Mandrake 10.1 PPC on an old-world (beige) G3 tower
 

Howdy all,

I dug my old beige mac G3 tower out of the closet to try and install Mandrake 10.1 PPC on. I haven't gotten very far. The machine is a 300MHz G3 running OS9.2, has 384MB of RAM, a 4GB HD, etc etc. I don't care about the underlying OS so I just left it intact figuring I could install right over it.

Following the instructions in the release notes, I unpacked the BootX files and used that to boot from OS9 to (hopefully) start the install process. It initializes the IDE devices, starts the RAMDISK stuff, then dies. Here are the last few lines of the boot process:

[snip]
RAMDISK: Compressed images found at block 0
VFS: Mounted root (ext2 filesystem) readonly.
Freeing unused kernel memory: 172k init 4k chrp 8k prep
E: error opening /tmp/syslog
FATAL ERROR IN STAGE 1: Fatal error initializing.

I can't recover from this.
You may reboot the system.
[end]

That's not very helpful to me...I'm guessing the problem lies somewhere around that FATAL ERROR opening /tmp/syslog :D but I'm not sure why it's choking.

Can anyone offer any insight?

TIA,
Jeff

I've got the exact same problem on my Mac PowerBook G3 233 w/ 32 MB RAM. I'm trying to install Mandrake 10.1 also. Plus the five lines you quote are identical to mine.

I found this web site:

http://www.wildoxmedia.com/Mandrake-PPC.htm

and filled out the BootX screen identically to the one pictured there. Now I get past the error and have an X mouse cursor on a blank turqoise background. I got nothing after that, so it still doesn't work 100%, but I think it shows that the trick in getting past the FATAL ERROR IN STAGE 1 is to use the correct kernel arguments. Maybe the ones listed at the above website will work for you, I'm going to see if I can find any more documentation on these kernel arguments.