Mandrake 9.1/PPC what is best forum for Linux on the Mac? Install trouble.

Where's the best place to get newbie help with Linux on the Mac?

Mandrake Club wants money to join. Ick.

Install trouble.

I've got Mandrake Linux 9.1/PPC on an old-world beige G3 PowerPC that I'm trying to turn into a Linux box. I put a Western Digital 80 GB hard drive in it (WD800GB) that seems to work fine with the Mac OS8.6 (has not been upgraded). I don't find this drive listed on the Linux compatibility databases but I thought maybe that's just 'cause it's kinda new.

I get as far as configuring the hardware devices, very early in the install.

It seems to detect only 4 devices:
unknown: Motorola|MPc106[grackle][NOT DEFINED]
usb-ohci: OPTi Inc|82681[NOT DEFINED]
unknown: Apple Computr Inc|Heathrow Mac !/O controller[NOT DEFINED]
card: ATI Mach64 Utah:ATI|3D RagePro 215GP
unknown:

Then I get this error:

AN ERROR OCCURRED: NO VALID DEVICES WERE FOUND IN WHICH TO CREATE NEW FILESYSTEMS. PLEASE CHECK YOUR HARDWARE FOR THE SOURCE OF THIS PROBLEM.

Is it not recognizing my hard drive? I've tried partitioning it just about every way imaginable, both with Drive Setup and pdisk. Am I missing a driver? How do I "check my hardware?" Linux supposedly detects IDE devices first, the 4 above are SCSI devices as far as I know (which isn't far), and there's no indication that Linux can find my hard drive.

Will it help if I get naked, paint myself blue with woad, and stand inside a chalk circle while shaking a beaker of dried peas over the computer and chanting "Hoc est bullshit?"

Oh bother.

I've installed debian-ppc sarge on my tangerine iMac, and it works very well. The sarge installer is pretty easy to use. You can always try Mandrake again, but debian is an excellent distro and runs much faster than YellowDog (based on Red Hat I think)

I think if you have an old-world mac, you can't use yaboot, and need xboot. I know Gentoo PPC works on old-world macs, but I'm not sure about any other distros. Gentoo is a fscking pain in the ass what with all the compiling. Yellow Dog might, but didn't give me the option to use xboot during install (possibly because I didn't need to).

apt-get and aptitude are wonderful little apps. I myself am an Arch Linux fan, but Arch is solely i686

Anyway. The installer's autopartition worked well and I only had to make a few tiny changes to make the video work. If you insist on using Mandrake, go ahead and give voodoo a try. It is an approach I haven't used on anything other than Windows, but seems to work quite well.