So here I am asking a "best distro" question!

A fellow brought me his Mac Powerbook G3 Pismo and the (6 Gig) hard drive has failed. I looked it over and presented him with his choices (one choice, of course, was to buy a new laptop).

He has chosen to buy a $30 256Meg RAM upgrade for it, a new PATA hard drive (I suppose it will be 80 Gig or better) and have me install Linux on it. This system currently has 64 Megs of RAM in it; the upgrade will make it either 256Meg or 320 Meg (depending on whether the modules play nicely with each other or not).

This guy is a computer illiterate; he needs something that just works. He'll pay me to set him up, but I am the one who will be doing the tweaking and, frankly, I don't want to be doing a lot of tweaking.

Now, I have not done ANY PPC work, with or without Linux. I have been googling and, predictably, the amount of PPC support in Linux is dwindling over time.

Are there any live CDs that will boot this system? I have not found any in my googling, but I could have missed it because I was looking at installable distros.

I have looked at Yellow Dog linux, but I know nothing about the Enlightenment window manager. I also do not know anything about Yellow Dog linux.

OpenSUSE looks promising, and there are only a few issues being described on the PPC HowTO, so that is one to consider. Does the multimedia support work with it?

Fedora's PPC support is getting long in the tooth, and I would hesitate to put Fedora on a machine for this guy anyway.

Ubuntu has dropped PPC as has Mandriva.

Gentoo seems to have comprehensive documentation about PPC, and it looks current. Sadly, I have never installed Gentoo or worked with it. Is it a good choice for this guy? I think I'll download and burn a CD just to play with it a bit, but until the memory upgrade arrives I won't be able to do much.

There are a number of other distros that I have never heard of and know nothing about that claim PPC support.

So, I am asking here for anyone who has done this with an imac; what do you recommend?

http://penguinppc.org/about/distributions.php - Debian is an easy to use system which has releases for PPC. http://fedoraproject.org/en/get-fedora - Fedora does have a current PPC version. http://en.opensuse.org/POWER@SUSE - OpenSuse is easy to use and versatile.

The best thing about all these distros is that they are mainstream and so support isn't too far away.

Well, I downloaded the Gentoo 2008 "minimal install" CD to see if the powerbook would come up in it, but it seems the only kernel provided in that iso is a G5 kernel.

This is a bad sign; I do wish they had told me that up front.

So now I am downloading the "universal install" CD to see if THAT works.

I also will look closer at OpenSUSE, I think.

edit:
Actually, penguinppc is the site I have been using as my starting point to look at the others. Debian does not appear to be upgrading their distros for PPC and the last ones I saw had either 2005 or 2006 dates on them (I forget). Did I miss something?

I have Debian installed on an old iBook with 300-odd MB of RAM and a 10GB hard drive. Had I not bought an eeePC, it'd still be my sitting-in-bed-on-a-Sunday-morning-browsing machine.

Performance was good with Gnome (KDE was also good), although predictably bootup time was quite long. I found Debian installed with a lot of services running by default (I did a netinst), so switching most of those off sped up both boot time and general running speed (feeling, not quantitative!).

I, like you, spent a while Googling to see what was available, but YDL seemed to be geared towards Playstations and the like. At least, that's my recollection of it.

I've also tried the BSDs, but I guess if you want easy to install and maintain, they're possibly not appropriate.

I have been searching mirrors for the ppc debian installation, but so far have not found it. The main debian site is giving 404 errors for all distros; I think they may have moved it all out to mirrors.

This, of course, will make it really hard to try debian. Does anyone know of a live mirror that has ppc on it?

edit: I did find a site in Ukraine that has bittorrent files for Debian/ppc. There are A LOT of CDs. So I am trying to get the net install CD via bittorrent; we'll see what happens.

If you get really stuck, I have debian-40r3-powerpc-netinst.iso (not the most recent release (4)) that I can stick on an ftp site for you.

Actually, that is the iso that I am bringing in with bittorrent. It is coming in at a good rate from three seeders (including one ktorrent client in France) and if things hold up I should have it all within 1/2 hour. We will see.

Yay, distro wars! you already know what I think 'cause I'm the one who suggested gentoo in your other thread. you should have to make your own kernel durring a gentoo install anyways and I can confirm gentoo works nice on that computer. I use gentoo on all the linux machines I build for computer illiterate friends and family mostly because once it's set up it works well and if something breaks I have to fix it so I might as well use something I know. the only exception to this is if they don't have a reliable internet connection. if you do go the gentoo way and get stuck drop me a line.

Well now.

I booted this system from the debian install CD, and it reports that there are 320 Megs of RAM in this system as well as a 10 Gig hard drive (rather than the 64 Meg and 6 gig reported on the outside label for the machine).

You'd think the guy would have told me about the RAM.

Oh well.

He might not have known. the sticker is just how it came from the factory, even if he had apple upgrade it before they sent it to him it would probably not be reflected on the sticker. 320Mb is as much as you can cram into those things unless you happen to find a stick of ram that works and is short enough to fit in the slot hidden below the cpu card.

He ordered a 256 meg upgrade just last evening. I do hope it will fit; 512 Meg will work a lot better than 320, though 320 should be fine.

I haven't proceeded beyond just booting the thing. The hard drive is recognized and the partition table appears OK, but it is corrupted and won't boot. Since it is recognized, I cannot say for sure that it has failed (though it may have, and the fact that after years of use it suddenly is corrupted to the point the machine won't boot is a very bad sign) and I need to consult with the owner before proceeding. I could pull the HD and stick it into something else and run spinrite on it.

Given the size and probable age of this drive, I am not inclined to do this, but if he wants to save his system 9 installation I should try.

OK I am looking at my G3 powerbook right now. If you remove the keyboard underneath this you will see a piece of sheet metal you need to remove this (do not ever try to operate the computer without this in place it contains a heat pipe that cools the cpu my G3 usually ran at 70c to 90c by far the hottest chip I've ever had.) Under this you will notice only 1 ram slot. officially the most ram you can have is 320Mb because it won't recognize modules bigger then 256Mb. In reality the entire cpu card can be removed from the mother board and if you look at the bottom you will see that the 64Mb of 'built in' ram is actually a 64Mb module in another ram slot on the bottom of the cpu card. the limitation here is the physical size of the ram module. if you have a 256Mb module that will fit and not be to tall (distance from the edge that goes into the connector to the opposite edge of the pcb.) then you can install that and have 512Mb.

Ubuntu does have a ppc distro, it's just community maintained now. Never underestimate the power of a passionate community.

http://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?t=427714

David

P.S. I have standard x86 hardware, so I haven't used the ppc version. Let us know if you try it out, and how it goes....

I decided not to proceed with gentoo when it became obvious that I'd be compiling most things. Not only does that slow things down, it creates a whole host of opportunities for other problems. Given that (a) I want to give this back to him and not fool with it and (b) he can barely SPELL "compile" much less deal with it, that lets gentoo out.

Debian looks very promising. I do know Debian, somewhat, and apparently the releases for PPC are pretty much current. Also, the netinstall CD I downloaded booted, recognized the wireless, properly asked me for the key to the security, connected to the wireless net and configured, and was ready to set up the hard drive when I stopped it.

Well, I just put up a new post about this on the Debian board, and after doing that, I remembered that pwc101 said he had debian installed on an ibook. I have no idea whether that is close enough to a G3, but would you please read my post on the Debian board and respond?

http://www.linuxquestions.org/questi...1/#post3234807