A while ago I picked up a broken Powerbook 3400 from a friend. After
replacing the screen and messing around with it for a little bit, I
decided to try and put Yello Dog on it.

The laptop is running OS 7.6. Yellow Dog offers instructions for OS 9
but none below that. So, i tried to do it with as much as I could
glean from the OS 9 instructions. I "initialized" the hard drive into
one 100 MB partition for the Mac OS and left the rest (Something like
2 GB) blank. Then I burned a copy of the first disk of Yellow Dog
3.0.1 (the latest version of Yellow Dog) and began installing it per
the instructions given at
http://www.yellowdoglinux.com/suppor...ide-single.pdf
. I tried to unzip the boot loader file BootX_1.2.2.sit but StuffIt
told me the archive was corrupted. I burned another copy of the CD, re
downloaded the ISO (thank god for braodband) and still, it said the
file was corrupted.

Im thinking I might need a newer version of StuffIt but I'm not sure.

If anyone has any experience with this or ideas on what can be done,
please any help would be greatly aprreciated.

A newer version of Stuffit indeed sounds like the solution.

99.9% of the time, what works in System 9 works in System 7...they're largely the same, especially when it comes to such matters as this.
I've personally installed YellowDog from System 8 without any trouble.

The StuffIt site only has version 5.5 for any System below 8. Is there soemthing equivalent to www.backports.org for for OS 7 or do I need to upgrade?

How frustrating. Try this zip file instead.

-Andrew

Problem is, at current I dont have a broswer on the mac and (now here's the kicker) the o, l and period keys dont work. So, i cant get that on the mac via just plain old downloading it. I have my main box running Fedora and Windows XP and whenever I burn a cd from Windows, it will not work on the mac. So, how could i get that file over to the mac?

Hmm....you might want to get a working keyboard. As a temporary workaround, though, I'm fairly certain that System 7 comes with a silly little tool called KeyCaps (in your Apple menu) that'll let you click out the reqresite characters. (Also note that the keypad '.' is the same as the period).

As for downloading...

It's possible that your Mac doesn't have ISO9660 support; I don't think it was builtin to System 7. If you have Fedora, you might try burning a CD from there using the HFS mode of mkisofs. Your PowerBook should be able to read that.

OR...

Why not use a floppy disk?

-Andrew

Well thank you for your help but I beleive it is moot now as I have obtained a copyo f System 9 and can now go on with the install as a regular person.