Many of you may scoff at this question, but here it is.

I was given (that's right, given) a Macintosh PowerPC 5400/180. Having not actually spent a dime, I figured it'd be worth trying to resurrect so-called "dead hardware" as a little side project.

It turns out that Linux just doesn't like PPC machines very much. This machine has only 24 megs of ram which makes it even harder to get anything to run on it, but I figure if Mac OS 8 can run on it, why can't Linux? Am I wrong?

I first tried a Debian PPC kernel with BootX 1.1.2 and that failed to start at all, so after more research I downloaded the Gentoo PPC iso and tried that. The BootX version included on that CD didn't work so I used my existing BootX 1.1 to try to load that kernel to no avail.

It actually got through the bootstrap process and then died with a "Kernel Panic: Unable to mount root fs on x:xx" where x:xx was some number I can't remember.

I also downloaded the iso for Yellow Dog Linux for PPC, but it seems that that kernel requires much more ram, as I immediately got a "Kernel panic: Out of memory and no killable processes" error when loading that one.

The one thing I did get out of Yellow Dog was a working BootX 1.2.x with the properly installed control panel and whatnot.

The question I pose to you, my savvy friends, is whether I'm totally out of my depth and out of luck, or has anyone pulled off installing any type of Linux distribution on an OldWorld PPC as old as mine? Any suggestions as to which kernel binaries to try would be appreciated, or success stories to encourage me.

Reply, before my faith in Linux is crushed by my failure!!

What's happened to me sometimes when installing linux on older machines is that I will get kernel panics and other such nasties when I allow the kernel to try and "detect" how much RAM is in the system. I've had Red Hat actually install sucessfully on only 16MB of ram on a Toshiba laptop, and then crash on me later when I attempt to boot (with no sensical explanation).

At the boot of the install, you can specify:
linux mem=16M for a machine with only 16MB and the installer will usually stop at an earlier point and tell you straight that you don't have enough RAM to run this distribution. That can save a lot of headaches if you're not really sure how much RAM is necessary for the distro you are installing. As an example, Red Hat will stop before loading into the graphical installer and tell you that Red Hat 7.3 requires at least 32MB of RAM, if you specify something lower than that.

Thanks, Amerist. I have another question, along those lines. Do you know if there is a kernel init parameter that I can pass through BootX that would have the same effect?

Not that it would solve my problem

Did anyone ever get a distro of linux on a ppc5400? I have 10 of them and want to set them up as thin clients- I need to get some version of xwindows installed. We tried yellow dog with no luck. Thanks