Slackintosh on eMac G4

ChathamJoker · 06-28-2009, 11:22 AM

hello everyone,

My friend just gave me an eMac with mac os X 10.3.9 on it, and he junked it up, so it's very slow. So I said to myself, hey, I can put Ubuntu 6.06 on it and actually make it useful!
So, I tried installing Ubuntu, and even with 6.06, there was the black screen OF DEATH!!!!!!!
You could hear it boot up, there is just no way you can see anything.
So my second choice was Slackintosh. I burned the CD version of 12.1 the new release. And I only burned 3 out of the 4 disks because people told me I don't need the 4th one. So I installed it, and it boots up. I press enter to boot it up, and nothing. NOTHING shows up. If there's anything I can do, please post.I need help. It's sitting in my room collecting dust. I want to make it USEFUL. If I should start with an earlier version of slackintosh,or something? Could you possibly help me with my ubuntu problems? I want to make it useful.

Thank you very much for your help,
William The Great.

chutsu · 06-28-2009, 02:16 PM

To be honest! Installing linux on macs IN MY OPINION is not that worth it. Sure its great that you can run it, but hardware support for the mac is not great, you will eventually run into problems of not being able to something because your using a PowerPC computer. If you want to use opensource software, I would suggest you get MacOSX + Xcode + Macports installed.

But anyways to answer your question, try and do the following:
For Ubuntu:
Try passing the boot option: noacpi or acpi=no

https://help.ubuntu.com/community/Bo...Boot%20Options

so Prees F6 when the ubuntu boot screen comes up.

Explaination of what the boot options do
https://help.ubuntu.com/community/Bo...Boot%20Options

crackpipe · 06-06-2010, 07:19 PM

Wondering if you ever got this solved Chatham. I too got a black screen in Slackintosh, installing it on an eMac G4 700MHz. It's probably nothing more than a simple fix in yaboot.conf. Problem is, I could not for the life of me chroot into the disk to modify the file.

Code:

# mkdir /jail /jail/proc /jail/dev /jail/sys
# mount -o bind /proc /jail/proc
# mount -o bind /dev /jail/dev
# mount -o bind /sys /jail/sys
# chroot /jail /bin/sh
chroot: cannot execute /bin/sh/: no such file or directory
# chroot /jail /bin/bash
chroot: cannot execute /bin/sh/: no such file or directory

Both /bin/sh and /bin/bash are present. For some reason, it won't allow me to execute a shell into /jail. TWo lost days and a Google overload to determine this chroot problem, and I still haven't been able to find that answer, so I can't yet get to what is probably a simple "ACPI=OFF" addition to yaboot.conf. Were you ever able to solve this problem? I hate it when I have to fix the tool to fix some other tool, and that can't even be accomplished. No chrooting, no changing a simple configuration file in two (lost) days. Wow. Maybe some of us need a full time IT person on-hand just for home computing these days. Chrooting is not supposed to be this difficult.