Good morning! I've been a Linux user for a number of years now. While my distro of choice is normally Ubuntu, I've utilized a lot of different distros out there. Point being expressing that is I'll use whatever distro can get this job done...

Here's the skinny - I took a job in a rather large school district who was predominantly a Mac district. Their intention is to slowly ween people towards the Linux platform and ultimately end up with a mixed environment of Windows, Mac, and Linux, with Linux (likely Ubuntu) being the primary OS seen in the masses.

Downside is, we have a lot of Macs currently. In fact, they're PowerPC Macs. Here's the kick in the pants... we utilize a lot of web based educational software. Well, that requires an updated Firefox and often times an updated flash player. Okay, great. Except that's where it kills us... as newer versions of Firefox and Flash are a dead end.

Having had deployment experience in the LTSP realm I decided that this might be an option. Some LTSP developers indicated the hard part should just be generating a PowerPC chroot for the LTSP clients to utilize. So I just installed Ubuntu PowerPC edition and generated an LTSP chroot. Then I copied that chroot, preserving permissions/ownership, over to the production server - an Intel based Ubuntu server.

With some tweaks I managed to get the Ubuntu clients booting up, however they would simply loop. I tailed syslog and saw they were looping at DHCPACK or DHCPNAK, something like that.

In short, I am now stuck. I nearly gave up on the project until I was told about a "semi geeky Linux user who demoed using LTSP with PowerPC clients at a recent Linux hack-fest." Naturally this sparked my attention as it should be possible, right?

The only curve ball I will be presented with if I even get these systems working is flash. Love it or hate it, it's heavily utilized with our educational web sites right now. Having a PowerPC chroot would be a slam since there is no native Adobe Flash Player for PowerPC Linux systems. I have however looked into Gnash and Lightspark. I have yet to use them but they may provide (some) help... maybe... I'm just not sure yet.

In short, I just refuse to accept that these systems are a dead end. I believe there should be SOME use for them.... somehow... We have well over a thousand of them, so if we can save some tax payer dollars and breathe some Tux life into them, I'd be incredibly happy.

Note: Only other distro I tried was Debian testing, which failed to install yaboot during the installation and refused to go any further.

Bumping this here post up. I managed to get a PPC chroot on an Intel based server but DHCP is failing at syslog. Something about a NAK or ACK. It just keeps repeating... Any insight?

I'd think that flash 10.2 on native mac would still be useful. I wouldn't play with linux on ppc.

You may have seen this. https://wiki.ubuntu.com/PowerPCFAQ#F...ideo_and_Gnash

Yellowdog used to be one of the better ppc distro's. Debian and maybe a few others have ppc support.

Some other choices. http://penguinppc.org/about-2/distributions/

As to the dhcp deal, might post that as a single question in networking.

Thanks for the response. Another flash alternative I was looking into was "Lightspark", but I haven't ventured too far into it quite yet... I hear good things though. *shrug*