I have an old iMac G3 (333 mhz, 256 mb RAM, 160 GB HD). I used it to listen to music and online radio, but it's so limited now that I wanted to install a lightweight linux distro to bring it back to life.

I've tried a number of distributions and none of them work. At first they booted from CD and then said that they couldn't mount the filesystem. So I erased the MacOS X partition and reformated the drive with the UNIX filesystem. Still, every distribution I've tried crashes when trying to boot the kernel (Yellowdog, Slackintosh, Xubuntu, FreeBSD).

The last one I tried was Finnix, and when I tried to boot the kernel the following message appeared:

I can't even use fdisk as no distribution will boot. I don't want to do anything fancy with my iMac, I just want a bash prompt and some basic tools like vim and ssh. Any ideas?

Hello,

Puppy linux also comes to mind - http://puppylinux.org/main/Overview%...%20Started.htm
I suggest that you run a live CD first to try to see what's up with your hard drive, since you are getting that error.

Cheers,

Josh

Is that PowerPC based? To my knowledge it isn't. My iMac it's not an Intel one, that greatly restricts the distributions I can try.

Ehh, that will do it man. How about the "sledgehammer" distro?

Do you have a link? Can't seem to find it.

You didn't get the joke....

Anyway, I advise you to check over on distrowatch and grab a live cd version, so that why you can try to mount your hard drive and troubleshoot from there. http://distrowatch.com/dwres.php?resource=ppc

I'm sorry, I'm not a native english speaker.

Finnix is a Live CD version and didn't work either.

I had no problems to set up Debian, Mint 9 PPC and Frugalware on an old iMac G3 (350 MHz, 512MB RAM, 40GB HDD). I just started from the install CDs and went through the different installers with accepting the standard options. Be aware that you need at least 3 partitions on that machines, but the installers should explain that.
Also be aware that you may have to make a fix to the X server configuration once you get that going: https://wiki.ubuntu.com/PowerPCKnown...een_on_iMac_G3

I just tried Debian Minimal. It presents me with the "boot" prompt, I type "install", then it shows:

And after what appears to be an eternity, it shows:

And goes back to "boot:" That has happened with every distribution I have tried.

I'm burning then on a CD-RW, could that be the problem?

Yes, that can be the problem, I have used ordinary CD-Rs. Also, I just pressed enter at the boot prompt, IIRC.

Can't believe the CD-RW was the problem, I have just booted Finnix!

Thanks for your time.

LOL.... I would have never expected for a disc to be the issue in this case. Glad to hear everything is fine now!