She says she's using OS X, I don't know what file system that OS uses though.

She does have an external HDD with a lot of free space, I don't know what file system it uses but changing it shouldn't be any problem. I also have a couple of HDDs and memory sticks, so retrieving the data shouldn't be a problem either

If you are using OS X then the system probably is using HFS+. There is a program


You can also download Ubuntu 8.10 Desktop and write the ISO to a CD and boot the CD with your PowerBook. You can then mount the OS X HFS+ filesystem drive with the following commands:

If you want to mount a hfsplus formatted drive or partition, e.g. /dev/sda1

1. Make a mount point for it, that you can call as you like, e.g. 'hfsplus', where you like (usually on /mnt or /media).
You need to run this commands always with root privileges
2. Mount it, specifying file system, device and mount point
An icon will appear on your desktop.

3. Create a mount point for your external drive as follows:
4. Mount your external drive as follows:
If you know what file system is on your external drive you may replace the auto with the name of the file system (adfs, affs, autofs, cifs, coda, coherent, cramfs, debugfs, devpts, efs, ext, ext2, ext3, hfs, hpfs, iso9660, jfs, minix, msdos, ncpfs, nfs, nfs4, ntfs, proc, qnx4, ramfs, reiserfs, romfs, smbfs, sysv, tmpfs, udf, ufs, umsdos, usbfs, vfat, xenix, xfs, xiafs).

An icon will appear on your desktop.

You can now proceed to copy the drives from your internal PowerBook hard drive (/mnt/hfsplus) to your external hard drive (mnt/backup) using drag and drop on the desktop.

5. To unmount the hard drives
Detach your external drive from the computer and you can proceed to install Ubuntu Desktop on your internal PowerBook drive.


Alternatively, you could look into using HFS+ Explorer to download the files.

What program?

So this is something I do on the iBook, using the Ubuntu PPC version? She comes back from the country in a couple of days, I guess I'll try it then.

Sorry, I guess I lost my train of thought. See the last line of the post.
Yes, the instructions were for running the Ubuntu PPC LiveCD on the PowerBook.